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Comment by jarvist | Hacker News Reader

Strangely this piece doesn't mention nuclear power plants: with 400 or so operational nuclear power plants worldwide, that's a lot of core meltdowns.

Similarly I would imagine there would be a lot of oil in the sea, if suddenly all the oil rigs and refineries were instantly abandoned.

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The experience with Chernobyl is interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_exclusion_zone

Wouldn’t nuclear power plants simply automatically shut down with all the safety measures they have? Maybe not all of them but probably not enough to cause a global catastrophe.

In reports of the recent Earth Quakes in Japan, the news noted how their Reactors had extensive safety protocols in place.

So hopefully they would shut down safely, at least in Japan anyway!

I'm certain all the reactors will SCRAM (shut down the nuclear chain reaction), but then every large (i.e. all) power reactors need active cooling to remove the decay heat and prevent a core meltdown. (This is what happened at Fukushima - even with all the staff on site, they couldn't cope with a station 'blackout' (no external power grid) event.)

If demand were to slowly drop to zero over a year as electrical devices shut down or fail, will a nuclear plant reduce power production without human input?

These two are in my main real disaster scenarios in the case I happen to by some magic survive the extinction level event. Yes, not very encouraging.

Why? If you live right next door to one, sure maybe it'd be a concern, but the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which is larger than the effect Chernobyl caused, only has a 20 mile radius. There's only ~400 plants in the world, each of which if they went completely full Chernobyl would only affect a 20 mile radius.

Didn't the contamination extend way beyond the exclusion zone, reaching, e.g., Sweden?

Yes, and it was actively "extinguished" and covered with large amount of concrete - something we for sure can't expect happening.

> that's a lot of core meltdowns.

In (journalistic) theory. In practice, the safety systems will kick in.

And some will fail.

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