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Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Ind. Gov't. - Japan: Could similar disaster happen here?

Indiana doesn't have a nuclear power plant, but several surrounding states do. South Bend Tribune reporter Lou Mumford today looks at Michigan. A quote:

[Mark Savage, spokesman for the Palisades Power Plant in Covert, Mich.] said Palisades, like the Cook Nuclear Plant in Bridgman, was built to withstand earthquakes, tornadoes and airplane crashes. That applies also to the plants now in crisis mode in Japan where the problem, according to Bill Schalk, the spokesman at Cook, was the quake's "one-two punch."

"In the case of Japan, it was both the seismic event, which the plants withstood as they were designed to do, actually, and the tsunami," he said. "The tsunami took out the generators and electricity they needed to flood the reactors. That's what took them down."

BTW, the question of what would happen if there were simply a massive failure of the power grid is not asked in the story.

This CBSDetroit story has another good photo of "Indiana Michigan Power’s Cook Nuclear Plant Unit 1 near Bridgman, on the southeast shore of Lake Michigan."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on March 16, 2011 01:40 PM
Posted to Indiana Government