No reports on the Google Data Center between Council Bluffs and Omaha.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (who are stricter on nuclear safety) said the plant was okay, though that was before the water-filled berm broke. I have heard that they’re going to try repairing the berm and pumping the water back out. The World-Herald printed a list of emergency measures they can take if the water goes higher than 1,010 feet. But I don’t think there’s a whole lot we can do except keep watch and keep working.

The Cooper plant further south has had a close call, but nobody seems to be reporting on that one.

Put another way, it’s like saying modern cars aren’t any safer when all you have to look at are models built in the 60′s and 70′s.

On the other hand, even as a public agency, they’ve got a huge investment in money and reputation in the supposed safety of nuclear power, so there’s still a motive to minimize public relations problems. For years they’ve bristled at any suggestion that nuclear is unsafe.

I wrote the disaster plan for the hospital in Missouri Valley, Iowa, northeast of Ft. Calhoun, in the 1990s. At the time, the plan for dealing with a radiation release was essentially “get in your car and drive east on US 30.” I said at the time it was a fantasy. I’d be surprised if a more realistic plan is in place today.

Though if things were to get any more interesting, would OPPD be any more forthcoming than TEPCO has been?

The Cooper plant is at full power generation and there is no plan for shutdown. There is also no viable plan for what to do if the water rises again!

Check it out for yourselves. There’s more than one plant in danger. Calhoun is the only plant you are supposed to look at. The other two are NOT capable of dealing with additional flooding, and due to AGW flooding is projected to continue to get worse, and events are predicted to unfold faster, in the years ahead. Right now the plan for Cooper is to wish real hard and clap your hands real loud, and if we’re lucky the water will go down. This year. That’s the whole plan.

There will be a fukushima/chernobyl in the USA, because (other than in California) we the people haven’t got the balls to get out there and prevent it. The Bush administration re-licensed all the aging, obsolete power plants the Clinton administration refused to talk to, and the Obama administration is at least as nuke-friendly as Bush was, despite speeches to the contrary.

But that doesn’t mean that every single story element was. Recall that they were eventually massacred with chemical weapons by an authoritarian fiefdom.

This doesn’t mean there wasn’t any danger. The spent fuel pool was saved by luck rather than design. An adjacent pool containing radioactive waste (irradiated machinery etc) began leaking after the explosion, adding water to the spent fuel pool.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110621p2a00m0na010000c.html

So to take your example, it’s like saying: this collection of cars from the 60s and 70s are safer because they have been retrofitted with modern back-up and safety systems, and we have rewritten the owner’s manual to include more stringent controls.

Please no car analogies. Nuclear power plants can and have been upgraded to newer safety standards before. Its an industrial plant and you can do lots of things to improve it. The problem is that its cheaper to bribe the politicians that set the standards.

For example, in Fukushima a reactor safety company pitched their plan to upgrade the venting system a couple of years back. TEPCO declined since that would reduce their bottom line.