Feel free to discuss my idea about rebooting the nuclear power plant

Average Joe cannot repair his toaster, so unless the maintenance crew left a "Nuclear Power Plants for Dummies" right at the site this is going to be really tough.

The Wikipedia article you linked says "The design is intended to passively remove heat for 72 hours, after which its gravity drain water tank must be topped up for as long as cooling is required." Meaning that after the 72 hours it starts melting and that getting it back in action even if you avoid damage requires pumping lots of water. (Or hacking the security system, but that did not work so well in Chernobyl...)

Most nuclear power plants have diesel backup generators to supply emergency power to the cooling pumps in a crisis situation. In an apocalyptic situation, they would probably have been triggered and ran continually until the fuel was exhausted, granting a few hours for a more graceful automated shutdown. Assuming you don't have a radioactive mess from the cooling pools, it is probably more useful to salvage the generator sets and make biodiesel to run them.

Somehow, after reading the Westinghouse promo-material, my first opinion of proper action is to flee in a direction up the prevailing winds... The main goal seems to have been cutting costs and while it has many ideas that seem good to me, the simplification also meant that no test plant was built and that reduced redundancies and safety classes were used.

I would recommend reading the 1977 novel Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which has a major plot thread about keeping a nuclear power plant working after a disaster (a cometary impact in this case).

A completely different question, quite aside from "why wouldn't a simple self-built wind-/watermill suffice": Why would having electricity be "a huge bonus for Joe"? What would he do with it? About the only really useful thing I could think about would be running a freezer, and there are other ways to preserving food.

The cost for reactor design was done by the US Navy, hence that reactor design you talk about @Thucydides isn't optimal. Not sure if anyone else has birthed a reactor design that isn't a copy or based on the original US reactors.

Wouldn't the biggest issue be the breeder reactor, so it isn't one but two reactors to keep going. One is bad enough, but a fast breeder reactor is likely to require far more skill and training for safe operation or operation at all. Any industrial machine or plant would be a serious undertaking at best to impossible to operate without training and documentation.

@DevSolar I have an answer for you. Imagine being without electricity for a day. Now imagine being without electricity for a year. Would you vote against an idea of "lets have electricity back"?

@PavelJanicek: I don't have to imagine that, I can draw on first-hand experience -- camping, medieval re-enactment, spending two-week holidays in a lodge with oil lamps and a hand-pump. My question stands -- what would you do with electricity, aside from having a freezer available (which is useful, I admit)? Especially if put into a situation where your primary concern is farming? The few things where I would welcome power -- sawmills, for example -- are just as easily driven by wind, water, or even steam power directly (and have been, historically). All easier built and maintained.

@DevSolar lots of tools run on electricity (driller, saw ...) and for instance my house in village uses electricity for heating and for water heating. But to answer honestly: I don't know. The "huge bonus" is basically mindset right now. Even if its just warm shower, being Joe, I would go for it

@PavelJanicek: Don't feel defensive. I just want to point out that, given your scenario, there are much easier (and less risky) ways to comfort than bothering with a powerplant. You'd be surprised how many people still know how to do things "the old way". Hot shower? A tub, a fire, and a bucket. (Actually, skip the bucket and take a bath.) Heating? A hearth and a chimney. (Electricity is actually quite ineffective at heating.) Pottery, spinning, weaving, sawing, drilling, plowing, threshing? Have all been done for milennia before electricity came about. Your "modern" mindset is deceiving you.

Sounds a lot like the Maze Runner trilogy.

@devsolar Yeah, I've done without electricity for short periods too, like camping trips and power failures. I would think the advantages of electricity are obvious: electric lights, power tools, appliances, radios, heating and cooling, etc etc. Is it possible to accomplish many of these things without electricity? Of course. Did people do this for millennia? Of course. But electricity does it way better and easier. That's why so many people use electricity today and not steam or animal power.

If you want to get some idea of the technical skills required just for the electrical part of this, fire up Minecraft and load the ElectricalAge mod. It uses an actual DC circuit simulator to calculate loads, line loss, heating, etc. Gives you more respect for the people who balance our grid so we don't have to do it all individually. (Be prepared to do a lot of reading and math if you try this.)

Just curious: Why is part of the premise of your question that Joe knows Windows and Linux but "only real basics" of Mac OS? If the story could be made to work if Joe is a Mac OS expert, why would that be unacceptable? Is there some other element of your story that requires Joe to be ignorant of Mac OS? This seems a very strange constraint to include.

@Jay The answer is simple. I did put myself into "Joe" role.

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