TAKING STOCK:Japan has been shaken to its seismic core in the past and questions
LIVING IN one of the most seismically unstable countries in the world, Japanese people have learned to live with the constant tectonic twitches, burps, and eruptions from beneath their feet.
Japan records thousands of small quakes every year, and active volcanoes are dotted throughout the country. The nation’s most iconic symbol, Mt Fuji, could erupt at any time, spewing ash down on Tokyo, the world’s biggest metropolis.
“It’s hard I guess for people outside Japan to understand how we can live in such a country,” said Atsushi Sugita, a salary-man trying to get home from work in Tokyo last night. “But this is where we grew up so what can we do. And our technology is very good.” Until yesterday, the worst natural disaster in modern history was the Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated much of Tokyo and Yokoyama and killed over 100,000 people in 1923.
Over half a century and huge technological leaps later, any belief that Japan had neutralised this deadly seismic power was shattered when the Great Hanshin Earthquake killed 5,000 people, destroyed 100,000 homes and inured over 400,000 people in January 1995.
That disaster, with its toppled highways and buildings, dealt a huge blow to the country’s technological confidence, especially in its ability to protect the integrity of its nuclear power plants.
Japan has long been an anomaly: an advanced country that had continued building plants despite the twin nuclear disasters of Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986). Its network of reactors now supply about a third of Japan’s energy needs.
Four years ago, the industry was shaken to its core when the powerful Niigata quake struck very close to the site of the world’s largest nuclear plant, the 8200-megawatt Kashiwazaki- Kariwa on the Sea of Japan coast.
In the seconds after the 6.8 quake struck just 12 miles away, pipes burst, drums of nuclear waste toppled and monitors stopped working. A fire in an electrical transformer burned unattended for over two hours and 1,200 liters of contaminated water sloshed into the sea.
It took the plant’s operator weeks to acknowledge that the quake had caused the power plant to sway a maximum 2,058 gallons – not only the strongest sway recorded at a nuclear power plant in Japan, but perhaps most powerful at any nuclear plant in the world.
In at least one area of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, the shaking was 6.8 times larger than the maximum level taken into account when the plant was designed.
The industry and the government insisted throughout that crisis, as they are doing today, that the plants are safe. Indeed, such was the strength of feeling during the Niigata crisis, that the foreign office blamed foreign news organisations for “inappropriate or inaccurate” reports on the quake.
The upshot of that disaster was that new regulations were ordered for the network of plants, demanding that geologists identify quake faults active up to 130,000 years ago, a reaction to the stunning revelation that the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant sat atop an unknown fault.
“The government keeps saying that the technology is failsafe and these plants are safe,” said Takemoto Kazuyuki, a Niigata resident who opposes the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa complex.
“It is playing nuclear roulette with our lives.”