The panel on the Woolsley video meeting was concerned over what they seemed to think was a real danger of a very prolonged outage - not an immediate shutdown of backup systems. I believe that there were experts there. Perhaps their concern is well-motivated and reasonable - it has been echoed by some prominent scientists (e.g., Michio Kaku).
The panel stated that it costs less than $2 Billion to protect the grid - an insignificant financial incentive to hype the risk. Leaking Pen wrote: > Considering that nuclear plants in the US are designed around the idea of > EMP from nearby nuclear explosions not being able to stop them running, I > don't believe there is a problem. (From my father in law, who is a senior > reactor operator at Palo Verde, they have mechanical backups to completely > take a core down if need be. ) > > > On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 4:29 PM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I would hope that a backup system would kick in if the grid went down. >> Battery operation kept the Fukushima reactors safe for a few hours and >> had >> the diesels been functional, there might not have been such a mess. >> [...]
