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Community Corner

Japanese Earthquake Prompts Questions About California's Nuclear Power Plants

About 200 miles up the coast from West Hollywood is the El Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which is in close proximity to four earthquake faults.

Looking at the failure of three cooling systems at nuclear power reactors in Japan and a second containment building explosion, I can’t help but wonder about the shortsightedness of building nuclear plants near an earthquake fault. The question arises, are we at risk here in Southern California?

Southern California Edison proudly proclaimsthat the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant in San Diego County was built to withstand a 7.0 quake and a 25-foot tall tsunami.

More problematic is the aptly named El Diablo Canyon Power Plant, about 200 miles up the coast from West Hollywood in Avila Beach. It’s a good place to build a power plant, except for four earthquake faults in the vicinity.

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The design was considered safe enough to resist shaking from the nearby San Andreas Fault when construction began in 1968. But in 1973, a new fault was discovered three miles offshore, the Hosgri fault. Back in 1927, a few miles farther out, it had produced a 7.1-magnitude quake. Yet construction at El Diablo continued.

In 1979, tens of thousands of protestors gathered to try to block the plant's construction. Two years later, hundreds of activists were arrested. The plant was ultimately finished with a design intended to withstand a 7.5-magnitude earthquake. It went online in the mid-80s.

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So the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant and the El Diablo Canyon Power Plant are designed to resist a 7.0 and 7.5 quake respectively. To put this in perspective, the plants would be safe in a quake the size of the one that hit Haiti last year but would not be safe in an earthquake as big as the one that leveled San Francisco in 1906. That was a 7.8.

Because the Richter Scale is logarithmic, each whole number represents a change in earthquake amplitude by a factor of ten, but that only tells part of the story. As an estimate of energy expended by a quake, each whole number represents about 31 times more energy than the amount released by the previous number.

Experts are predicting that the next quake on the San Andreas Fault could be . But when?

Thomas Jordan, Director of the Southern California Earthquake Center, has said repeatedly that the San Andreas fault is "locked and loaded... It's been a long time since an earthquake has occurred on that fault—more than 150 years."

We are being reassured that quakes around a magnitude of 8 are the most we could expect in California because the fault geology is different here than it is in Japan. In fact, the biggest quake recorded in California history was the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake, on the San Andreas fault, which reached 7.9

But Friday's 8.9 earthquake was the biggest in Japanese history. It is now estimated to have killed thousands of people while also pushing Japan 13 feet closer to North America, shortening the earth's day and tilting the planet off its axis.

California didn’t escape unscathed. The tsunami caused an estimated $50 million of damage to our coast.

President Obama has repeatedly said he supports new nuclear power plant construction to help wean America off fossil fuel dependency, yet if we learn anything from the disaster in Japan, it should be that if we built any additional nuclear plants, they should be in areas more seismically stable than El Diablo Canyon.

My heartfelt good wishes go out the Japanese people. They have suffered a devastating blow and could use our help and prayers.

After quakes in close succession around the Pacific ring of fire, first in New Zealand and now Japan, I hope that that California's faults remain quiescent.

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