Electrical fire knocks out cooling to high-level radioactive waste storage pool at Fort Calhoun, Nebraska

John Sullivan reports for ProPublica that an electrical fire at the Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant in Nebraska temporarily cut power for running the cooling water circulation pumps in the high-level radioactive waste storage pool. If the power disruption had persisted for 88 hours, the pool would have boiled dry, and the high-level radioactive waste would have caught on fire. A 1997 study done for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reported that such a high-level radioactive waste storage pool fire could release 8 to 80 million curies of radioactive cesium-137 into the environment, resulting in downwind consequences of 54,000 to 143,000 latent cancer deaths, 2,000 to 7,000 square kilometers of agricultural land condemned, and economic damages of $117 to $566 BILLION. A 2001 NRC report, NUREG-1738, calculated that 25,000 people, as far away as 500 miles downwind, would die from cancer caused by escaping radioactivity from a pool fire. Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant is also currently facing severe flooding on the Missouri River.