Pakistani Slam Piece Spreads Panic Over Ft. Calhoun

 

Image from Omaha Public Power District.

A truly crazed article in Pakistan’s The Nation leads one to believe that the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant is a Fukushima-style disaster not just about to happen, but already happening…and President Obama is to blame. Please don’t think for a second I believe the federal government is incapable of lying, or that there’s complete freedom of the press in the U.S. Far from it! But in this case, Pakistan’s The Nation is off its rocker, and factually mis-states something so critical that it totally derails any claims they make. This is anti-American hysteria, pure and simple, whipped up by a Pakistani publication and supposedly supported by a Russian agency that I know nothing about, but that I would, at face value, be inclined to trust about as far as I could throw it.

Regardless, the kind of hysterical coverage seen in the Pakistani article is just out of control. Here’s the madness:

A shocking report prepared by Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency (FAAE) on information provided to them by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) states that the Obama regime has ordered a “total and complete” news blackout relating to any information regarding the near catastrophic meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant located in Nebraska.

According to this report, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant suffered a “catastrophic loss of cooling” to one of its idle spent fuel rod pools on 7 June after this plant was deluged with water caused by the historic flooding of the Missouri River which resulted in a fire causing the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) to issue a “no-fly ban” over the area.

Located about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, the largest city in Nebraska, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant is owned by Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) who on their website denies their plant is at a “Level 4” emergency by stating: “This terminology is not accurate, and is not how emergencies at nuclear power plants are classified.”

Russian atomic scientists in this FAAE report, however, say that this OPPD statement is an “outright falsehood” as all nuclear plants in the world operate under the guidelines of the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) which clearly states the “events” occurring at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant do, indeed, put it in the “Level 4” emergency category of an “accident with local consequences” thus making this one of the worst nuclear accidents in US history.

 

[Link.]

For what it’s worth, the claim about a Level 4 emergency is complete and total garbage, and that’s really significant. It’s a basic fact that cannot be disputed…unless the NRC and plant officials are lying. I’m not saying they’re not — I have no idea — but I have no indication that they are, and that is not what the Pakistani source says the Russians say. Their claimed “falsehood” does not derive from a cover-up of facts (for instance, if there had been a release of radiation but the power company did not report it) — but from a FUNDAMENTAL MISREADING OF THE International Nuclear Event Scale that even I, a simple caveman with about a 7 I.Q. and an inability to do basic math, can understand.

That comes from an official Russian source? I hope not. If it does, the world has bigger problems than Fort Calhoun.

A Level 4 event requires a release of radiation to generate local consequences, or at least one death locally (i.e., in the plant) from radiation, not just from anything. (That’s OR! Or!! Not AND!). When the crane operator died at Fukushima, that did not fulfill the criteria for a Level 4 event — because he did not die of radiation.

However, for some time after that, Tepco was lying. The implication, here, in the Pakistani source, in claims they attribute to the Russians, is that the Obama administration is lying. I’m not saying they’re not — I haven’t the foggiest fucking idea. But it completely misconstrues the facts to claim that the reported incident on June 7 at Fort Calhoun is a Level 4 event. According to the report to the NRC (see my earlier article on this), there was no release of radiation. There were no deaths associated with radiation. There wasn’t jack kitty crap, other than a temporary evacuation.

Is Omaha Public Power District lying? I haven’t the foggiest, but either the Pakistani The Nation or the Russian source, and probably both, are deliberately misstating the facts of the INES, which you’d think Russia would have a handle on…given, you know, that its precursor state kinda set the standard for nuclear accidents.

Yes, that’s true, people, I, who never shut up about how full of shit the American press is, would still rather rely on the American press than on the Russian nuclear agency and the Pakistani press to tell me the truth about my own country. You know why? Because I know a thing or two about Russia and Pakistan. When they handed out Freedom of the Press, Pakistan was on vacation. And the government of Pakistan needs all the anti-American sentiment it can get, in order to counter the swiftly growing American political and economic overtures toward its perceived nemesis, India. Hey, I can’t say I blame them; as a nation, Pakistan is threatened by internal instability. Furthermore, after years of getting a free ride because it helped the U.S. in the “war on terror,” the Pakistani government is finding that the Obama administration is less inclined to completely blow off India in favor of a country that handed nuclear weapons technology over to North Korea and tried to sell it to Iran and Libya…then blamed it on a single rogue nuclear scientist, who had stolen said technology from the Dutch in the first place and who remains a national hero in Pakistan.

Don’t get me wrong…the U.S. press is repeatedly asleep at the wheel in covering both corporate malfeasance and environmental crises. I’m not trying to be an American chauvinist here — believe me, no one loves America or wants to slap it around more than I do. But in the case of hysteria like this — with a clear political bias — what irritates me is that a lot of the world will believe it.

Meanwhile, the dark tentacle-gods of Big Coal are locked in their hellspawn canyons deep beneath the earth, counting their gazillions…

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One comment on “Pakistani Slam Piece Spreads Panic Over Ft. Calhoun
  1. Hey, I’m not from NE but most of my relatives live in Omaha so when I first saw this I was a bit worried and did some research. After Fukushima…

    1. All the websites reporting this that I looked at except the initial Pakistani article are conspiracy websites, which copied the initial article word-for-word but usually without giving a reference.
    2. I did some searches in the FAAE website (minatom.ru). There are some references to the Fort Calhoun plant in some english language articles predating these events, but nothing about any of this. I do not know if FAAE also has other websites.
    3. The supposed FAAE quotes in quotation marks do not appear on any Russian website, using Googles ‘site:ru’. I searched for each one of them separately, adding ‘Calhoun’.

    Therefore, I suspect this is just some Pakistani anti-US propaganda without any basis whatsoever, and no relationship to the Russians. Funny that the supposed America first-and-only websites have picked it up and run with it so thoroughly, especially when it is supposedly based on a Russian report.

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