26 Nuclear Power Plants In Hurricane Sandy's Path

pigrabbitbear writes "Hurricane Sandy is about to ruin a bunch of people's Mondays. In New York City alone, the storm has already shut down public transportation, forced tens of thousands to relocate to higher ground and compelled even more office jockeys to work from home. (Okay, that last part might not be so bad, especially for the folks that don't actually have to work at all.) But if it knocks out power to any of the 26 nuclear power plants that lie directly in its path, the frankenstorm of the century will ruin Tuesday, too. Heck, a nuclear meltdown would be a much bigger problem."

Comments

Around here

[camperdave]

Around here, the nuclear power plants are designed to survive a 747 flying into them. I'm sure a little bit of a breeze isn't going to be any trouble

Re:Around here

[Anonymous Coward]

Like Fukushima, it isn't the breeze that's the problem. It's the storm surge.

Re:Around here

[suutar]

and leaving the backup generators in an insufficiently drained basement. And not being able to get extra generators in because of hilly terrain and road damage.

Re:Took you long enough, Slashdot

[greg_barton]

It hasn't. /. editors have had an anti-nuke bias for years.

Storm of the century??

[Billly Gates]

It is a cat 1 storm. Yawn.

Give me a break

[samantha]

A) Sandy has average winds less that 80 mph so the major danger is heavy rainfall (or perhaps snow) only.
B) "Nuclear meltdown" is largely a media myth. Real nuclear plants do not melt down in the way the popular mythology claims.
C) Real nuclear plant are designed to push in the control rods if anything like a power drop happens.

So stop with the 70s anti-nuclear FUD.

Re:Give me a break

[captaindomon]

You should probably do some research on Fukushima. The control rods did drop when the earthquake hit, as part of the emergency shutdown, the chain reaction did stop as designed, and there was enough residual heat from fission by-products that the entire fuel assembly melted anyway.

Interesting Fact

[Anonymous Coward]

The title is an interesting fact (previously unknown to me), but the article has no real point. It has a lot of fearful speech and reads like religious propaganda. If it were calling for increased preparedness, then that would be one thing. It doesn't do that, though -- it's just appears to sound scary by using scary bullet points.

TL;DR: Crap article.

Re:Took you long enough, Slashdot

[mooingyak]

Most densely populated area of the world? Typical Yank! Look at a map and see how the [population density is around places like Beijing and New Delhi. Just because they are not milky white like you does not make them irrelevant you ignorant imbecile!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing (pop density 1200/sq km or 3000/sq m)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_delhi (pop density 5854/sq km or 15,164/sq m)

vs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_york_city (pop density 10,518/sq km or 27,243/sq m)

So Beijing and New Delhi don't come close to NYC for density.

Re:Massively overbuilt, most reliable buildings.

[dgatwood]

Because power plants are designed to generate a lot of power, and most are not designed to be able to generate a small amount of power. When the mains goes offline, they can't dump the power anywhere, and without that load to keep the generator speed regulated, the turbines would spin up to an unsafe speed and would damage themselves, so they have to shut down the reactor. Thus, if the plant is an older design that requires active safety systems after a SCRAM, they have to provide a backup power source to power those safety systems.

Re:Massively overbuilt, most reliable buildings.

[fm6]

I'm sorry, where are these magic plants that don't need backup power? I did some googling and couldn't find any.

Re:Massively overbuilt, most reliable buildings.

[QuantumRiff]

Then I guess I would be glad they were built several DECADES after the ones in Japan. I also guess I would be glad that the generators are located above the floodplain. Then, I would be glad that the spent fuel isn't stored with the reactor, but in another building. Lastly, I think I would be glad that after Fukishama, enough attention has probably been paid to the very, very, very unlikely event that they could probably get emergency generators air-lifted in by the US military in a big hurry, if they were required.

Re:Isn't this just a recycled press release

[Creepy]

That was a massive earthquake and tsunami. I doubt a hurricane will do much to a nuclear power plant that was built to withstand hurricanes (and I believe all coastal ones NEED to be).

That said, if they'd just built molten salt reactors like the chief nuclear scientist at Oak Ridge (Alvin Weinberg) suggested to Nixon only to get canned by him, we wouldn't be in this predicament because they don't melt down. Really it was all about jobs in California and nuclear weapons (LWRs are better for making bombs), but our needs our different now than they were in the 1970s.

Re:Took you long enough, Slashdot

[CastrTroy]

Actually, if we're talking 10 mile radius vs 50 mile radius, then it' actually a lot less than 1/5 the size. A 10 mile radius is an area 314 square miles, whereas a 50 mile radius is 7850 square miles. So a 10 mile radius is really only 4%, or 1/25th the size of the 50 mile zone.