Nuclear Plants In Arabian Sea Face Tsunami Riskhttps://phys.org/news/2020-09-nuclear-arabian-sea-tsunami.htmlA major tsunami in the northern Arabian Sea could severely impact the coastlines of India and Pakistan, which are studded with sensitive installations including several nuclear plants, says the author of a new study.
"A magnitude 9 earthquake is a possibility in the Makran subduction zone and consequent high tsunami waves," says C.P. Rajendran, lead author of the study, which was published this September in
Pure and Applied Geophysics. "The entire northern Arabian Sea region, with its critical facilities, including nuclear power stations, needs to take this danger into consideration in hazard perceptions."
Atomic power stations functioning along the Arabian Sea include Tarapur (1,400 megawatts) in India's Maharashtra state, Kaiga (being expanded to 2,200 megawatts) in Karnataka state and Karachi in Pakistan (also being expanded to 2,200 megawatts). A mega nuclear power plant coming up at Jaitapur, Maharashtra will generate 9,900 megawatts, while another project at Mithi Virdi in Gujarat may be shelved because of public opposition.
... "In principle, one could add safety systems to lower the risk of accidents—a very high sea wall, for instance. Such safety systems, however, add to the cost of nuclear plants and make them even more uncompetitive when compared with other ways of generating electricity." [...
like renewables]
Rajendran and his team embarked on the study after noticing that, compared to peninsular India's eastern coast, tsunami hazards on the west coast were under-recognized. This despite the 8.1 magnitude earthquake that occurred in the Makran subduction zone in 1945.
Earlier studies, such as the one published in 2013 in
Geophysical Research Letters, have indicated that tsunamis, similar in magnitude to the one caused by the 2004 Sumatra earthquake, could occur at the Makran subduction zone where the Arabian plate is subducting beneath the Eurasian plate by about 1.5 inches per year.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/grl.50374According to the 2013 study, the Makran is a wide-potential seismogenic zone that may be capable of generating a very significant (greater than 8.5 in magnitude) tsunamigenic earthquake that poses risks to the coastlines of Pakistan, Iran, Oman, and India. ...
C. P. Rajendran et al.
The Orphan Tsunami of 1524 on the Konkan Coast, Western India, and Its Implications,
Pure and Applied Geophysics (2020).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00024-020-02575-0