"It is possible that the epicenter of the fault line runs under the power plant," said Akira Fukushima, deputy director-general for safety at the Industry Ministry's nuclear agency ...

"This earthquake was much bigger than the plant had been designed for," said Fukushima ...

And yet it was only a magnitude 6.8 quake. What will happen if they get hit with one that is two times as strong -- or ten times?

The L.A. Times story makes clear that this was no isolated incident:

Public skepticism about the safety of Japan's nuclear power plants has been nurtured by a slowly emerging pattern of questionable safety habits and cover-ups.

Tepco's 17 nuclear plants were temporarily shut down in 2003 after it admitted it had falsified safety inspection reports. And owners of the Shika nuclear plant revealed in March that they had suffered a critical accident in 1999.

Until this week, the government and Tepco had vociferously denied claims that the facility's seven reactors sat above an active fault.

In 2005, government experts defended and won a court challenge brought against the power company by a local citizens group, which argued that the plant should not be allowed to build additional reactors because the area was an active earthquake zone.

"The nuclear power industry is terrible about disclosing information," said Yoshinori Ito, a lawyer who represented the citizens group.

He accused the government witnesses in the case of being too timid to contradict the scholars who had provided the initial data that allowed construction to proceed.

The court declared that the ground under Kashiwazaki "did not even amount to a fault and could not cause a quake."

As Charles Montgomery "Monty" Burns would say, "Excellent."

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.