Tuesday, December 19, 2006
:: International
Tehran's atomic ambitions face seismic risk
By arrangment with AKI
Tehran, Dec. 18: If Iran is making progress in its ambitions to become a nuclear power, risking sanctions in its standoff with the West, there is another far more sinister danger to Tehran's atomic ambitions.
One hundred per cent of Iran is at "seismic risk" according to leading international scientists working on the Global Seismic Hazard Programme(GSHP) which assesses the risks of killer quakes worldwide. Whether Tehran is seeking nuclear power only for civilian use or for military purposes, the geologically sensitive nature of its terrain means any nuclear plants are at high risk.
According to the experts of the project, which began in 1992 involving the top global seismology institutes, half of Iran's territory is at "seismic risk" and the other half is at "elevated seismic risk".
The danger of the seismic risk in Iran is well known by scientists not just Iranian ones but scientists abroad.
The country is situated on a convergence of plates which move at a speed of 3 cm a year" said Enzo Boschi. the president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV), in Rome.
"All the southeastern belt is affected by this movement of the plates which carries with it a high risk of earthquakes" Mr Boschi told Adnkronos. " Iran is in the convergence belt of the massive Alpine-Himalayan mountain range that covers thousands and thousands of km and crosses many countries" he said.
"On these territories there are various tectonic plates and contributing to the risks in Iran are the African, Arabian but principally the Indian plate. Add to this, in the more northern regions, the effectof the Euro Asian tectonic plate which makes its "influence" on Iranian territory felt." "Since 1900 there have been 17 major earthquakes striking Iran, all of between 7 and 8 on the Richter scale" said Alessandro Amato of INGV's National Earthquake Centre.
The worst, touching 8.0, was in 1984, but the most recent one, in Bam in December 2003, flattened a densely populated area causing tens of thousands of deaths and destroying an area of immense cultural and historical value. A sequence of seismic events which, according to experts, speaks for itself. The plant at Bushehr, the heart of the Iranian nuclear programme, should be able to resist a shock of up to 7.2 degrees. A Russian construction firm is building the reactor which the Iranians say will start generating electricity in November. However the plant's security structures were designed in the 1970s by German technicians from Siemens, and many experts fear they may be antiquated and inefficient.
Other nuclear structures in Iran, more or less secret, are being built and little is known about how protected these may or may not be.
To date there have been no known cases of emergencies created by earthquakes striking nuclear plants (civilian or military): the only one was that caused by a 5.9 magnitude quake that struck northern Japan in 1993, causing the number one reactor at the Onagawa plant to block creating a small increase in neutrons.
The International Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (IIEES) has created a research centre for risk management, which has been asked to study "the impact of seismic events on at-risk structures", not just chemical plants and fuel deposits but also nuclear installations.
As the 26 December anniversary of the tragic Bam earthquake draws near and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the theocratic regime seem increasingly intransigent regarding nuclear power, the seismic safety questions seem more pressing than ever.
© Copyrights 2006 Asian Age.