ST. LOUIS, MO (KTVI-FOX2Now.com)—
Federal budget cuts could make flooding along the Missouri River in Eastern Iowa worse. That's because 12 flood gauges that help predict future river levels could be taken out of service because of budget cuts.Meanwhile, Missouri River flood waters are now lapping at the base of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant in Nebraska. All that leads a local expert to ask why we're building everything from nuke plants to shopping malls in flood plains. If there's not a lot of rain upstream on the Missouri River the St. Louis area could dodge a bullet:
Robert Criss, a planetary scientist at Washington University has spent years studying floods and hydrology and how water behaves. He says no matter what the flood level on the Missouri River here turns out to be, it's being made worse by the very levees built to
Criss believes that places like the Chesterfield Valley should never have been developed at all after the flood of 1993. But given the development in places like the Chesterfield Valley Flood Plain that is the minority opinion.end quote
The problem of all this is if nuclear power plants continue to be built in natural flood plains or potential tsunami tracks we will continue to have problems like we did at Fukushima all around the world over the coming years of increasinly extreme weather. For places like the U.S., Canada, Russia and China this might be less of a problem because of the sizes of the countries. But places like Japan, England, France, Germany where land is at a premium and cannot be replaced, losing 500 square miles of land for Centuries like they will in Japan now is horrific for those countries.
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