Eli5: Why do nuclear plants need external power? Couldn’t they just siphon off some of the power the plant makes to accomplish the same tasks (like an alternator running the electrical components in a car)?
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They are designed to generate massive amounts of power, not very small amounts like their systems use. If you would like to use the alternator analogy, it would be like an alternator being so massive that the engine has to run at full throttle to make power. Anything less and it doesn’t make the power needed to run other things. Since the grid is designed to be stable, they don’t build any steam redundancy into the power generation system. Those are just more components to fail/leak in an already hazardous environment.
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