BREAKING: Nuclear accident may be imminent as flood berm bursts at Fort Calhoun Nebraska nuclear plant

Editor’s Note: While the mainstream media guardians have been napping, we published a comprehensive article warning the public of the dangers present at Ft Calhoun. Now we are told that the flood berm has now collapsed after being punctured by “an unidentified piece of machinery“. Our big media stars and knuckle-dragging elected officials should be reminded here that this plant’s rod pool holds 20 years worth of spent fuel rods from all plants in the state plus 1/3 of of the rods that were removed during a recent refueling that was just accomplished. Now it appears that back-up generators are working to cool the nuclear materials (sound familiar?). OPPD spokesman Jeff Hanson said the transfer was precautionary because of water leaking around the concrete berm surrounding the main transformers. If they loose cooling around the fuel rods, this will be as bad- or worse, than the meltdown at Fukushima, Japan. This story could be reaching a critical climax, and there is nothing but silence. Don’t say we didn’t warn you, although we are praying this situation is not going to escalate.

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CNN
June 27, 2011

A water-filled berm protecting a nuclear power plant in Nebraska from rising floodwaters collapsed Sunday, according to a spokesman, who said the plant remains secure.

Some sort of machinery came in contact with the berm, puncturing it and causing the berm to deflate, said Mike Jones, a spokesman for the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD), which owns the Fort Calhoun plant.

GONE: This 7.5 ft protective rubber dam has now failed at Ft Calhoun's nuclear plant.

The plant, located about 20 miles north of Omaha, has been shut since April for refueling.

“The plant is still protected. This was an additional, a secondary, level of protection that we had put up,” Jones said. “The plant remains protected to the level it would have been if the aqua berm had not been added.”

Parts of the grounds are already under water as the swollen Missouri River overflows its banks, including areas around some auxiliary buildings, Jones said.

In addition to the berm, authorities have put in place floodgates and other barriers to help protect the facility, like sandbags.

The 8-foot-tall, water-filled berm, 16 feet wide at its base, surrounded the reactor containment structure and auxiliary buildings, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

NRC officials are still denying there is any danger after nuclear plant flooded yesterday.

“We built the plant up high enough based on history, based on the flooding in the past. If the flood would rise for some reason above that level we have taken precautions, again, per our procedures to sandbag the important equipment for the reactors,” said Dave Van Der Kamp, with the Nebraska Public Power District.

He said the chances of floodwater getting into the building where the core is kept are almost zero.

The plant is designed to withstand waters up to 1,014 feet above mean sea level, according to the OPPD. The river currently stands at 1,006.3 feet and is not expected to exceed 1,008 feet, the OPPD said.

Heavy rainfall in Montana and North Dakota, combined with melting snow from the Rocky Mountains, have sent the Missouri surging downstream this summer. The river washed over and punched through levees in nearby northwestern Missouri, spurring authorities to urge about 250 nearby residents to leave their homes.

The 6 to 12 inches of rainfall in the upper Missouri basin in the past few weeks is nearly a normal year’s worth, and runoff from the mountain snowpack is 140% of normal, according to forecasters.

It was catastrophic flooding from Japan’s March 11 tsunami that knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, resulting in three reactors melting down and producing the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. This year’s Midwestern flooding has also led to a spate of rumors about the Fort Calhoun plant that OPPD and the NRC have been trying to knock down.

The utility has set up a “flood rumor control” page to reassure the public that there has been no release of radioactivity from the plant. An electrical fire June 7 did knock out cooling to its spent fuel storage pool for about 90 minutes, but the coolant water did not reach a boiling point before backup pumps went into service, it has said.

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A Nuclear Plant’s Flood Defenses Trigger a Yearlong Regulatory Confrontation

Editor’s Note: Officials are still maintaining the line that this nuclear plant in Nebraska is safe against the recent flooding along the Missouri River, but the public can only sit back and wait to see. If there is any disruption of service to the cooling pool for the spent fuel rods, then the region may be in serious danger.

