Rising water threatened the cooling system at the Oyster Creek
nuclear plant, in Toms River, N.J., on Monday night. The plant
declared an alert at 8:45 PM, which is the second-lowest level
of the four-tier emergency scale established by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. The water level was more than six feet
above normal. At seven feet, the plant would lose the ability to
cool its spent fuel pool in the normal fashion, according to
Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The plant would probably have to switch to using fire hoses to
pump in extra water to make up for evaporation, Mr. Sheehan
said, because it could no longer pull water out of Barnegat Bay
and circulate it through a heat exchanger, to cool the water in
the pool. Having first come online in 1969, Oyster Creek is the
nation's oldest operating nuclear reactor, and is of the same
design as those that failed at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The
reactor is located 50 miles east of Philadelphia and 75 miles
south of New York C