Someone made an interesting point on Thom Hartman's video about Nuclear being off the grid

[Quixote1818]

Snip:

Okay...am I missing something? The issue is that the water pumps stopped working because they dropped off the grid. Don't these nuclear plants MAKE electricity? They can't "plug in" the pumps to themselves to pump in water? They have to make MORE than the pumps require...just ground the remainder? I am no engineer but maybe someone here can explain?


I am sure there is some really obvious answer here but I thought it was an interesting question. :)

[NYC_SKP]

1. Plugging into themselves would require that the turbines and generators are running...

...and I suspect that one of the first things done in an emergency is to take these offline, but I could be wrong about that.

:shrug:

Far better had they designed adequate gravity fed water reservoirs.

[Tx4obama]

2. self delete ,because I couldn't explain what I wanted to say very well. n/t

[drm604]

3. When the earthquake occurred

the reactors automatically shut down and therefore were no longer producing electricity. The diesel generators made up for that and ran the pumps until the tsunami hit and took them out.