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By PETER BEHR
NYT
June 25, 2011

Pictures of the Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant north of Omaha, Neb., show it encircled by the swollen waters of the Missouri River, which reached a height of nearly 1,007 feet above sea level at the plant yesterday.

The plant’s defenses include new steel gates and other hard barriers protecting an auxiliary building with vital reactor controls, and a water-filled berm 8 feet tall that encircles other parts of the plant. Both systems are designed to hold back floodwaters reaching 1,014 feet above sea level. Additional concrete barriers and permanent berms, more sandbags and another power line into the plant have been added. The plant was shut down in April for refueling and will remain so until the flood threat is passed.

UNDER WATER: Nuclear Plant at Ft Calhoun is open for fishing now. (PHOTO: Wiki Commons)

“Today the plant is well positioned to ride out the current extreme Missouri River flooding while keeping the public safe,” Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Victor Dricks said on an agency blog this week.

But a year ago, those new defenses were not in place, and the plant’s hard barriers could have failed against a 1,010-foot flood, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission contends in a yearlong inspection and enforcement action against the plant’s operator, the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD).

“This is the first test of the revised flood preparations for Fort Calhoun,” OPPD spokesman Michael Jones said.

NRC inspectors concluded that at flooding levels above 1,008 feet, the plant “would experience a loss of offsite power and loss of intake structure” and water pumps providing essential cooling water to the plant. In that case, “the plant would be incapable of reaching cold shutdown” with normal operations — a fundamental safety requirement imposed by the NRC. The commission’s Region IV office in Arlington, Texas, issued a notice of violation against the plant on Oct. 6 last year, finding that the issues were of “substantial importance” to the plant’s safety.

OPPD challenged the NRC’s inspectors’ conclusions in a series of conferences before bowing to the commission staff’s demands and agreeing to install the additional defenses this year. The AquaDam water berm was installed beginning June 4.

Operating in the shadow of Fukishima

The questions about the plant’s flooding safeguards illustrate the challenges that confront regulators seeking to protect nuclear plants against extreme natural hazards — challenges that appear more foreboding now in the shadow of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

The 1,010-foot level represents a so-called 500-year flood peak that has not occurred on the Missouri outside Omaha since 1952, according to National Weather Service data. But the level has topped 997 feet 16 times in the past two decades, the NWS reported.

The vast Missouri River flooding follows enormous accumulations of snow on the Western mountains that drain into that river system, another devastating impact of extreme weather that is forcing reconsideration of disaster planning, experts say.

Despite the stark conclusion of the October 2010 NRC letter, the plant’s vulnerability under different flood scenarios isn’t black and white, says Gerond George, a senior NRC reactor inspector, who returned from his most recent trip to the plant site Tuesday. The NRC and OPPD have different interpretations of the utility’s obligations under its license, and the response of the Fort Calhoun staff to a flooding emergency cannot be precisely predicted, the NRC says.

“The NRC isn’t saying if the flood happened last year, they couldn’t have protected the plant. We can’t say that for sure. They would have had trouble,” George said.

A still-unresolved issue in the dispute is the NRC’s contention that OPPD received, but did not properly act on, a warning by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2003. It said high-water threats to the plant should be raised by 3 feet based on a new assessment following severe Missouri River floods in the mid-1990s. “The performance deficiency existed for many years,” the NRC said in an Oct. 6, 2010, letter to the Omaha utility.

Another open issue is why NRC’s inspectors did not focus on the flood threat until an inspection in 2009, George said. “We’ve been looking at that, as well, to be honest. How did we miss it?” he said. “We believe it is just the nature of the inspection program. … We only sample certain parts of their design basis,” the term for the anticipated threats that nuclear plants are required to survive.

The difference a few feet can make

When NRC inspectors decided to take a close look at Fort Calhoun’s flood protections in 2009, they found a range of barriers that reached nearly to the 1,010-foot level. The precise level — 1,009.5 feet — is written into the plant’s operating licenses as a flooding “design basis” threat that the plant must be guarded against. But OPPD had also committed to protect the plant’s reactor systems against floodwaters reaching 1,014 feet, the NRC says — a level that might be reached if the Gavins Point Dam upriver on the Missouri in South Dakota were breached.

