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May 21, 2008

Was China's earthquake triggered by a nuclear accident?

China_nuclear

Though I haven't seen this possibility mentioned anywhere, I'm certain that the folks at Fort Meade have spent a fair amount of time and effort trying to get a definitive answer to that question.

When I saw a map showing how close China's supersecret main complex for making nuclear warhead fuel — codenamed Plant 821 — is to the May 12 magnitude 7.9 earthquake's ground zero, accompanying William J. Broad's May 16, 2008 New York Times story about Western efforts to monitor possible radiation leakage as a result of the quake, I couldn't help but turn cause and effect around and wonder, what if?

More from Broad's article: "Closer to the epicenter of the quake that struck Monday is Mianyang [top], a science city whose outskirts house the primary laboratory for the design of Chinese nuclear arms. It is considered the Chinese equal to Los Alamos.

"Nuclear experts said that closer to the epicenter of the earthquake, in rugged hills a two-hour drive west of Mianyang, China runs a highly secretive center that houses a prompt-burst reactor. It mimics the rush of speeding subatomic particles that an exploding atom bomb spews out in its first microseconds.

"North in an even more rugged and inaccessible region, nuclear experts said, China maintains a hidden complex of large tunnels in the side of a mountain where it stores nuclear arms.

"'It's very close to the epicenter,'

Ertwer5y5

said one specialist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because, to the best of his knowledge, the exact location of the secret complex had never been publicly disclosed."

Huh.

May 21, 2008 at 10:01 AM | Permalink


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Comments

There were 4 Big quakes in the Xizang region in the months prior to Sichuan.
For concrete to be spewed out probably takes a large nuke over pressure..and the eyewitness reports mention radiation.
Probably a mishap that started the quake, the whole area was on a knife edge just prior.

Posted by: | Nov 26, 2008 5:03:09 PM

Has anyone thought about the possibility of the quake causing the nuclear reaction instead of the other way around?

Posted by: KP | Jun 6, 2008 1:11:13 PM

Notice that all the public news has wiped any story of this off their sites? Strange. You know its probably still spewing radioactive energy and material out. A little radiation anyone???

Posted by: chris | Jun 4, 2008 2:06:42 PM

Lu Shishen, who reported the cover up of the earthquake forecast, said that there was a strong nuclear explosion in Sichuan during the earthquake.

Xinhua reported yesterday that an explosion of “volcano was observed in the earthquake”, people said that concrete debris was burst out of the crack during the quake.
Experts tested the debris and found it is radioactive, according to Lu Shishen’s report.

so far nobody know what happend exactly.

Posted by: Ray | Jun 3, 2008 2:07:19 AM

I agree with this article and with Bill's comment above. I don't believe the "earthquake" was a natural disaster. There are some articles on-line that tell how in China since March 15, Tibetan students in Chengdu were not allowed to return to their homes. May 11, Mother's Day here in the U.S., a great number of Tibetan women held a protest. The very next day, a great number of women and children were killed in Chengdu. I believe that they may have trucked the protesters on the Sichuan-Tibet highway to Chengdu, where many of their children were, and kaboom: no more Tibetan protesters before the Olympics. The Tibetans have been forbidden to go out of their homes. At any rate, China seems to now be of the opinion that their "earthquake" has diminished concerns about human rights violations against Tibet.

Posted by: Patti Morey | May 30, 2008 2:37:29 PM

"What is with humans building nuclear installations on fault lines?"

Um...these are the people who brought you baby toys with lead paint and animal feed with antifreeze. If they manufacture their weapons the same way they manufacture most of the crap they export, it's very plausible that a few of the damned things went off. Seriously, would that really surprise anybody?

Posted by: Ken N | May 23, 2008 8:34:29 PM

RC, perhaps you should do a little research before you start spouting off (following the lead of the Fox "News" punditry). Do you have any idea the power of a single H-bomb? Do you have any idea how many thousands of these warheads we have? Last I heard we could wipe clean the surface of the earth several times with what we have. If they were all set off at once close to one another I doubt the planet would survive... so I'd say that's probably more than a 7.8 earthquake.

You may have heard about a recent (coincidental) report on what would happen if a 7.8 hit California. According to what I've heard [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90725902] the earth would need to move for at least 100 seconds and requires a fault at least 200 miles long. One would think if there were a great enough shock at just the right point on a fault line under extreme pressure like that you could set the whole thing loose. I find the idea of a test facility causing it to be doubtful but if an H-bomb went off underground close to a critical load area I could see that kick starting the earthquake.

What is with humans building nuclear installations on fault lines?

Posted by: Alan Evil | May 23, 2008 5:45:20 PM

So...what if it wasn't an "earthquake" at all?

Posted by: Ken N | May 23, 2008 12:34:20 PM

An interesting aside to this. I believe it takes a significant amount of water to do atomic/nuclear testing. If you remember back a few years there were a series of tremors and earthquakes around the Rocky Flats Facility in Boulder, Colorado. A geologist in Golden finally clued them in to what was happening. They (Rocky Flats) were disposing of water down a deep well they drilled on Rocky Flats for disposal of water. The geologist had a great demonstration, he tilted a piece of plywood at an angle (like a fault in the earth) and placed a can of Coors at the top. The can did not move, then he poured some water down the board and the can slid down the board. They reviewed their water injection dates and the dates of the tremors and sure enough there was a correlation. They stopped the water disposal and the tremors ended, except for the natural ones of course.

Posted by: Bill S | May 21, 2008 3:52:38 PM

In spite of what RC says, why does it feel like it could be true?

Posted by: Milena | May 21, 2008 2:36:22 PM

Another sensational, nonetheless, stupid question. How many nuclear bombs are needed to trigger an earthquake of this scale? I doubt even putting all US nuclear war head together would not generate a magnitude 7.9 earthequake.

Posted by: RC | May 21, 2008 12:35:12 PM

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