Japanese Battle Dangerous Nuclear Power Meltdown Scenario

The terrible tragedy in Japan is bad enough with all the lost lives and crushed cities and towns but now the battle to save the damaged nuclear power plants has the government scrambling to prevent an even larger disaster from happening which could impact beyond the Japanese borders if it does not resolve.

This article is from National Geo and is a good read on just how things are in Japan right now.

The nuclear crisis at Fukushima Daiichi power plant comes four years after another earthquake delivered a warning to Tokyo Electric Power Company that seismic risks at its atomic reactors could be far greater than plant engineers had reckoned.

TEPCO is now battling to avert a catastrophic meltdown at three of the six reactors at the Fukushima facility, with a second hydrogen explosion early Monday morning signaling the difficulty of that effort.

But in 2007, the company escaped such peril at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, the largest nuclear power station in the world, when it was damaged by a 6.8-magnitude earthquake that was up to three times larger than the plant’s design was built to withstand.

That underestimate touched off concern and study throughout the global nuclear industry, but officials have pointed to the incident as a demonstration of nuclear plant resilience, because no critical safety structures or systems were impaired. Industry critics have drawn a less comforting conclusion: “They were lucky,” says Arjun Makhijani, an engineer and president of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.

In any case, there is no question that TEPCO’s seismic risk assessments now will be under renewed scrutiny.