BANGALORE: Two leading geologists have warned that a magnitude 6-plus earthquake cannot be ruled out in Jaitapur – the proposed site of India’s largest 9,900 MW nuclear power plant on the west coast that has seen protests against it for safety reasons – and that it could occur within the lifetime of the power plant.
“Since Jaitapur lies in the same compressional stress regime that has been responsible for generating both the magnitude 6.3 Latur and magnitude 6.4 Koyna earthquakes in the past five decades, it can be argued that a similar sized earthquake could possibly occur directly beneath the power plant,” they say in a report in the latest issue of Current Science published by the Indian Academy of Sciences in Bangalore.
“The probability of this earthquake occurring is low but it is nevertheless possible, and is an important consideration in the analysis of power plant safety,” say its authors — Roger Bilham in the department of geological sciences of the University of Colorado, US, and Vinod Gaur in the CSIR Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation in Bangalore.
According to Bilham and Gaur, the Indian Plate is unique among the world’s continental plates in that it is flexed by its collision with the Tibetan Plateau resulting in “belts” of buckling parallel to the Himalaya that extend southward, deep into the plate interior. This “flexural depression”, they say, results in high compressional stresses that are believed to be responsible for the thrust faulting that produced the Latur earthquake, and presumably for the faulting in the Koyna region. (IANS)
