AND AGAIN: NUCLEAR PLANTS IN EARTHQUAKES

There is one nuclear plant in Soviet Armenia, the Metsamor plant with two units of 400 MW each near the Armenian capital of Yerevan. Both are pressurized water reactors, not the graphite fireworks used at Chernobyl. They have been on line since 1977 and 1980, respectively.

As we have now seen many times in the US, Japan, Taiwan, and especially in the Richter-7.3 earthquake near the Idaho Na-tional Engineering Lab in October 1983 [AtE Jun 84], nuclear plants work through such earthquakes without ever missing a beat.

The two Metsamor reactors have a special arrangement to prevent the containment building collapsing in an earthquake: they don't have one. The same safeguard is used by all other Soviet nuclear plants.

In the West, a nuclear plant is far and away the safest electric power plant in an earthquake. Oil and coal fired plants with their stored fuel present a grave fire hazard: even without an earthquake, there were several hundred dead (and 40,000 evacuated) when the storage tanks of the Venezuelan oil-fired Tacoa plant caught fire in December 1982. But the most frighten-ing danger in an earthquake are hydroelectric dams: several of them in California could kill up to 100,000 victims, and the pumped storage above the San Fernando Valley could take a stag-gering 200,000 lives.

[Why is nobody worried? For one thing, the dams are quite safe until the next earthquake in their vicinity. For another, these people will only be drowned or killed by some other easily com- prehended cause; it is not like the sinister and mysterious force of newkular evil. But most important of all, what's the good of a threat of 200,000 dead if it cannot be used for political capital?]

There are several reasons why a nuclear plant is more earthquake-resistant than other power plants (it is not earthquakeproof because there is no such thing as "the strongest possible" earthquake). Compared with dams or even fossil-fired plants (which need a railroad, a river or a pipeline), it has much greater freedom of siting. Both its pressure vessel and containment buildings are hollow, tubular structures, which have greater strength than solid structures (the lonely spire of Coventry Cathedral amidst a field of devastation was typical for many other bombed cities in Britain and Germany in WWII).

To this add the grueling seismic tests that nuclear plant equip-ment must withstand not just by calculation, but by actual tests on a shaking rack. As usual, there is a double standard. There is no federal earthquake standard for the more dangerous fossil-fired plants, and local standards (as in Southern California) are now being, quite sensibly, reduced since experience has shown that they result in costly over-designing. To the contrary, nuclear plants must satisfy not only qualitatively stricter limits (specified, for ex-ample, by accelerations rather than mere static loads), but after TMI the numbers were simply multiplied by factors dreamt up by hysterical bureaucrats in Washington without regard to ex-perimental measurements.

Yerevan, incidentally, not only hosts the two nuclear reactors. Its radio station also plays a prominent role in Soviet underground folklore. An endless series of anti-communist jokes are of the pat-tern "Radio Yerevan is asked . . . Radio Yerevan answers . . ." For example: "Radio Yerevan is asked: Is it possible to build socialism in Switzerland? Radio Yerevan answers: Yes it is; but it would be a pity to devastate such a beautiful country."