They really should get that spent fuel off site and someplace else. You could cool spent fuel with flowing water, as in the open ocean or a river. Not ideal, but better than letting it melt.

The reactor would require pumps for cooling, and there wouldn’t be time to remove the fuel. You could have those pumps powered directly by a diesel or a turbine. You would want electricity to monitor everything.

There were several problems that complicated things at Fukishimo. The spent fuel pools went dry, which removed the water that was blocking the radiation. That made the radiation levels at the top of the pools too high for human exposure. The radiation isn’t line of sight, it scatters off of thing, even air, so the whole area couldn’t be approached.

If they had simply installed piping to allow water to be remotely added to the pools, that would have prevented them from going dry. Once they went dry, the fuel got hot enough for the zirconium to catch on fire and that released the fission products in the spent fuel.

Daedalus2u, a current generation nuke plant shut down to that level and spent fuel pools still require cooling, right? So this would rely on the power generation system (diesel or whatever) to be shielded and possibly to even be able to be knocked off line and repaired very quickly. (I have a feeling they would do better at the first part and ignore the second part)

Also, I assume none of this is in place now anywhere.

As long as the power lines to the power plant were severed, it might be shielded well enough for diesel generators inside it to continue to operate.

The problem is that some very large transformers have a very long lead time (years), and require the products of large factories (steel sheet of specific composition, copper wire, kapton insulation, potting resins). These large factories in turn require large transformers to supply them with power.

There was a recent (last year or so) decision that required emergency power to do the spent fuel cooling to last for 2 years and the reason cited was a Carrington-type event. I remember suggesting that the cheapest solution would likely be putting everything into dry storage instead of a cooling pool.

I mean, if there’s a massive, Constitution-defying spying program, that needs to be addressed. But Snowden is definitely an oathbreaker, possibly was intending to break that oath before he even made it, and has rather depressing credentials. He did not plan his escape particularly well, which at least argues against him having been recruited by anybody, or at least anybody competent. (Which is something to be relieved about, I guess.) I’m not too keen on the fact that he abandoned his girlfriend either. And now this…. If he believes this, then he is a grade A kook seriously overinterpreting what he saw at his job.

I mean, this isn’t just suggesting the possibility of a Carrington Event for which we are underprepared. No, this is suggesting a specific event, predicted 14 years ago . . . . . . that would not merely disrupt our economy but actually kill most of us. Two months to extinction.

Sorry, that part is just ridiculous. A really really really powerful geomagnetic storm can cripple our power grid and damage our telecommunications networks; this would be devastating to our civilization, but it wouldn’t be an extinction event. Assuming the grid can’t be repaired within a few months, you’d start seeing starvation related deaths, heat related deaths, cold related deaths. But you wouldn’t be seeing a single death due to the solar flare itself, because they are basically harmless to living tissue on Earth. OK, maybe in the higher latitudes a few more people might get cancer. That’s about it. It’s not like the Sun’s going to go nova.

So, there is a scenario where a nuke plant shuts partway down just making enough electricity to cool itself, or goes all the way down and uses generators to run the cooling .Then the plasma strikes. This shuts down all the electrical circuitry at the power plant. This means all sensors, control servos, and the cooling system. So the plant heats up and melts down, goes critical, and experiences hydrogen and/or fission-related explosions.

And this happens in all the nuclear power plants in the whole world all at once!!!!!

This is going to make a great movie.

One of the big issues is that grid interconnections create a very long effective antenna. The eastern US grid interconnection (one of three major grid systems in the US) covers from Maine west to Montana and south to Miami. We’re talking 2000 km of antenna. The ~1000 km line between James Bay and Montreal (at particularly susceptible latitudes, and over a terrain of particularly susceptible rock) was enough to cause the March 1989 storm (the biggest of the satellite era, estimated to be about 1/3 the strength of the Carrington event) to bring down the electricity network for the entire province of Quebec. But since then Hydro Quebec has taken steps to harden their transformers, as well as capacitive coupling to ground in order to mitigate the effects of geomagnetically induced currents. Most US operators have not been taking such measures.

I don’t know about Manning, but the reporting I’ve seen on the Snowden case says that he was already planning to do a document dump of some kind when he took the job with Booz Allen, and allegedly was in contact with Glenn Greenwald (the Grauniad reporter/commentator who broke the story) before starting the job. Which plans he concealed from his prospective employer. Said employer was under contract to the NSA in order to help run a program which, Snowden alleges, was designed to spy on US citizens in the United States without probable cause. Greenwald is a US citizen residing in Brazil, so the laws restricting the collection of US domestic communications traffic without probable cause do not apply to communications between Snowden and Greenwald. (US law seems to be anything goes WRT international communications, and Greenwald’s history as a national security gadfly would make him a person of interest to the watchers.) So take your pick: (1) Booz Allen should have known what Snowden was up to, but didn’t; (2) they knew what he was up to, and they let him do it anyway (for reasons which may be honorable or otherwise), or (3) Snowden is a sociopathic liar, and should have been weeded out on those grounds. In cases (1) and (3), I would have expected somebody to publicly either fall on his sword or be fired, even if it was a low-level HR flunky, just for the sake of optics. I may be incorrect in assuming that Booz Allen has any aptitude at addressing optics problems.