Great Plains (IA KS ND NE MO SD)

"OMAHA, Neb. -- A Nebraska environmental group wants federal regulators to keep the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant shut down because it would be inundated by floodwaters in the unlikely event of a dam failing upstream."

"The Clean Nebraska group said Wednesday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's own assessment of the flood threat at the plant about 20 miles north of Omaha predicts all major equipment at Fort Calhoun would be flooded if the Oahe dam on the Missouri River failed.

"ST. LOUIS -- Illinois rejected an application for a permit for a strip coal mine that opponents claimed would have threatened a tiny village's water supply and various animals in a nearby wildlife area."

"A byproduct of the ongoing heat wave, increased smog, may ultimately bring more and longer-lasting annoyance than the heat itself. The heat wave will eventually break, but Wichita’s smog reports probably already have been damaged to the extent of triggering some mandatory -- and potentially costly and inconvenient -- pollution controls like those in other big cities."

Politicians touted the use of tax credits to clean up the long-abandoned Carondelet Coke brownfields site site in St. Louis and turn it into an industrial park. But corner-cutting and lax oversight meant companies would benefit and taxpayers would get a raw deal, an investigation shows.

"STUART, Neb. -- Stepping carefully through a 12-foot-deep canyon gouged into the sandy soil of their family ranch by a long-gone storm, Kurt and Laura Meusch ask a Shakespearean question: What's in a name?"

"The historic Texas drought caused the Ogallala Aquifer to experience its largest decline in 25 years across a large swath of the Texas Panhandle, new numbers from a water district show."

"Oil drilling has sparked a frenzied prosperity in Jeff Keller's formerly quiet corner of western North Dakota in recent years, bringing an infusion of jobs and reviving moribund local businesses. But Keller, a natural resource manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, has seen a more ominous effect of the boom, too: Oil companies are spilling and dumping drilling waste onto the region's land and into its waterways with increasing regularity."