Flood waters may be undermining structures at Ft. Calhoun

In a blog entitled "A Long Road Ahead for a Flooded Reactor," Matt Wald of the New York Times reports that even if the Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant rides out the current historic flooding of the Missouri River -- as Omaha Public Power District and U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials assure it will -- it will still take a long time after the waters recede to restart the reactor. Wald writes "The plant faces... other challenges, however. One is that the flowing water, four feet deep in some spots around the plant, may have undermined some structures. Already, plant workers have stopped moving heavy vehicles over paved surfaces because they may have been weakened, the managers say."

"Meltdown as 'Speed Bump': The Nuclear Gang Regroups"

Beyond Nuclear board of directors member and investigative journalist Karl Grossman has just exposed a "Nuclear Renaissance" friendly summit in Washington, D.C. where the Fukushima catastrophe was regarded as a "speed bump" on the road to an expansion of atomic energy. His article is posted at Counterpunch.

A frightful question: what would the Fort Peck Dam's failure mean for Nebraska's atomic reactors?!

Bernard Shanks, an adviser to the Resource Renewal Institute, has studied the six main-stem Missouri River dams for more than four decades. He has worked for the U.S. Geological Survey and served as director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. He has written three books on public land policy and is completing a book on the hazards of the Missouri River dams. In a guest commentary entitled "The looming Missouri dam flood," published at stltoday.com on June 7th, Shanks warns that "The Fort Peck Dam is built with a flawed design that has suffered a well-known fate for this type of dam — liquefaction — in which saturated soil loses its stability." He adds that "It may be the largest at-risk dam in the nation." He concludes that "There is a possibility a failure of Fort Peck Dam could lead to a domino-like collapse of all five downstream dams. It probably would wreck every bridge, highway, pipeline and power line and split the heartland of the nation, leaving a gap 1,500 miles wide. Countless sewage treatment plants, toxic waste sites and even Superfund sites would be flushed downstream. The death toll and blow to our economy would be ghastly." To his nightmare list, of course, could be added Nebraska's Fort Calhoun and Cooper atomic reactors, as well as the radioactive West Lake Landfill in St. Louis.

NIRS' Michael Mariotte on "Between the Lines" re: AP's exposés on "Aging Nukes"

Scott Harris of the weekly radio newsmagazine "Between the Lines" interviews Michael Mariotte, executive director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, on the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, flooding at Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant in Nebraska, and AP's recent exposés on aging atomic reactors in the U.S.

"Nuclear catastrophe imminent in Nebraska? Negligence and cover-ups at Ft. Calhoun reactor"

Joseph Giambrone has a few questions for Omaha Public Power District and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in his Counterpunch article. Giambrone cited a June 24th New York Times/ClimateWire article by Peter Behr, "A Nuclear Plant's Flood Defenses Trigger a Yearlong Regulatory Confrontation," which reports that OPPD resisted NRC and even Army Corps of Engineers warnings and pressure to upgrade flood defenses for years on end, only recently doing so; the upgrades have yet to be evaluated, but are being severely tested by the rising floodwaters of the Missouri River.