![]() These reactors need to be cooled for years, honestly, I'm hearing.īRUMFIEL. I mean, this is why the IAEA continues to describe the situation at the plant as precarious. What happens if the electricity goes out again? We might even say when it goes out again, given that it is a war zone.īRUMFIEL: Yeah, exactly. So now it is in the process of cooling down like all the others. And they brought that final reactor offline. And I think they really saw an opportunity here to shut down that last reactor safely while they were connected to external electricity. So on Sunday, they got power restored to the plant from the grid. They've had trouble with the staff in the nearby town of Enerhodar, where they've had power and water and sewage problems. On top of that, you have staffing issues. And they get damaged the longer island mode goes on. The turbines and pumps and things on these reactors are designed to operate at much higher power outputs. But the problem is island mode can only work for so long. I mean, now it's kind of the opposite question because it seems like that's pretty essential to safety. But then, why switch it off now?īRUMFIEL: Right. Basically, this is a cool trick where they can use the reactor at very low power to keep the lights on at the plant and keep water moving through its core and all the other cores as well. So what they did was they took one of the reactors and they started something called island mode. ![]() Shelling kept knocking out power lines repeatedly throughout August and early September. And so they needed water moving through them and they kept losing power to the site. These reactors still had warm cores, still had nuclear reactions going on, heating water in the cores. But of course, they had the same problem. Why did the Ukrainians not shut this reactor down before now?īRUMFIEL: Well, they actually did shut down several other reactors at the site. INSKEEP: And of course, the continued worry is there about some kind of shell landing in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, something going terribly wrong, which does raise a question. And so even in this moment, although everything's switched off, there is still a need to keep water circulating through the reactors. You have to keep water moving through the cores to keep everything cool. So these reactor cores stay hot even after they're turned off. And it's kind of like cooking with charcoal. Nuclear reactors use heat to make electricity. And you sort of switch it off so it can't produce electricity anymore and take it off the grid.īRUMFIEL: Not exactly. INSKEEP: What does it mean to power down a reactor?īRUMFIEL: Well, basically, what it means is that you put in the control rods. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel has been following this story. The plant's Ukrainian operators now say they have powered down the last working reactor. ![]() You may recall Russian troops occupy it and that fighting continues nearby. We're also following developments of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine.
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