Active Fault in 400,000 Years
Active faults under buildings of nuclear power plants are now a focus for Japanese nuclear power plant operators.
Utilities now plan to restart nuclear electricity generation plants, filing requests to the regulating office in charge. But some of those plants are judged or suspected of having active faults which can trigger an earthquake in the worst case.
The regulating authority is very cautious in ruling that those plants do not have active faults under buildings housing nuclear reactors. According to law, such plants are not allowed to operate.
It is very difficult to find that any feature of the ground indicates existence of an active fault or an identified fault is active, meaning that it triggered an earthquake in these 400,000 years. The Japanese regulation concerned specifies that a utility company should check whether or not an identified fault moved in these 400,000 years. (Academically it is not strictly defined how many years should be taken into account for the period of a fault being still or at a pause when judging it to be active.)
This is one of the most difficult conditions for an operator of a nuclear power plat to meet. But the regulating authority plans to review applications utility companies have submitted for permission of restart of their nuclear power plants taking six months or so. So, at the earliest, it will be at the end of this year that any suspended nuclear reactors in Japan will start their operation again.
Now the number of nuclear reactors applied for the official review is 10 while they belong to five different nuclear power plants all over Japan (there are about 50 reactors in Japan).
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Mat 7:18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.