The Missouri River floods have threatened Nebraska's Ft. Calhoun and Cooper nuclear power plants putting tremendous stress on both the systems and their operators, but the immediate risk of a meltdown like those that occurred in Japan at Fukushima is small.
Carl Pope, former director of the Sierra Club writing on The Huffington Post Green Blog says it's also clear "that if these same floods had occurred a year ago, before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission forced plant operators to upgrade safety standards, Ft. Calhoun, at least, would have been at serious meltdown risk. If the floods recede with no further damage to these plants, President Obama could, quite legitimately, claim that he saved Omaha. He probably won't, though, because the politics of doing so would reveal a deeper and more disturbing truth: while the Obama Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), led by Gregory Jaczko, has begun to take seriously the problems it inherited, America's fleet of 104 operating nuclear power plants is anything but safe."
