[BohDaThone]

You asked: "How long to restart a Nuke?" if it just "tripped off" as a safety measure, we are definitely talking hours, not days, to restart -- maybe even just a few minutes.

another thread had a report from the "North American Electric Reliability COuncil" saying that roughly 28 Gigawatts of supply went off at some point, but only 5-10 GW are off now. For comparison, a big nuke is about 1 GW -- total national supply is about 800 GW

[ChadGore]

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY June 13, 2001:"One of the concerns, obviously, is the aging power grid and the growing problem that we have in getting electricity from the power plant to the light switch. It's clear that we must upgrade and expand the power grid. If we put more connections in place, we'll go a long way towards avoiding future blackouts."

[Alas Babylon!]

The nuclear power reactors are not off, they're just not supplying power to the grid. In other words, the reactors are still up; loss of electricity elswhere shouldn't affect them. So they may spin down the generators, but the reactors should be ok.

[meyer]

You asked: "How long to restart a Nuke?" if it just "tripped off" as a safety measure, we are definitely talking hours, not days, to restart -- maybe even just a few minutes.

I don't think you're considering NRC red tape, nor the complex startup procedure that is the nature of nuclear plants. There's quite a few supercritical coal-fired plants that can't be restarted for nearly a day after a forced shutdown at full load. I can almost guarantee that, short of an act of congress or Presidential intervention, you won't see any of those nukes on line for at least 24 hours, and probably more like 48 hours. In fact, I don't think an act of congress would help all that much since these plants have to be looked over rather carefully before restarting. Its prudent.