Some additional perspective on the size of the problem.

A typical house faucet moves 2.5 gallons per minute. A firetruck can pump around 1,500 gallons per minute. One of the pumps used in a BWR can move over 100,000 gallons per minute.

That means that it would take a whole lot of firetrucks to equal just one of the normal pumps.

Another way to look at it. The electrical generating capacity of unit #1 is around 460MW. The actual thermal capacity is much higher due to inefficiencies in converting heat to electricity. The notional thermal capacity of a shut down reactor is approx. 5% of operational load. Ignoring the inefficiencies that makes the shut down reactor core the equivalent of at least a 23MW heater that needs to be kept cool. I can't recall the loss rates for steam turbines and generators at the moment but I would suspect we could easily double that to 43MW and still be low. Multiply by 3.4 to get rough BTUs.

That is a lot of heat to transfer.

- Eric
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You are never beaten until you admit it. - - General George S. Patton