Nebraska nuclear nightmare

by Bradley Hughes

As Japanese officials reveal that the Fukushima nuclear disaster was worse than they told us, two weather disasters come close to creating more nuclear catastrophes in the US.

In Nebraska, a fire in April at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant led to a shutdown of the cooling system for the spent fuel rods for more than an hour. Plant officials say that it would take 88 hours without cooling before the cooling water would all boil away. The plant is located just less than 30 km from the centre of Omaha which has a population of over 400,000 people.

By the beginning of July, the plant had become an island due to the flooding of the Missouri River. If the temporary measures to hold back the water fail, the reactor is in danger of having a disaster similar to that at Fukushima.

In New Mexico, a wildfire in July that spread over 100 square miles was close to the Los Alamos National Labs, a nuclear-weapons design site that houses radioactive waste from these programs.
Firefighters set and then extinguished a fire in a ring around the lab to stop the wild fire from making it onto the grounds of the lab. If the lab burns, radioactive materials will be consumed by the blaze and sent by winds over a large area.

Even if the blaze makes it only onto the grounds, there is the same danger because it is not known how much contamination is in the soil around the lab.

Japan

In Japan, officials from the electric company responsible for the Fukushima nuclear power plant have revealed that the damage to the plants was much worse than they initially reported.

In mid-June, they admitted that three reactors had experienced full meltdowns; the radioactive contents of the reactors had completely melted due to their own heat and also melted through some of the walls of the containment vessels.

They now also calculate that the first week of the accident released 2.3 times as much radiation as they initially thought. An area around the reactor of almost 1,000 square kilometers is likely to remain uninhabitable.

They are continuing to flood the very hot melted cores with water to try to keep them cool, which is producing an ever greater abundance of radioactive water that needs to be treated or stored.

In May, urine tests of ten children in Fukushima city revealed that all of them had radioactive cesium in their urine. Cesium ends up in bones and the radioactivity can lead to bone and blood cancers.