Reply #305: Offsite power and onsite (emergency) power

[divvy]

I think that all commercial nuclear plants can survive a loss of offsite power. It is a very serious condition to lose offsite power, but emergency generators can operate emergency core and suppression pool cooling systems. These diesels could be reasonably expected to function reliably for weeks, if not months... provided diesel fuel was trucked in. There was no good reason for the spent fuel pools in Japan to end up in this condition. All nuclear plants I know of have diesel fire pumps. All they had to do was sometime in the first day or two dump a fire hose in the pool and turn it on... it would have kept the pools full. At the same time, I have always felt that onsite storage of large quantities if spent fuel is risky... perhaps more so at BWR's. As far as surviving a total loss of offsite power and all site emergency generators, I think almost all commercial plants would have core damage, including PWRs. There are battery and steam powered systems that would keep the reactor safe for a few hours, but after that batteries die and suppression pools overheat. In my opinion, there is nothing about the failures in Japan that are unique to Mark I, BWR 3/4 units. If they are obsolete because they couldn't handle a long term loss of all AC power, then so is every nuclear power station in the world... though I admit I don't know much about he Canadian or Russian designs. I doubt they would be better off, though. As far as evacuating a nuclear power plant, there is no currently operating nuclear plant that would not eventually suffer a core meltdown if the operating crew walked away from it (or otherwise couldn't do its job)