Come on. First of all, a simple google search returns several hundred hits related to this story. Second, after reading the full article, I can’t help but laugh, it is written like a poor man’s conspiracy novel.
Let’s get some facts straight here. Calhoun has been in a state of cold shutdown since April for a refueling outage. This means that all of the plant’s reactors have been rendered inoperable and placed in a “safe” state. The nuclear fuel rods aren’t even in the reactors.
The problem at Calhoun related to a spent fuel containment pool. A small fire at the facility caused water circulation pumps to go offline for about 40 minutes. This meant that new water wasn’t being circulated into the spent fuel pool. The spent fuel in the containment pool remained full of water and all spent fuel rods remained stable. The fire was extinguished by automatic fire suppression systems and water circulation to the spent fuel pool was restored within an hour.
At no time did the plant ever experience a “catastrophic loss of cooling” as the article states. In fact, the plant has backup systems to circulate water that operators decided not to activate because the spent fuel rods remained cool.
I appreciate your website and your willingness to broach topics that others won’t, but I think this “news” link pushes the line from journalism into tin foil hat territory. In the future, it’s probably a good idea to pass over any articles from the far right wing Pakistani website thenation.pk or those that include infowars.com as a source.
Got credibility?
EDITOR: We goofed! We mistook the Pakistan newspaper for the left leaning but reputable Nation Magazine.
