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The deluge of rainwater that waylaid the state in June flooded towns and raised rivers.

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It also affected one of Nebraska’s two nuclear power plants, so much that the Cooper facility in Brownville issued a “Notification of Unusual Event” at approximately 2 a.m. June 22.

The notification is a low-level state of emergency mandated by federal regulations when the Missouri River reaches 42.5 feet.

Nebraska Public Power District, which owns the facility, stressed that the plant is operating safely and personnel are not threatened by the river waters at this time.

The Cooper facility was brought online in July 1974 and is a boiling water reactor.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a boiling water reactor works thusly:

• reactor core creates heat

• steam-water mixture is produced when very pure water (reactor coolant) moves upward through the core absorbing heat

• steam-water mixture leaves the top of the core and enters the two stages of moisture separation where water droplets are removed before the steam is allowed to enter the steam line

• the steam line directs the steam to the main turbine causing it to turn the turbine generator, which produces electricity.

Nebraska’s other nuclear power plant is Fort Calhoun, owned by Omaha Public Power. Fort Calhoun is somewhat smaller than Cooper and is a pressurized-water reactor.

With coal-burning Gerald Gentleman Power Plant just down the road in Sutherland, the Canal plant south of town, and miles of coal cars coming into Bailey Yard every day, it might be easy to forget that other areas of the state get their electricity from the power of the atom.

In fact, Nebraska’s involvement with the nuclear age dates back to the earliest stages of the Manhattan Project. Nebraska scientists were involved in the construction and testing of atomic weapons during World War Two.

The Manhattan Project created bombs with such astounding power that project leader Robert Oppenheimer was moved to reference a verse from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

A reference from the Christian book of Revelations can demonstrate how closely tied Nebraska was to the atomic weapons: if Oppenheimer’s bomb was the rider known as death, then Nebraska built the pale horse upon which it rode.

Nuclear Weapons

At about 7:15 a.m. August 6, 1945, Japanese early detection radar picked up a small cluster of blips headed towards the southern part of the nation’s main island. Approximately 45 minutes later, the radar operator in Hiroshima determined that the incoming squadron was made up of no more than three planes and was probably nothing more than a reconnaissance mission.

Imperial forces were short on planes and personnel and the decision had been made not to scramble fighters to respond to such small incursions on Japanese air space. The air raid warning, always instituted if the Americans’ feared B-29 bombers were spotted, was lifted as well.

The operator was spot on with his analysis in the respect that the squadron was indeed comprised of three planes: B-29s Enola Gay, The Great Artiste, and an as-yet unnamed aircraft (later to be dubbed Necessary Evil).

The radar officer gravely misjudged the purpose of the flight, however. At 8:15 a.m., Enola Gay dropped the first nuclear bomb to be used in war, named “Little Boy,” over Hiroshima. Following a 57-second drop, the bomb reached its target height of 2000 feet and detonated.

It killed between 70,000 and 80,000 people instantly, leveled 70 percent of the city, and changed the world forever by ushering in the age of nuclear weapons.

Three days later another B-29, Bockscar (a play on the name of the airplane’s commander) dropped “Fat Man” on Nagasaki. The atomic bombs in conjunction with a Soviet offensive prompted the Japanese surrender on August 15 (in Japan, August 14 in the United States due to time zone differences).

The B-29 Superfortress was a marvel of aviation technology in its day, capable of flying at altitudes and speeds that surpassed the capabilities of the fighters the Japanese sent after them.

There were only four facilities in the United States tasked with constructing the planes: Boeing plants in Washington and Kansas, a Bell plant in Georgia, and the Glenn L. Martin (now Lockheed-Martin) plant in Bellevue, Nebraska.

Enola Gay was hand selected off the assembly line in Nebraska by Paul Tibbets, who piloted the plane on its fateful mission. Tibbets named the plane after his mother.

Bockscar was also constructed in Bellevue.

The Martin plant was on what is now Offutt Air Force base. After the Axis was defeated and a new threat emerged in the arms race with the Soviet Union, Offutt Air Force Base served as the headquarters of Strategic Air Command throughout the Cold War.

