Tornado Touches Down At Nuclear Plant: Nuke Plants Vulnerable To Weather--Rising Water And Cooling System Malfunction picture and video

Sunday’s tornadoes roared across the Midwest ad ploughed houses under like a bulldoer. Homes, schoolks and even nuclear poiwer plants got hit,

News reports say a Kentucky nuclear plant may have been hit in Paducah, Kentucky. This shows a danger from weather systems that is unique to nuclear plants.

The Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant is a facility located in McCracken County, Kentucky, near Paducah, Kentucky that producesenriched uranium for nuclear power plants. The plant is now operated by United States Enrichment Corporation, a subsidiary of USEC Incorporated, a publicly traded corporation (NYSE: USU). It is the only operating uranium enrichment facility in the United States apart from a pilot gas centrifuge installation at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, and URENCO‘s in Eunice, New Mexico. The Paducah plant produces low-enriched nuclear fuel for nuclear power plants.

The gaseous diffusion plant covers 750 acres (300 ha) of a 3,425 acres (1,386 ha) site. The four process buildings cover 74 acres (30 ha), and consume a peak electrical demand of 3,040 megawatts.^[1]

Unlike electric generating plants, nuclear plants have cooling systems which must operate. Fukushima and Hurricane Sandy show us how vulnerable those plants are to weather-related power outages and earthquakes. SOURCE

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The danger Hurricane Sandy posed to nuclear power plants along the East Coast highlights some of the same vulnerabilities that terrorists looking to release harmful radiation into the environment could exploit, watchdog groups said this week.

The unprecedented storm posed two main challenges to atomic energy facilities: rising water levels and interruptions to the electricity grid. Both have the potential to disrupt crucial cooling systems at the plants, and particularly those for pools used to cool spent reactor fuel. If spent fuel rods overheat and are exposed to air, they can cause fires and dangerous radiation releases. MOREHERE

Missourians are not that crazy aoub anuclear plant in their neck of the woods, as this Youtube video shows:

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