Electrical Fire Knocks Out Spent Fuel Cooling at Nebraska Nuke Plant

A fire [1] in an electrical switch room on Tuesday briefly knocked out cooling for a pool holding spent nuclear fuel at the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant [2] outside Omaha, Neb., plant officials said.

The safety of deep pools used to store used radioactive fuel at nuclear plants has been an issue since the accident at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant in March. If the cooling water a pool is lost, the used nuclear fuel could catch fire and release radiation.

As ProPublica reported earlier, fire safety is a continuing concern [3] at the country's 104 commercial reactors, as is the volume of spent fuel [4] piling up at plants.

Officials at Fort Calhoun said the situation at their plant came nowhere near to Fukushima's. They said it would have taken 88 hours for the heat produced by the fuel to boil away the cooling water.

Workers restored cooling in about 90 minutes, and plant officials said the temperature in the pool only increased by two degrees.

The fire, reported at 9:30 a.m., led to the loss of electrical power for the system that circulates cooling water through the spent fuel pool, according to a report [5] from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A chemical fire suppression system discharged, and the plant's fire brigade cleared smoke from the room and reported that the fire was out at 10:20 a.m., the NRC said.

Mike Jones, a spokesman for the plant's owner, the Omaha Public Power District, said Fort Calhoun has a backup pump to provide water to the spent fuel in case the main system is lost. That pump, which runs on a separate power supply from the rest of the plant, was inspected and standing by on Tuesday, but plant operators restored main power to the pool before the emergency pump was needed, he said.

Fort Calhoun's single reactor has been shut down since April for refueling. The plant had already been operating under a heightened level of alert because of nearby flooding on the Missouri River, the NRC said. The cause of the fire remained under investigation this morning.

Tyler Durden  at ZeroHedge

Who needs a wartime nuclear exchange when you have peaceful countries nuking the gamma rays out of their own sovereign territories - now that the environmental theme is rather popular, the following video by Isao Hashimoto shows all the nuclear "tests" conducted by the world in the period between 1945 and 1998. Based on public data, the world's peaceful countries have already nuked themselves at least 2,054 times, with the US nuking the state of Nevada and its immediate neighbors about one thousand times. And keep in mind - the fallout does not just miraculously "disappear." Feel free to consider that next time you look at bargain properties on the strip. Anyway, as Idealist.ws asks, "How would your life be different if you were taught in school a small nuclear war already took place?" One thing is certain - Congress would be stunned and appalled, and the disgraced CEO of Nukes R Us, Inc., who previously gave trillions in campaign contributions to every Congressional critter, would be facing a very unpleasant and theatrically televised day.

From a discussion on advanced fallout maps:

'Civilized countries' - that now form what we dub the 'nuclear club' - conducted over 2,000 nuclear blasts on the Earth, and these entities - the executioners of her slow death - vigorously deny any irreversible, incurable damage. 
If you're looking for fallout maps, you won't find any such map here or anywhere that will satisfy your whim or sophisticated inquiry.  Why?  Because the executioners, to their best of their satisfactions, don't want you to see them.  What you can and will see - if you seek it - are bits and pieces of the destruction: a high reading of radioactivity in wheat or milk here, of air over there, a trajectory map here, and a rare truthful analysis there.  Put them together and you have what would happen in a small-but-non-mutually-destructive nuclear war (that we erringly refer simply to as the Cold War): the radioactive fallout circling - for eons - around the Earth and within her biosphere as a consequence of our historic, 'peaceful' tit-for-tat nuclear testing exchange is no different than the fallout in the event of an actual nuclear exchange had 400 or so atomic and hydrogen bombs fell only in remote regions of land and sea on the globe.   How would your life be different if you were taught in school a small nuclear war already took place?  How would that change the way you see your life and your health? Or your country or the world?