As reported by CBS News, twin water spouts -- tornadoes over water -- formed over Lake Michigan, and merged into a single water spout, on Thursday (see photo, left). The water spouts were reported in Kenosha, WI, just north of the WI/IL border. Just south of that border is Zion, IL, home to the twin Zion atomic reactors, located right on the Lake Michigan shoreline. Thus, the water spouts occurred just a short distance from the Zion nuclear power plant site.
Although the problem-plagued reactors permanently closed in 1998, the high-level radioactive waste (HLRW) storage pools still hold 1,052 metric tons (2,302 assembies) of irradiated nuclear fuel, as documented in the U.S. Department of Energy's Final Environmental Impact Statement for Yucca Mountain (Tables A-7 and A-8, Feb. 2002).
If the cooling water supply is lost from the pools, the large inventory of HLRW could catch on fire, unleashing catastrophic amounts of hazardous radioactivity onto the winds and waves.
A tornado could knock out the power grid, which runs the cooling pumps on the HLRW storage pool. NRC regulations assume that the grid will be re-connected before the pool boils dry, a process that could take days or weeks. However, at Fukushima Daiichi, it took 10 days or so just to restore lighting to the control rooms, let alone cooling to the HLRW storage pools.
A tornado could also cause such damage to the storage pool that its water simply drains away suddenly. The waste could then catch fire within hours.
Not uncommonly, NRC has simply granted exemptions from Emergency Planning Zone regulations to permanently shutdown reactors. Whether the population around Zion could be quickly evacuated due to a pool fire remains to be seen.
Chicago is but 30 miles south of Zion. Lake Michigan is the drinking water supply for 40 milion people in 8 U.S. states, 2 Canadian provinces, and a large number of Native American First Nations.