OPPD planned to extend the barrier to 1,014 feet by stacking sandbags on top of some steel floodgates that protected the auxiliary building, and to use more sandbags to safeguard the water intake structure and its essential cooling water pumps.

The NRC inspectors rejected that strategy. “The sandbagging activity would be insufficient,” the NRC concluded in a July 15, 2010, letter to OPPD. The half-inch cross section on the top of the floodgates was too small to support a 5-foot stack of sandbags hit by swirling floodwaters, the agency said.

OPPD spokesman Jones said the heart of the dispute is a disagreement in how the utility and the NRC assess the plant operator’s responsibilities. “We presented our analysis to them, which we felt indicated that the design basis [for the flooding threat] should remain 1,009 feet,” rather than 1,014 feet, he said.

“Our risk assessment differed from their assessment. After reviewing our arguments and additional material, they denied our request not to issue the yellow finding. As a result, we made the changes they said were necessary,” he added. “They also ordered us to revise our policies and procedures and make whatever changes were necessary to bring the design basis up to 1,014. We did so, and we believe we are now in compliance with the NRC and are awaiting a final inspection.”

After OPPD assembled a panel of experts last year to contest the NRC’s judgment, the agency fired back with an even stiffer dismissal of the utility’s plans.

OPPD said that if a flood threatened to go past 1,009 feet, it would weld steel plates over some of the doors to the auxiliary building, containing essential control equipment to manage reactor cooling. (Other barriers would be fitted into slots at entranceways.)

The utility said the plant’s fire engine could also be lifted onto the deck of the turbine building alongside the reactor to pump floodwaters from that building.

New defenses still under evaluation

The NRC responded in its October 2010 letter that once flooding reached 1,004 feet, water would have entered the plant and the ability of emergency workers to move around the site would “significantly degrade.”

If levels exceeded 1,004 feet, water would reach the lower floodgates, hampering the welding of plates to door frames, the NRC said. At 1,008.5 feet, the technical support center used by emergency technicians would have been inundated. At 1,010 feet, water would begin to enter the auxiliary building, “shorting power and submerging pumps. The plant could then experience a station blackout with core damage estimated within 15 to 18 hours,” under a worst-case scenario, the NRC said.

The NRC concluded that the use of the fire truck for emergency pumping would fail, after it determined the truck could not draw floodwaters successfully from the turbine building. Moreover, it was not clear how workers could operate a crane to lift the fire truck into position if outside power were lost, the NRC staff added.

The NRC has not completed its evaluation of the new defenses installed at Fort Calhoun, nor has it resolved how OPPD handled the new information about flood threat that the NRC says the utility received via the Corps of Engineers.

The NRC cites an updated flood assessment by the corps in 2003 that raised the high-risk flood threat levels by approximately 3 feet. The NRC said OPPD updated its own flood analysis in 2005 but did not mention this flood analysis update when it made changes to its emergency planning. OPPD “did not develop a corrective action plan” to respond to the new information, NRC said.

“We think they had the information, and acted on it, but not in the way they should have,” said George. “Their documentation did not reflect that [information].” The matter is still under investigation.

Copyright 2011 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

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RELATED: 

MEDIA BLACKOUT: WAS THERE A NUCLEAR INCIDENT AT FORT CALHOUN NEBRASKA?

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FORT CALHOUN: PREDICTIVE DRILL OR MERELY COINCIDENCE?

21st Century Wire
June 23, 2011

A bizarre coincidence? The emergency preparedness video by Universal Education Systems available on an Egyptian website, outlines the potential scope of nuclear disaster at Fort Calhoun. 

Amazing, yet true…

 Foretelling? Video outlines plume disaster at Ft Calhoun before it happened.

MEDIA BLACKOUT: WAS THERE A NUCLEAR INCIDENT AT FORT CALHOUN NEBRASKA?

