Just wondering France is planning 14 new reactors what’s the safety protocol if an earth quake hits a reactor and does it do much damage to the environment around it
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Look up the Fukashima Daiichi Nuclear Reactor Incident. It was triggered because of the 2011 Sendai Earthquake and tsunami. Essentially the earth quake took out the electricity and the tsunami took out the generators. What happens if a big earthquake hits a Nuclear Reactor? In a word, Shitshow.
Depends entirely on the design of the reactor and what safety measures exist there and how strong the earthquake is and what the local natural features are like.
The biggest risk is similar to what we saw at Fukushima, where radioactive material from inside leaks out and contaminates the soil and water in the area (and that can be bad if the water flows to other places). Otherwise, reactors are built with a lot of safeguards in place now so it’s not going to like meltdown and go out of control like we saw in Chernobyl.
In general, a lot of bad things can happen. We can allow or design for them, but in the end it is always best to build the plant outside of a seismic zone.
In the example of things that *have* gone wrong, remember that power plants are machines, and machines require power. Usually, a nuclear plant powers itself which works great as long as the plant is producing power, if the plant experiences an emergency and its scuttled (no power) that can be a huge problem. So the plants will require power from an outside source in this case. Usually that power can be supplied from the power grid (other plants) but if *that* goes down you’ll have to rely on local generators. Now, if the area experiences both an earthquake but also something like a tsunami which floods/washes away the local generators then you’re triple fucked (Fukushima is an example).
My point being is that modern nuclear powerplants are really, really well engineering with multiple levels of safe guards. But even then, you don’t want to rely on a safeguard to get around a problem, better to avoid the problem in the first place. So yeah, don’t build a powerplant on a fault line.
I’m not sure about the reactors that france has planned, but there is also research going in improved nuclear reactors that A) use other fuel, such that you only need to store the radioactive waste for a couple of hundred years instead of a couple of thousand years and B) that have “passive” safeguards that prevent an dessaster like cherbobyl or Fukushima by having a plug that melts if the reactor overheats and then all the radioactive fuel is drained into a reservoir where the reaction stops instead of going “boom”.
[Here](https://youtu.be/ElulEJruhRQ) is a link to a YouTube of PBS spacetime video that explains it (if I recall the content of the video correctly)
> Just wondering France is planning 14 new reactors what’s the safety protocol if an earth quake hits a reactor
1. Try not to build your reactor where record breaking earthquakes happen. Japan is on/near a giant fault line. France is not, so French reactors don’t have to deal with huge earthquakes to begin with.
2. Ensure that your stuff doesn’t fall apart on an earthquake. Humans are pretty good at this, Asian and US West Coast engineers have a lot of experience designing stuff that doesn’t mind being shaken around. Fukushima-Daichi managed this just fine, the earthquake did not damage the plant. It, however, forced it to automatically shut down and knocked out external power for cooling pumps. It had diesel backup generators though!
3. Make sure any tsunami that comes after the earthquake doesn’t flood your diesel generators. This is where FD had an oopsie: they had an anti-tsunami wall that was undersized, and the diesel generators were in the basement. So they got fucked and the core overheated and got a bit runny. Worth to note that the Onagawa NPP, half as far from the epicenter than Fukushima but designed with a much taller tsunami wall, has weathered the earthquake and tsunami without issue.
Fukashima.
If the earthquake is large enough or close enough to damage the facility there will be a disaster. But you can build them in such a manner as to resist damage from earthquakes.
All plants have to be designed to seismic requirements.
Safety systems are designed to category 1 requirements. Which means they cannot fail.
Category 2/1 systems are designed so that they could fail, however they cannot break anything that is category 1.
Anything that is category 2 cannot become a flying object that damages other systems.
For every plant, we come up with a maximum ground shaking force. Then engineers use models to determine how much shaking every floor/wall/structure in the plant sees. Finally, the systems which are built either are tested on a shaker table or built in such a way that they can withstand the shaking.
There are full time seismic qualification engineers at every nuclear power plant which manage these requirements.
No reactor has had safety system damage due to an earthquake. Even the Fukushima reactors, they all survived the earthquakes and were capable of safe shutdown (until they were flooded….. which is a whole different qualification program).
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