Hobson's Choice: Meltdown Two Cores At Brunswick or Flood Tens of Thousands of Upsteam Homes And Businesses.

This is the Hurricane Harvey's Houston flooding paradox...

The setup

These upstream reservoirs and lakes have expensive vacation and secondary homes on their banks. The strategy of maintaining lake levels for the rich is to maintain the levels right up cozy near the mcmanions. The lakes are maintained high in the summer. The lakes for flood control, are set low for the winter and spring flooding control. They are still set at the high level now especially for the widespread wet summer runoff. The NC hydrology is still draining from the really wet summer. There was a high flow before hurricane Florence. Now biblical precipitation is occurring all though the state and especially for the lakes and reservoir. They are going to have to lower the flood gates...emergency reservoir control...in order not flood the lake expensive homes and the upstream town and communities. A tremendous wall of water then is going to flow down stream in the Cape Fear River to Brunswick. It is a meltdown in it own right. This drastically raises the Cape Fear River downstream up to a flooding level These lakes and reservoirs also have gigantic emergency spillways. You never want to use the spillway...it really is a dam safety device. Once the dams' level exceeds its design lake high level and water goes down the spillway, then you loose the flood control for the down steam communities. All the reservoir water flows out the spillway. In biblical flooding, there is no lake control. Sometimes the emergency spillway is overtopped by lake water flooding and nobody has any flood control for downstream communities. This begins damaging the dam by water erosion. This is called a dam failure and it increases the likely of a cascading dam failure.

So it is your choice: meltdown two nuclear cores or destroy all the  down stream properties and kill all those poor souls by flooding. That is what you are facing. This usually is a corrupt secret back room political deal what to protect.

Ok, why can't the reservoir authorities use their dam(s)flow control gates...throttle them... to control the river level around the Cape Fear River Brunswick area? They are suppose to have the collective reserve capacity to do this. I am confident they are highly sensitive to the nuclear plants in the area???                

The flooding comes within hours of the hurricane hitting the plant. Hurricane flooding is a highly dynamic and unpredictable situation. With up to 40" of rain hitting the North Carolina, we have no indication with how the "Ca pe Fear River" freshwater flooding will interact with the Hurricane surge. All the weathers authorities are saying this Hurricane Florence still has a Cat 4 hurricane surge. This is a facilitative assumption flood barrier. This is the best our monied political system can come up with. It is a Obama Walmart flood barrier.

This problem with engineers is they are trained to look at things in isolation. The NRC has unclear regulations with the licensees and NRC has to look at hurricane flooding holistically with fresh water flooding. So how about a cascading dam failure on the Cape Fear River? You want a name to remember, the Jordan Lake and the 1945 New Hope dam. They talk about a horrendous 1945 flooding event on the Haw River. It directly connects into the Cape Fear River. The got numerous locks on the Cape Fear River. They say most of NC is drained though the Cape Fear River. I mean, all the rivers and their dams that connect into the Cape Fear River. The Harris Lake and their Nuclear plant drains into the Cape Fear River. A cascading set of nuclear plants in a dire emergency?

NOAA says you can expect with a cat 4 hurricane three to greater six inches feet ocean surge over-topping the facility. Honestly, I don't trust NOAA with their computer modeling of hurricane surge levels...I don't trust the NRC's and the licensee modeling of the storm surge and anything associated with the licensee analysis of the storm surge. There is too much self interest involved with in all of this.