VA Quake Calls Attention To Safety Of Nuclear Plants
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Heaven soon
Aug 25, 2011, 7:56:32 PM8/25/11
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Quake Calls Attention To Safety Of Nuclear Plants
Tuesday's 5.8-magnitude earthquake, which rippled out of central Virginia and was felt across much of the East, was a not-so-gentle reminder that temblors can hit in any part of the country. And advocates of better safety standards, particularly for nuclear-power plants, but other infrastructure, too, said the episode underscores hidden vulnerabilities. Although earthquakes are more frequent and often more violent along major geologic fault lines like the Cascade and San Andreas faults of the West Coast and the New Madrid fault in the Midwest, countless older, deeper faults beneath the North American plate can still cause trouble. "Most of these faults are dead, but many are active enough to produce small quakes and, in this instance, a larger one. If they only produce quakes on a scale of once every thousand or more years, it's a lot harder for us to analyze and predict what they might do,"said James Trull, a professor of geological science at Florida State University in Tallahassee
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www.heavensoon.com
Tuesday's 5.8-magnitude earthquake, which rippled out of central Virginia and was felt across much of the East, was a not-so-gentle reminder that temblors can hit in any part of the country. And advocates of better safety standards, particularly for nuclear-power plants, but other infrastructure, too, said the episode underscores hidden vulnerabilities. Although earthquakes are more frequent and often more violent along major geologic fault lines like the Cascade and San Andreas faults of the West Coast and the New Madrid fault in the Midwest, countless older, deeper faults beneath the North American plate can still cause trouble. "Most of these faults are dead, but many are active enough to produce small quakes and, in this instance, a larger one. If they only produce quakes on a scale of once every thousand or more years, it's a lot harder for us to analyze and predict what they might do,"said James Trull, a professor of geological science at Florida State University in Tallahassee
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www.heavensoon.com
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