'Silly' to run Japanese nuclear plant on fault line

November 11, 2012 by legitgov

'Silly' to run Japanese nuclear plant on fault line 11 Nov 2012 Japan's only working nuclear power plant sits on what may be a seismic fault in the earth's crust, a geologist has warned. Mitsuhisa Watanabe says the earth's plates could move under the Oi nuclear plant in western Japan, causing a catastrophe to rival last year's atomic disaster at Fukushima -- although some of his colleagues on a nuclear advisory panel disagree. "It is an active fault. The plates shifted some 120,000 to 130,000 years ago for sure," Mr Watanabe, of Tokyo's Toyo University, said. "In research that I have conducted on active faults in Japan and overseas, structures built above them were all damaged" when they moved and caused an earthquake, he said.