Gyeongju Earthquake on EnergyNotehttps://energynote.kr/en/tags/gyeongju-earthquake/Recent content in Gyeongju Earthquake on EnergyNoteHugoen-USWed, 30 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900How Korea's reactors are designed for earthquakes and tsunamis: the numbers, site by sitehttps://energynote.kr/en/posts/korea-reactor-seismic-design/Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900https://energynote.kr/en/posts/korea-reactor-seismic-design/<p>At 8:32 p.m. on September 12, 2016, a magnitude-5.8 earthquake, the strongest ever instrumentally measured in South Korea, struck about 27 kilometers from the Wolsong nuclear site outside Gyeongju, and instruments there recorded shaking strong enough to trigger a manual reactor shutdown. Four units went off line as a precaution; none was damaged, and the recorded shaking stayed below the plant&rsquo;s design limit. It was still the closest a Korean reactor site has come to testing the number engineers had written into its blueprints decades earlier.</p>