SAC was charged with creating nuclear strike strategies and maintaining the United States Air Force’s fleet of B-47 Stratojets. The B-47 served as America’s primary long-range bomber during the 50s and 60s.

As the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles made a large force of nuclear capable bombers less necessary, SAC also oversaw the U.S. stock of nuclear missiles.

Omaha was a logical choice for SAC headquarters, given its central location.

It also makes sense that some of those missiles would be stored in Nebraska, as well. The area around Lincoln served as home to a dozen Atlas silos, part of the 98th Aerospace Wing headquartered at the Lincoln Air Force Base.

The Atlas was the first ICBM developed by the United States and was operational until 1965, when the superior Titan II missile phased it out. The Atlas’s enjoyed a long after- life of being used in commercial space launches until the mid-1990s.

In the early 60s parts of Western Nebraska, along with Wyoming and Colorado, were selected as the location of the enormous Minuteman Missile complex. More than 200 silos were constructed in the tri-state area.

When missiles are decommissioned and removed, the question becomes what to do with the empty silos.

The website nesilos.com chronicles what became of some of Nebraska’s old silos, complete with photographs. For example, a silo near Elmwood now serves as a salvage yard, with old tires tossed down into the bin where an Atlas ICBM once stood. On the other side of the state, a couple turned an Atlas silo into a subterranean home near Kimball.

With all that firepower pointing at the Soviet Union from Nebraska in the 50s and 60s, it stands to reason that the Soviets had missiles and planes of their own with the Good Life’s name stamped on them.

The website nebraskastudies.org stated that several targets in Nebraska would have been first-wave targets in the case of a Soviet attack, including Offutt and the huge ammo dump near Hastings.

Of course, Nebraska’s ties to the nuclear age are not solely those of missiles and bombs and imminent doom. The tiny town of Hallam, near Lincoln, was the site of an experimental nuclear power plant, one of the first of its kind.

The Hallam station was a graphite-moderated sodium-cooled reactor, clad in stainless steel. Corrosion and stress-cracking in the steel containment cans lead to the Hallam plant being the first commercial atomic energy plant to be decommissioned after operating from 1962-1964.

According to nebraskastudies.org, “The highly radioactive nuclear material was shipped to a storage facility. Some nuclear material and parts of the plant were used by other plants. What was left -- pipes and equipment that had been exposed to radiation -- was sealed up in the reactor containment vessel, surrounded by concrete and buried alongside the generating station.”

The nuclear reactor was replaced by a conventional coal burning facility that is still in operation. It is known as the Sheldon Station.

Boyd County

In 1989, the federal government, a handful of state governments, and a couple of multi-national corporations approached Boyd County in northern Nebraska with a Faustian proposal: allow Bechtel International to build a low level nuclear waste dump on a vacant farm in exchange for $120 million over 40 years.

Proponants of the dump thought that the small county would jump at such a hefty sum of money regardless of what was asked in. They misjudged the intelligence and tenacity of the rural county, home to scores of Republican farmers who fought tooth and nail against Big Nuclear and Republican governor Kay Orr.

Among the problems with the proposed dump’s location was that it was well known by locals to be prone to flooding, a fact that was not considered by Bechtel.

Save Boyd County, a group opposed to the dump, cast its lot in with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ben Nelson, who promised to do what he could to derail the project.

Following his razor thin victory in the Democratic primary and subsequent triumph over Orr, Nelson managed to delay the build but could not stop it. However, Save Boyd County managed to trump Bechtel’s highly paid engineers and the dump was never built.

In 2002 a judge determined that the Nebraska government unfairly hindered and delayed the building of the nuclear waste site and fined the state $146 million. The state forked over the money in 2005.

The whole saga served as the inspiration behind Susan Cragin’s 2007 book “Nuclear Nebraska: The Remarkable Story of the Little County that Couldn’t be Bought.” Now-Senator Ben Nelson wrote the foreward.

There are those in America who still hold the belief that nuclear energy may be the answer to America’s dependence on foreign oil, and in light of the catastrophe in the gulf, fossil fuels have never been under such critical fire.

It may come to be that Nebraska’s future will be as entwined with the power of the atom as its past has been.