A US nuclear plant in Alabama similar in design to the earthquake-hit Fukushima facility in Japan has multiple defences to prevent and tackle the same kind of emergency, its operator said.
Safety features at the Browns Ferry plant in northern Alabama are so superior to those at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant that even in the event of massive flooding the chances of a crisis were negligible, officials from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) told reporters.
"What we have here is defence in depth, multiple levels of redundancy, backup to the backup to the backup," TVA communications consultant Jim Nesbitt told journalists who toured the facility on Friday as he explained the plant's elaborate safety systems.
The emergency at the Japanese plant has escalated since March 11 when a tsunami, triggered by a massive earthquake, knocked out power. It has revived debate over US nuclear safety just as the industry is set for its first expansion since an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in Pennsylvania in 1979.