Officials monitoring rising floodwaters at Nebraska nuclear plants - CNN.com

The NRC will dispatch additional inspectors to the plant "if conditions warrant," Dricks said.

Heavy rainfall in Montana and North Dakota, combined with melting snow from the Rocky Mountains, have sent the Missouri urging downstream this summer. The river washed over and punched through levees in nearby northwestern Missouri over the weekend, spurring authorities to urge about 250 nearby residents to leave their homes.

The 6 to 12 inches of rainfall in the upper Missouri basin in the past few weeks is nearly a normal year's worth, and runoff from the mountain snowpack is 140% of normal, according to weather forecasters.

And CNN affiliate KETV reported Wednesday that, as a precautionary move, the Cooper facility is keeping dozens of staff members onsite around the clock. The station reported that about 60 people are sleeping on cots at the plant and that the staffers are being rotated out every two days.

It was catastrophic flooding from Japan's March 11 tsunami that knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, resulting in three reactors melting down and producing the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. This year's Midwestern flooding has also led to a spate of rumors about the Fort Calhoun plant that Omaha Public Power and the NRC have been trying to knock down.

The utility has set up a "flood rumor control" page to reassure the public that there has been no release of radioactivity from the plant. An electrical fire June 7 did knock out cooling to its spent fuel storage pool for about 90 minutes, but the coolant water did not reach a boiling point before backup pumps went into service, it said.

"People are getting scared by a lot of the misinformation," Dricks said. "It's primarily coming from Internet bloggers rather than the mainstream media. None of them have bothered to check with us."

via cnn.com