The nuclear plant's turbines were literally on the "roof" of the reactor complex completely in the open. Nuclear regulations only require the reactor itself to be enclosed and protected.
No shit the turbines froze over. They ignored reports advising them to fully enclose the plant for years.
The feed water system for cooling water froze, and the plant had to be shutdown.
This is what happens when you don't plan your essential services to react to predictable extreme events.
That a nuclear plant can theoretically handle this sort of thing quite easily means nothing if you don't actually implement the systems to do so.
> STPNOC said in an event report filed with NRC that the unit tripped at 5:26 am
The feed water system has nothing to do with the turbines, and the plant shut down as a safety precaution.
I was perhaps a bit too hasty in my initial statement, clearly this reactor tripped because of the cold. I'm not an expert but given a nuclear power plant produces literally gigawatts of low grade waste heat it feels like that should have been possible to work around i.e. for example by bleeding cooling water back at the intake.
But effective. If you're a politician.
No politician cares about sounding absurd if that's what his primary voters want to hear him say.
I read that multiple coal plants went offline due to weather related issues including problems with the water supply needed to operate the steam turbines and freezing of coal piles.
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063727799 has some good details including that 38% of coal generation capacity was offline during the worst of the recent freeze in Texas.
I think this all just comes back to the point made up-thread: preparing power infrastructure for bad weather is essential, and the size of the relative advantage of coal vs. other forms of generation is dominated by the improvement in availability that comes from that.
They could. Build them on a salt dome.