"The biggest problem, as I see it right now, is the Oyster Creek plant, which is on Barnegat Bay in New Jersey," says former nuclear executive Arnie Gundersen, noting it lies in the projected eye of the storm. "Oyster Creek is the same design, but even older than Fukushima Daiichi unit 1. It's in a refueling outage. That means that all the nuclear fuel is not in the nuclear reactor, but it's over in the spent fuel pool. And in that condition, there's no backup power for the spent fuel pools. So, if Oyster Creek were to lose its offsite power — and, frankly, that's really likely — there would be no way cool that nuclear fuel that's in the fuel pool until they get the power reestablished. ... The most important lesson we can take out of the Fukushima Daiichi and climate change, and especially with Hurricane Sandy, is that we can't expect to cool these fueling pools." [includes rush transcript]
GUEST:
Arnie Gundersen, former nuclear industry senior vice president who has coordinated projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the country. He provides independent testimony on nuclear and radiation issues to the NRC, congressional and state legislatures, and government agencies and officials in the U.S. and abroad. He is the chief engineer at Fairewinds Associates and co-author of the Greenpeace report, "Lessons from Fukushima."
 http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/29/nuclear_plants_from_virginia_to_vermont
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