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

Storm of the century??

[Billly Gates]

It is a cat 1 storm. Yawn.

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: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.

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.