Here is another point/question that John did not raise...
It my understanding that all or most of the nuclear plants that tripped
did so because the area surrounding the power plant lost electricity.
I'm not sure if this is true for any of the non-nuclear plants.
Supposedly this is a type of safety measure. If the community
surrounding a power plant loses electricity, then traffic lights are
out, people are probably without working radios or other sources of
information, emergency response personnel are already busy. Therefore,
the thought has been that we ought to scram the reactor because if
anything should go wrong with the reactor we don't have a surrounding
community that is prepared to deal with a power-plant emergency.
On the other hand, this philosophy leads to a domino type of failure. If
the failure of one power plant takes out the power in the community
surrounding a different power plant, then that different plant will trip
because of the first failure, and this perhaps takes out power in the
community surrounding yet another plant, and so on.
On the whole, it seems to me that automatically scramming a nuclear
plant (or any power plant) when the surrounding power goes down, is
rather dumb. It should at least not be automatic. They should wait
long enough to understand what is happening and assess the situation.
It could be (as was the case in the recent
blackout) that shutting down a plant is far worse than taking the risk
of keeping it running without the benefit of local community power.
Anybody know more about this?
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Chemistry and Physics
Bluffton College
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu