Floods threaten Nebraska nuclear power plant

Thanks to Harold One Feather for alerting anti-nuclear list serves to an emergency declaration due to flooding on the Missouri River at the Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant near Omaha, Nebraska, as reported by the Associated Press on KWQC t.v. news as well as The Omaha World Herald newspaper. However, floods have threatened Nebraskan nuclear power plants on the Missouri River before -- as at Cooper nuclear power plant in July 1993. Regarding the emergency flooding situation, the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) -- owner and operator of the Fort Calhoun Station (FCS) nuclear power plant -- has announced: "FCS has been offline for a planned refueling outage since April 9. If river levels are too high, the plant will remain shut down, and will not be restarted until conditions make it safe to do so...In anticipation of higher water levels, employees are taking additional actions to protect the plant and property, including building a berm around other buildings in the plant." OPPD has posted videos of emergency sand bagging operations at Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant on June 1st (note how close flood waters have already mounted, lapping at the brink of the electrical transmission switchyard), as well as of emergency inflatable damming and active flood water pumping on June 4th. Given all the audible wind in both videos, one has to wonder why OPPD doesn't simply generate its electricity from Nebraska's rich Great Plains wind resource -- clean and safe and ever more cost effective -- as opposed to dirty, dangerous, and expensive nuclear power. Flooding at Nebraska's nukes is a reminder, in the aftermath of the ongoing Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, that it doesn't take an earthquake and tsunami to trigger a nuclear catastrophe -- a flood on the Missouri River could "do the trick." Ironically, the Cooper atomic reactor is a General Electric Boiling Water Reactor of the Mark 1 design -- identical to Fukushima Daiichi Units 1 to 4.