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Great Picture of Fort Calhoun and the Missouri River

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From St. Louis today:

image

The NRC sent out a notice (pdf) last week saying a fire had occurred in a switchgear room and was extinguished in less than an hour. No incidents have been reported since. Here’s what Omaha Public Power District said yesterday:

Jeff Hanson says, "We're protected far above where this is projected to go."

It helps that the facility was built to withstand a 500-year flood event and Hanson says there are feet of protection between the Missouri and the important structures on site.

That was before the aqua dams were put in place. Hanson says the plant has plans and procedures in place and practice flood defense. The aqua dams add another layer of protection from flooding.

Jeff Hanson says, "Protecting the vital assets, we have sandbagged and placed earthen berms around the substations which guarantees the power can get into the plant to keep the plant powered."

The facility was taken offline to refuel earlier this year so the containment building has been flooded by OPPD in order to cool the fuel rods.

Hanson adds they have a number of backup systems in place to continue to pump clean water through the spent fuel pool and into the reactor containment building so he says there is nothing to fear.

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Comments

Anonymous said…
At Idaho Samizdat there is an excellent blog post spiking some of the conspiracy theories circulating on the Internet about the flood and the plant.
June 16, 2011 at 12:32 PM
Anonymous said…
"The facility was taken offline to refuel earlier this year so the containment building has been flooded by OPPD in order to cool the fuel rods."

The implication is that they deliberately flooded the containment building to cool the fuel rods. Come on, be serious. Do you really believe that?

Obviously when the containment building floods, and these guys say they did that deliberately to keep the rods cool, there is a problem. I've never heard such rubbish. No one floods their building to cool rods in a reactor. Basically these guys are just laughing at the public.
June 17, 2011 at 7:59 AM
Brian Mays said…
"The implication is that they deliberately flooded the containment building to cool the fuel rods."

I suspect that this is simply a case of misunderstanding by the reporter. It probably means that the fuel rods sitting in the reactor vessel are covered by water, which is the normal situation during a refueling outage.
June 17, 2011 at 8:20 AM
Anonymous said…
What they mean by "flooding the contianment" is that the refueling cavity has been flooded. This is exceedingly normal for an outage. The reactor vessel sits at the bottom of a giant concrete cavity (pool) which is normally empty. They flood it up to the refueling floor (approx. 40 ft. above the reactor vessel head) to offload the fuel in the core. The 40 ft. of water is what provides shielding from the radiation when the core is exposed, and keeps the core cool during this time.
June 19, 2011 at 12:15 AM
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