Boy, I sure am a sporadic poster... LOL: I get motivated for preparedness in spurts!

Having read "Lights Out" and "One Second After" has left me with one of my biggest emergency fears being the threat of EMP. Especially after the interesting event a little while back with the strange "missile/plane/thing" off the coast of California.

However, one thing the two aforementioned books fail to discuss involves nuclear plants... specifically, the spent fuel storage. And how that spent fuel depends on a constant flow of cool water to keep it from blowing the heck up. I do realize that the nuclear plants have backup plans (all of which seem to depend on having electricity!)... but if an EMP fries the generators and transformers... how will they receive cold water? They won't.

I was watching "Aftermath: Population Zero". It paints a very ugly picture of what would happen if the spent fuel is not kept submerged in water. You can imagine.

So. I started researching maps of the nuclear plant site in the US. The sheer quantity makes survival seem like a bleak prospect.

I thought some of you (especially those with more experience or knowledge in the nuclear field) may have some thoughts or insights on this?

Aside from having and being able to get to an isolated place somewhere in the world, what protection is there from this?

I would hope that the reactor cooling systen in a nuclear power plant would be designed to survive an EMP event.
Pumps can be driven by diesel engines, which can be started by compresed air, or by hand in small sizes.
Basic electrical equipment can be hardened/protected against EMP, the military do this, and I would hope that this is true of nuclear power plants also.
I would still prefer not to live downwind of one though !

adam2,

From what I've read, the plants are hardened against emp... but they are still part of the main electrical grid (not sure about my terminology here). So if the "main grid" or whatever is not working, then how would the plants draw power (even if their systems were still functional)?

The plants should be self sufficient in terms of electrical power generation (i.e., they use what electricity they generate first to run the plant then put the rest on the grid. Second, when the rods go in if you loose control, the plant shuts down and cools down. This is a feature of Pressurized water reactors which are what the US uses. Chernobyl was a graphite moderated reactor, rods in mean more heat which means big molten pile.

Big take away, don't worry about the nuc plants.

Regards,
Bill

"One Second After" is grim reading. Made me think I should add cyanide to my survival kit.

Yep,if they lose power gravity drops the rods and the reactor shuts down -- I think the term is Scram.

EMP is very difficult to achieve. I have no concern about EMP being employed against the US by anybody but the Russians and the Chinese. And I don't think they're likely to nuke us.

Getting to an isolated place in the world is the last thing I'd do in whatever global catastrophe is in the national hysteria for 15 minutes. I'm hunkering down right here in town with all my neighbors and my CERT team and firefighters that we're associated with. If the disaster strikes here (I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area), here is where the aid will come.

> the strange "missile/plane/thing" off the coast of California

was identified, by the way. It's some scheduled flight that happens at that same time every day.

Exactly. It's the emergency break for the reactor, so long as gravity works the failsafes will work unless something horribly, horrible wrong has happened at the mechanical level and then was ignored. More so than nuke plants, I'd be worried about the tens of thousands of chemical works around the country.

I agree i have seen more Chemical, Metal An Fuel Plants or w.e Explode and such. They show atleast like 3-4 Places on TV in them Wildest or Most amazing shows. There is a metal works that delt with explosive metals that blew, a Place that made Some kinda fuel for THe shuttles that blew up, a Propane? place that blew up, And there was some kinda spill that set fire to a town I think the video of a cop backing away at top speed from the flames as the fumes set fire is always shown from that.

"Lights Out" and "One Second After" both make a lot of unwarranted assumptions about an EMP. They assume it works, while it was observed in some cases it was not observed in other cases. Nobody, not even the experts, are sure what an EMP device would look like and they don't know how to employ it if they had one.

The effect is not a sure thing. Many of the references used to support a claim of a catastrophic effect are quite old. Those books claim that modern electronics are always and predictably more vulnerable. Comparing mid-50s tube electronics to CMOS they clearly are.

Comparing more recent circuit and component designs, which are designed to avoid issues with voltage surges from any source, and optical systems which are entirely immune it is far less clear that an EMP would be more an issue now than in the 60s. Some quite credible studies claim that the vast majority of observed effects on test circuits in the 70s were temporary, requiring little more than resetting systems, or requiring replacement of simple components such as fuses.

Standard assumptions like vehicles with electronic ignitions failing is not so simple. Some tests on individual vehicles show they fail. Others not. As far as I can tell nobody has made a systematic study.

The doubt adds its own dynamic. Not knowing how effective, or ineffective any attack, an attack nobody knows how to do, an attack that has never been tried, may be makes it a high risk strategy. If you spend millions on a bomb would you use it on a potential light show and making our lights flicker?

Beware reading the survivalist literature and semi-factual alarmist sites too literally. They do not sell because they are reliable and accurate guides but rather because they are calculated to raise passions.