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.