Fort Calhoun: Potentially bigger disaster than Fukushima!

This isn’t some elevated bathtub like the cooling pools at Fukushima. Oh, no. This cooling pool is forty feet UNDER GROUND AND forty feet ABOVE GROUND. It’s EIGHTY FEET DEEP IN TOTAL. If they can’t cool it, the corn belt is in trouble.

And, by the way, it was filled up to capacity in 2006 – which is why they had to start storing the excess spent fuel rods in those concrete dry casks outside of the pool.

The reason there is a problem and why they aren’t telling the truth is because, while Fukishima is equivalent to about twenty Chernobyls, Ft. Calhoun is equivalent to about twenty Fukushimas. Not because it has a lot of reactors – or even a very big one. But because it is holding an immense amount of nuclear fuel in its cooling pool.

The head of the NRC toured the Fort Calhoun Nuclear plant which is now underwater. A 10 mile evacuation around the plant has been ordered, but all references of the evacuation have been scrubbed from online news sites.

NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko visited the Fort Calhoun plant Monday, a day after a protective berm failed leaving key parts of the facility surrounded by overflow from the Missouri River.

Mr. Jaczko’s visit came 8 hours after a protective berm collapsed early Sunday, causing water to surround the containment buildings and key electrical equipment at the Fort Calhoun plant.

“It’s certainly clear that this is not an issue that’s going to go away anytime soon,” Jaczko said.

These days we don’t hear too much about the ailing nuclear reactors in Fukushima Japan, but make no mistake the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant remains very serious. Now the U.S. is dealing with it’s own potentially serious nuclear situation in Nebraska.

More than 2 feet of water rushed in around containment buildings and electrical transformers at the 478-megawatt facility located 20 miles north of Omaha.

Crews activated emergency diesel generators after the breach, but restored normal electrical power by Sunday afternoon, the NRC said. It noted that the cause of the berm breach is under investigation.

But a Google news search for 10 mile fort calhoun evacuation shows no results about the evacuation, only articles talking about how hard it would be to evacuate a 10 mile radius around many of the US nuclear plants.

There also has been an Fort Calhoun evacuation map posted on the (NEMA) Nebraska Emergency Management Website. However, Google shows that it has been there since at least the 17th of June and that indicates officials saw this coming.

The back-up generators are probably flooded as well. They were ALSO what the rubber dam was in place to protect. Even if they aren’t, there is water in the electrical system. That’s what the yellow cards from the NRC were about last year – and those cards were never signed off as safe. There are at least six and probably dozens of NRC and government people there ‘closely monitoring’ the plant. All they can do is watch.

The ‘emergency’ plans were only thought up when the water started rising and were only implemented beginning on June 6. Before then, the plant owners were still arguing back and forth with the NRC that a flood that bad couldn’t happen. And the brilliant rubber condom around the plant didn’t just burst by itself. They were piddling around and managed to pop it themselves!

Ft. Calhoun nuclear workers carrying in fuel cans by hand in order to keep pumps running

[...] At Fort Calhoun, where the river has risen gradually, the water seeps in through sandbag walls, electrical conduits and other places that workers had not thought much about before. There are so many small water pumps running to keep up with the leaks that keeping them supplied with gasoline and diesel requires something akin to a bucket brigade.

Orange plastic fuel cans are rolled on a cart over the catwalks and then handed off to employees who are headed deeper into the plant. Climbing over the sandbags at the entrances, they carry them in, and workers on their way out pick up a few empties and carry them out for refilling. [...]

Source: NY Times

The union of concerned scientists say another 3 feet of water and there is a 100% chance of core meltdown. And a damn upriver from the Nuclear plant is now releasing over 1 million gallons of water per second.


http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/06/28/fort-calhoun-nuclear-plant-underwater-references-10-mile-radius-evacuation-order-scrubbed-internet-news-sites-32161/