A strong earthquake of upper 5 (click here) on the Japanese seismic scale hit Iwate Prefecture and surrounding areas at 6:13 a.m. on Wednesday, the Meteorological Agency said. No tsunami warning was issued.
The focus of the quake, estimated at magnitude 6.6, was in the Pacific off Miyagi Prefecture and its depth was about 50 km, the agency said.
No damage was reported to nuclear reactors in the region, including those at Tepco’s crippled Fukushima No. 1 power station. No nuclear plant in the country is currently active.
Hanamaki in Iwate Prefecture logged an upper-5 on the Japanese seismic scale, and many other locations along the Sanriku coast felt strong jolts. Moderate tremors were also felt in Tokyo.
The tremor rattled areas damaged by the 2011 quake and tsunami which killed more than 18,000 people and triggered the nuclear meltdown....
What ever possessed Japan to build four reactors? Every measure of safety was ignored.
Japan and the surrounding islands straddle four major tectonic plates: Pacific plate; North America plate; Eurasia plate; and Philippine Sea plate. The Pacific plate is subducted into the mantle, beneath Hokkaido and northern Honshu, along the eastern margin of the Okhotsk microplate, a proposed subdivision of the North America plate....
