More thoughts around nuclear power plants.
You’re likely to find that, unless safely shutdown before the accident, most nuke plants will have scrammed by the time you get to them. Now, a scram means that a reactor either cuts the links holding control rod cores up, or in some other methods, literally fires the control rods back into the reactor. Scramming basically renders the reac core useless… For generating things, that is.
Shoreside plants use water for emergency coolant, flooding the core with it if needed to try and contain the heat. Inland plants would also feasibly use water, dropping the mains pressure greatly. The mains the Blob got into… What does the massive radiation of a possibly damaged core do to a blob? I sure as hell don’t know, but it would probably be nasty.
Now, moving on to other people talking about nuclear plant control, refueling and suchlike. I have done a little bit of research.
While it’s no longer available for free, there used to be a BWR Nuclear Simulator for the PC. While not fully covering everything in a plant, it covered the main basics, and I picked up control in about half an hour. It took me four hours of practice to have the control rod retraction pattern down, and from that point, I could run the plant from cold to 100% operation fairly easily. It helps that the plants are kinda idiot proof, popping up big lit warnings when things go past safe limits, and auto-scramming when you reach dangerous ones. Though in real life a scram is very expensive to fix, and an emergency operation, in a sim you could scram as many times needed to learn. After all, I doubt a lone survivor is going to try and run a safe shutdown of a plant when he’s the only one at the controls. Scram that reactor pool, fix the problem, bring one of the others up.
Coolant is recycled, and usually completely safe. It’s only if there’s a leak it’s dangerous, and the heavy water in the reactor is sealed.
Fuel rods. There are lots of types, but for… Ease of actually doing things with them, I propose we would use the CANDU reactor type as standard. This is a CANDU fuel rod:
They are 50 cm long, and 10 cm diameter. That would be easily handleable. As for the danger of them?
This is a fuel rod being inspected.
Yeah, I think that says enough. With a dosimeter on your body, you’d be fine, as long as you took iodine and kept an eye on the meter.
Back to the plants themselves. If you find a safely shut down plant, the chance of it having fuel in the reactor is of course, almost certain. Fuel rod stocks are not likely to be many at all. So, you’d need to find fuel rods. While you might get lucky, and stumble on a nuclear repository, it’s far more likely that you’d find fuel for your plant in… A scrammed plant. With those blobs, and if there’s zombies in the core… Well, radiation doesn’t give you superpowers, it kills living cells. Zombies will be fine. The OTHER thing it does is that long term exposure can make the exposee radioactive. Those normal green zombies shuffling around inside the plant? You better hope you have a dosimeter, or you might be getting a very high dose.
Finally. Once you’ve found the fuel, there’s a new problem. Without moderator rods, you can’t pack the fuel up tight and close, because that’s what they’re like in a core. So, transportation will either involve very heavy shields, or you’re gonna need multiple trips.
Disclaimer: I am in no way a nuclear plant engineer, or physicist, and I may have misunderstood what I’ve read, though I would hope not. If you find evidence countering what I present, please, present it!
If people are willing, and like my musings, I’ll present thoughts on the other plant types mentioned, Solar, and Hydro, then look into power and the Grid. If someone would remind me of what year this is set in, I will also present a few other types of powerplant that could be used, some small-scale, others not so much.
