“nuclear plants also were not equipped to deal with historical cold weather.”
I think that’s false. If anyone thinks it’s true then they need to explain in detail why cold weather shut the nuclear plants down.
One possible scenario is steam drum level indicators on the boilers freeze, giving false signals to the control computers. This erroneous information then causes shutdowns as the control system/operators react to to the bad information.
I’ve seen this happen on systems with 6 different instruments measuring the same level in a drum.
I’ve worked may long hours keeping a power plants running during extrema cold weather taking what would be considered to be extraordinary measures. This was on plants that were supposed to be build to handle the cold.
It’s not unusual at all.
ConservativeMind posted this link upthread:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3935712/posts?page=37#37
“According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the shutdown of the nuclear reactor was caused by a disruption in a feedwater pump to the reactor, and that caused the plant to trip automatically and shut down early Monday”