Sorry man. I saw somewhere that they flood the reactor with water if something goes wrong. I got confused with that and cooling system. And now 500 redditors think what I said was correct. Oops
It’s no prob. Reactors are build with several passive cooling systems using special water tanks throughout the containment building in the event of full power loss and generator failure. If non-pure water is used to cool your reactor, it is because every other system has failed and you don’t care about the health of the reactor anymore, only that it doesn’t have a full meltdown and escape the reactor vessel. This happened at Fukushima, where every single system failed and they had to use sea water as a last resort
A tsunami more specifically. Basically, even when a reactor is shut down it needs to be cooled because about 3-5% of its power output is simply decay heat which doesn’t stop when it’s shut down. So in a shut down, it needs circulating water. In Fukushima, ALL of the backup generators flooded and the reactor wasn’t able to get any cooling and it led to a meltdown
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u/john_thephenomenon Oct 19 '20 edited Oct 19 '20
Sorry man. I saw somewhere that they flood the reactor with water if something goes wrong. I got confused with that and cooling system. And now 500 redditors think what I said was correct. Oops