Hey everyone, thanks for taking the time to take a look at this. So my question today is about nuclear plants, hydro electric and just power plants in general. I'm looking for anything realistic and if any of you are gurus please science me into the ground with your answers! Alright lets assume, for whatever reason, that no one shows up to our power facilities and the outgoing shift just up and leaves. What would happen? I'm really interested in nuclear plants because I know they have some automation to them but, I haven't been able to figure out how much. Lets just go out on a limb and say the whole male workforce died out mysteriously over night. A mega virus or something that just kills men and does it in like 2 hours. How long could our power grid last before it just craps itself or the plants auto-shutdown (assuming they even would)? Are we talking hours, days, weeks, a month? Are we looking at meltdowns and burned out turbines or will other components go first?
I'd think the majority of problems would be social. If half of the population simply dropped dead, the world order would collapse completely. People will stop working for their retirement and forage to feed themselves for the next 24 hours, reverting to gang-like social structures for protection from other forages. As for nuclear power plants: in less than 24 hours they will shut themselves down. They automatically detect how much power is being used and shut down reactors as they stop being needed. Then nothing will happen for a few weeks. Fuel rods are kept in huge tanks of water, to keep them cool. Without people, that water will eventually boil away. When that happens, you'll have a catastrophic meltdown which will irradiate miles around it. Dams will work for years, they are fairly simple and very heavily automated. After about a year, mussels and leaves will block some pipes and cause the generators to stop. Of course, the grid is fairly fragile and the power it produces will have nowhere to go.
I suspect nuclear reactors would Scram themselves well before the water boiled away so not a lot would happen other than reactor shut down.
The question is answered exhaustively here also: When the zombies take over, how long 'til the electricity fails?
Sorry for the late reply, hope it will be of some help. Short answer: Depends on design. Long answer: Most, lacking any other failures, will successfully become shut down, but may suffer core damage in the process. This does not mean fission product release. All of the ones I've worked on would have been fine. The smaller the reactor, or the lower the power history (how high of power it was operated at recently - unfortunately most civilian plants operate at 95-100% steadily.) Nuclear power plants themselves will last from a few days to a couple weeks of their own accord with no issues whatsoever. On top of this, they have Emergency Diesel Generators, with enough fuel to last a few more weeks. These provide emergency cooling power. Smaller plants don't need active cooling and can be perfectly fine with passive cooling. (Read: no problems whatsoever). In the end, the way things will play out is that most of them will either scram themselves out or shut down more slowly. You might get a few meltdowns, but even in this event, without a combo tsunami-earthquake, their containments will keep the population safe from radiation. Provided that the workers are still alive, most would move their families to the nuclear reactor plant in the event of massive disaster. I know I would. You could run the reactor on low power and sustain a small society for quite some time. Plenty of water, plenty of guarded land, plenty of guns, thorough security systems (you'd need a military force withe helicopters and tanks to take one of these places over, at least in America), and lots of smart people who can figure out agriculture in short order. Very little need for gasoline. What's more, first-generation survivors would be willing to trade for electricity, making it an economic powerhouse of a place, and the workers are absolutely necessary to the operation, as it takes years of constant training and education to sustain one of these things. Dang, now I want to write a post apolocalyptic story with nuclear power plants as seats of power fighting against wasteland warlords.
