[ThirdMate]

Do you, or anyone else, know what it takes to restart a nuke plant? I would imagine it is a lengthy process. These would have been emergency shutdowns, is an inspection required?
Just trying to get an idea when production will resume. With that many nukes off the grid, I doubt conventional generators can take up the slack.

Any stationary engineers out there?

[Henk]

The major problem with restarting them is if they can't do it right away (4 to 6 hrs), then they will have to wait until the xenon dead time passes. This takes about a day I think.

Xenon builds up when the reactor is shut down. It prevents the nuclear reaction from occurring. During operation, the reaction overcomes the production of xenon by "burning" it up as fast as it is produced. Once shut down, the xenon builds up and there is not enough reactivity ("ooomph") in the core to get a chain reaction started again.

Here's a link describing the phenomenon.

[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