DCPD158 said:
aggiehawg said:
SwigAg11 said:
jabberwalkie09 said:
hunter2012 said:
Surely when the shelling has gotten close they powered down or greatly restrained the plant. Having it running full bore in the physical middle of a battle does not seem smart. People keep saying things the Russians won't do, but that appears to be just another line that they're willing to cross to save face in terms of looking like the old bully Russia.
Nuclear power plants can't just shutdown immediately from what I know. I'm hoping a nuke engineer could fill in the blanks a bit more here.
Nuke engineer here. Nuclear plants can do an emergency shutdown called a SCRAM. However, there is still a lot of residual heat that still needs to be removed from the reactor for a long time. The danger is if the Russians damage the systems that handle the prolonged core cooling. That's what happened at ***ushima, they lost long term heat removal, and then a steam blowoff had to occur which is what you saw from the videos of the roofs popping off. Chernobyl was a steam explosion stemming from a variety of reasons.
What if the water is cut off from the cooling operations?
BOOM! I would think
Mostly likely not at first. Instead, you would probably have a Three Mile Island event first where the reactor fuel starts melting and settling in the bottom of pressure vessel.
At worst, they start bleeding steam pressure into the main containment building which acts as a large buffer to contain radioactive material. If it keeps up, however, I would eventually be concerned with radiation release to nature.