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Saturday
Jun112011

Arnie Gundersen warns a dam break on Missouri River upstream could be an "inland tsunami" for Ft. Calhoun atomic reactor in Nebraska

Image from http://www.cartoradiations.fr/Fort_Calhoun.phpIn a 36 minute long radio interview with Robert Knight of Pacifica Radio's "Five O'Clock Shadow" broadcast from WBAI in New York City, Fairewinds Associate's nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen (pictured at left) warned that a dam break upstream of Fort Calhoun, Nebraska could send a wall of water down the Missouri River, the water of which is already lapping at the edges of the nuclear power plant. Gundersen also translates from "Nukespeak" into plain English the Ft. Calhoun "event report" about a fire that cut power to cooling pumps in the high-level radioactive waste storage pool, resulting in the water's heat up at a rate of 2 degrees per hour. Eventually, the pool could have boiled dry, and the high-level radioactive waste could have caught on fire, had not the circulation pumps been restored. Pools are not considered safety significant by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, so backup power is not required. Also, pools are not located within a primary containment structure, so potentially catastrophic releases of radioactivity would be released directly into the environment.