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A comment on Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest. Parent comment

Re:Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe'... by redwall_hp on Thursday March 03, 2022 @10:22PM (#30550303)
Usually they have fail safes that will more or less immediately shut them down. On any reactor designed in the last 50 years, they pretty much default to a safe state, as they require power to keep the failsafes open.

Starting back up after is the slow part.

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Re:Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe'... by necheffa on Thursday March 03, 2022 @10:49PM (#30550485)
The one snag is that even with the reactor shut down (just drop all the control rods in) you still have to deal with the decay heat.

Which, in the case of a controlled manual shut down shouldn't be a problem.

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Re:Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe'... by PeterisP on Friday March 04, 2022 @02:09AM (#30551611)
It's not a problem if you can continue to run the cooling system for quite some time. If you bomb the plant or its connections to the outside, that might be a problem - just as in Fukushima, where a key cause of the disaster was that the cooling system could not be properly powered when required.
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Re:Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe'... by eru on Friday March 04, 2022 @12:29AM (#30551021)
No clue how old the Ukrainian reactor (and its design) is. Perhaps more than 50 years?
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