“You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”
– Ayn Rand 

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By Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
June 23, 2011

Since flooding began on June 6th, there has been a disturbingly low level of media attention given to the crisis at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Facility near Omaha, Nebraska. But available evidence strongly suggests that something very serious could have happened there.

Unfortunately for members of the public, there is no shortage of proof that serious nuclear incidents and radiation releases have happened in America, and have been covered up each and every time.

Most Americans are completely unaware that dangerous radiation has leaked from some three-quarters of all U.S. nuclear power stations and should naturally raise concerns that much of the the country’s water supplies may be contaminated. For this reason, it is paramount that the media and the public demand every bit of information available on this latest event.

First accounts tell us that on June 7th, there was a fire reported at Fort Calhoun.  The official story is that the fire was in an electrical switchgear room at the plant.  The apparently facility lost power to a pump that cools the spent fuel rod pool, allegedly for a duration of approximately 90 minutes.

Here is a video regarding the extent of flooding experienced along the Missouri River in Nebraska:

 RISK: Levees in and around Omaha were not designed for 3 months of continuous flood water.
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            FORT CALHOUN NUKE SITE: does it pose a public risk?

The following sequence of events is documented on the Omaha Public Power District’s own website, stating among other things, that here was no such imminent danger with the Fort Calhoun Station spent-fuel pool, and that due to a fire in an electrical switchgear room at FCS on the morning of June 7, the plant temporarily lost power to a pump that cools the spent-fuel pool.

In addition to the flooding that has occurred on the banks of the Missouri River at Fort Calhoun, the Cooper Nuclear Facility in Brownville, Nebraska may also be threatened by the rising flood waters.

As was declared at Fort Calhoun on June 7th, another  “Notification of Unusual Event” was declared at Cooper Nuclear Station on June 20th.  This notification was issued because the Missouri River’s water level reached an alarming 42.5 feet. Apparently, Cooper Station is advising that it is unable to discharge sludge into the Missouri River due to flooding, and therefore “overtopped” its sludge pond.

Not surprisingly, and completely ignored by the Mainstream Media, these two nuclear power facilities in Nebraska were designated temporary restricted NO FLY ZONES  by the FAA in early June.  The FAA restrictions were reportedly down to “hazards” and were  ‘effectively immediately’, and ‘until further notice’. Yet, according to the NRC, there’s no cause for the public to panic.

FORT CALHOUN: Under water now. Is it potentially the next Fukushima?

“On June 6, 2011, the Federal Aviation Administration put into effect ‘temporary flying restrictions’or a NO FLY ZONE – until further notice over the area around Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant in Blaine, Nebraska.”

A news report from local NBC 6 on the Ft. Calhoun Power Plant and large areas of farm land flooded by the Missouri River, interviews a local farmer worried about the levees, “We need the Corps-Army Corps of Engineers–to do more. The Corps needs to tell us what to do and where to go. This is not mother nature, this is man-made.” Nearby town Council Bluffs has already implemented its own three tier warning system should residents have to leave the area quickly. Flooding fears would be drawfed however, in the event of a radiation leak at one the region’s nuclear facilities.

To date, it is unknown to members of the public whether or not the incident at Ft Calhoun Nuclear is actually a Level 4 emergency (on a US regulatory scale). A Level 4 emergency would constitute an “actual or imminent substantial core damage or melting of reactor fuel with the potential for loss of containment integrity.”

If there was any core damage, there is no guarantee that officials would allow such information to be made public for fear of public panic and loss of confidence.

Serious nuclear incidents have taken place on US soil which were covered-up, in some cases for over 40 years. “In 1959, a partial meltdown occurred at the Boeing-Rocketdyne nuclear testing facility, about 30 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The incident released the third greatest amount of radioactive iodine in nuclear history. But no one really heard about it until Boeing recently settled a class-action suit filed by local residents,” reported Living On Earth in 2006. At no point were members of the public informed about these severe radiation leaks which undoubtedly caused hundreds of cases of cancer and contributed to resident deaths. Details of this and other incidents have been kept secret for some 40 or more years.

 COVER-UP: The Boeing-Rocketdyne nuclear incident, 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles. 

