The Russians have just trashed the electrical power grid in Ukraine and done it in a more or less permanent way. They actually blew the generators apart this time instead of just attacking the power distribution grid. There is a wonderfully informative timeline of the the effects of war on operating nuclear reactors in Ukraine. It's worth a look and so is this: It gets going for our purposes at about the 6 minute mark.
Nuclear power station require reliable electricity in the event of reactor shutdowns. It is critical that the cooling process be maintained even when the reactor loses power. That's what killed Chernobyl and Fukushima. They lost the power and thus the ability to cool the reactors which either exploded or melted down.
2 comments:
"It's worth a look and so is this: It gets going for our purposes at about the 6 minute mark."
No link?
In the video he really starts to discuss what exactly went wrong and why at Chernobyl and it basically came down to operating the reactor well beyond normal parameters just prior to initiating a test of the 'fail=safe' switchoff from reactor turbine generators providing the power for the pumps to the kinetic energy left from the rotating turbines providing the energy to the run the pumps before the voltage drop started the emergency diesels which 'takes a minute or so to bring the EDG online to power the cooling pumps. That was the start of the catastrophe but it was also the reactor chemistry in that environment that killed the experiment and poisoned the land.
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