Comment by Reason077
3 years ago
A nuclear power plant can't just "keep spinning without a load" - all that energy has to go somewhere! If a nuclear plant is disconnected from the grid (tripped), the nuclear reaction must be stopped (eg: by inserting control rods into the core).
Of course it can, just short the generator coils and you have a free brake. The turbine should then still have resistance and shouldn't overspeed. Or just idk, use it to pump some water in a loop or discharge through some resistors. Getting rid of power isn't that hard if you want to do it. Simplest solution would I suppose be to just have an outside radiator that brings the steam to cooling tower levels of manageability so you can throttle the turbine with just a valve.
The thing is, they don't really want to do it if they can save fuel by shutting down.
> "just short the generator coils and you have a free brake"
You'll soon end up with a burning/melted generator.
> "pump some water in a loop"
OK, but you're going to need huge pumps (1000+ MW!). Expensive.
> "or discharge through some resistors"
Again, you'll need extremely large resistors, and a way to dissipate an awful lot of heat. We're talking about a huge amount of energy here!
Pump water in a loop through a radiator to cool the braking generators and the resistor bank :P
Could try also melting some salt on the side.
sadly, my searches for "gigawatt resistor" and "gigawatt electric load" have been fruitless.
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