According to the seven-level International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, a Level 4 incident requires at least one death, which has not occurred according to available reports.

According a recent report on the People’sVoice website, The Ft. Calhoun plant — which stores its fuel rods at ground level according to Tom Burnett — is now partly submerged and Missouri River levels are expected to rise further before the summer if finished, local reports in and around the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant suggest that the waters are expected to rise at least 5 more feet.

Burnett states, “Ft. Calhoun is the designated spent fuel storage facility for the entire state of Nebraska…and maybe for more than one state. Calhoun stores its spent fuel in ground-level pools which are underwater anyway – but they are open at the top. When the Missouri river pours in there, it’s going to make Fukushima look like an X-Ray.”

The People’s Voice’s report explains how Ft Calhoun and Fukushima share some of the very same high-risk factors:

“In 2010, Nebraska stored 840 metric tons of the highly radioactive spent fuel rods, reports the Nuclear Energy Institute. That’s one-tenth of what Illinois stores (8,440 MT), and less than Louisiana (1,210) and Minnesota (1,160). But it’s more than other flood-threatened states like Missouri (650) and Iowa (420).”

 Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen explains how cooling pumps must operate continuously, even years after a plant is shut down.

As with the critical event in Fukushima, in Ft Calhoun circulatin­g water is required at all times to keep the new fuel and more importantl­y the spent radioactive material cool. The Nebraska facility houses around 600,000 – 800,000 pounds of spent fuel that must be constantly cooled to prevent it from starting to boil, so the reported 90 minute gap in service should raise alarm bells.

Conventional wisdom about what makes for a safe location regarding nuclear power facilities was turned on its head this year following Japan’s Fukushima disaster following the earthquake and tsunami which ravaged the region and triggered one of the planets worst-ever nuclear meltdowns.

TV and radio journalist Tom Hartmann explores some of these arguments here:

Nebraska’s nuclear plant’s similarities to Japan’s Fukushima, both were store houses for years of spent nuclear fuel rods.

In addition, there are eyewitness reports of odd military movements, including unmarked vehicles and soldier movements throughout the region. Should a radiation accident occur, most certainly extreme public controls would be enacted by the military, not least because this region contains some of the country’s key environmental, transportation and military assets.

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Angela Tague at Business Gather reports also that the recent Midwest floods may seriously impact food and gas prices.  Lost farmland may be behind the price spike to $7.55 a bushel for corn, already twice last year’s price.  Tague notes also:
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“Corn is a key ingredient in ethanol gasoline, feeds America’s livestock and is found in many food products including soft drinks and cereal. Prices will undoubtedly increase steadily at the grocery store, gas pump and butcher shop throughout the summer as Midwest flooding continues along the Missouri River basin. Not only are farmers losing their homes, land and fields — ultimately their bank accounts will also suffer this season.”
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IN SUMMARY

The nuclear industry has a very long history of withholding information and misleading the public with regards to the hazards of its industrial activities. One of the lessons we can learn for Japan’s tragic Fukushima disaster is that the government’s choice to impose a media blackout on information around the disaster may have already cost thousands of lives. Only time will tell the scope the disaster and how many victims it will claim.

More importantly, though, is that public officials might do well to reconsider the “safe” and “green” credentials of nuclear power- arguably one of the dirtiest industries in existence today. Especially up for inspection, are those of 40-50 year old facilities like Ft Calhoun in the US, strangely being re-licensed for operation past 2030. Many of these older facilities serve little on the electrical production front, and are more or less “bomb factories” that produce enriched material for nuclear weapons, and recycled nuclear waste used in deadly depleted uranium munitions.
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When a nuclear facility goes red, it’s game over for the population in the surrounding vicinity. Can we really afford more Fukushima-type events from a government and an industry that keeps its lips so tight? 

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RELATED: 

THE DIRTY GREEN SECRET: SHOPSOILED NUCLEAR GOODS

BREAKING: FLOOD DAM BURST AT FORT CALHOUN – STATION IS NOW UNDERWATER AND IN GRAVE DANGER

 

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