Airspace Over Flooded Nebraska Nuclear Power Plant Still Closed

http://www.businessinsider.com/faa-closes-airspace-over-flooded-nebraska-nuclear-power-plant-2011-6

A fire in Nebraska's Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant briefly knocked out the cooling process for spent nuclear fuel rods, ProPublica reports. The fire occurred on June 7th.

On June 6th, the Federal Administration Aviation (FAA) issued a directive banning aircraft from entering the airspace within a two-mile radius of the plant.

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WOWT, the local NBC affiliate, reports on its website: "The Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Facility is an island right now but it is one that authorities say is going to stay dry. They say they have a number of redundant features to protect the facility from flood waters that include the aqua dam, earthen berms and sandbags."

OPPD spokesman Jeff Hanson told Business Insider that the nuclear plant is in a "stable situation." He said the Missouri River is currently at 1005.6" above sea level, and that no radioactive fuel had yet been released or was expected to be released in the future.

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protection against any danger.

in the good old USA concerning nuclear power plants. They're all getting old and metal fatigues with age, combined with vibrations and heat and cool cycles. That fact is not rocket science either. We've already had a couple near misses and no telling at the numbers that we don't know about. The only constant with the nuclear power industry is they all lie.

rec

Let's send these fools off to Fukushima for a taste of their own medicine.

http://casenergy.org/nuclear-energy/energy-in-your-state/nuclear-energy-in-nebraska/

Initially I thought it was just the use of zulu time in the NOTAM which had made its way into the story, but when I refreshed my memory of the conversion it still didn't work out.

If Nebraska is CDT, and the NOTAM was issued at 2232 UTC(zulu) then it would have been issued 5 hours before the fire reportedly broke out.
NOAA time conversion chart: http://hurricanes.noaa.gov/zulu-utc.html

From the original quoted by OP article:
http://www.truth-out.org/electrical-fire-knocks-out-spent-fuel-cooling-nebraska-nuke-plant/1308155673

The fact that the minute part of the time hack on the NOTAM is :32 and the fire was reported at :30 would be consistent with the timing related to emergency procedures (about two minutes from time the checklist was run in the NPP control room).

Three years ago I would have assumed poor reporting and let it go, but after becoming more familiar with the NRC penchant for secrecy I'm interested in resolving the anomaly.

Anyone see an explantion I've missed that is embedded in the facts as known?

NRC report states fire noted at about 9:30am CDT (2:30pm UTC),
Fire is out by 10:20am CDT (3:20pm UTC)
NOTAM is 5:32pm CDT (22:32 UTC)

I don't follow the NOTAM to emergency procedure checklist linkage.
Question is, then, why a NOTAM issued 7 hours after the fire is out?

Wait there is something fishy...

I just double checked the sources:

FAA NOTAM is 06/06
http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_1_6523.html

NRC Fire report is 06/07
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/event/2011/20110608en.html

In that case, the NOTAM was issued at 5:32pm the day before the fire,
17 hours before in fact.

Coincidence? I mean it is flooded out and all?

Also NOTAM says 2231UTC not 2232UTC so the 2 minute checklist thing seems unlikely.

The only thing I can do is to tell you that my experience with command center operations leads me to believe that the nuclear plant control room has a "hot line" that automatically connects them to a set group of emergency responders and sends out a mass message with one action on the part of those in the control room. A response like the NOTAM is probably canned, and triggered almost automatically by the nature of the initial notification. So a one or two minute response is what you would expect.

the timeline (from the reports) is as follows:

06/06 at 22h31 UTC a NOTAM was issued by the FAA
06/07 at 14h30 UTC the fire was detected, and out by 15h20 UTC according to the NRC

14h30 + 1h29 ~= 15h59 difference

That's a 16 to 17 hour gap between NOTAM being issued and the fire.
The NOTAM was issued the day before the fire.

Hotline or no, the reports state this was the timeline.

How's the fire department going to get there?

If not impossible, to bring to bear quickly. They'd be pretty much cut off and on their own to deal with a major event until the floodwaters receded.

What a clusterfuck.