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A brief history of Design. Power plant designs can vary in their fuels, coolants and configurations, as WiredScience describes in the article Reactor Drawings Make Nuclear History Beautiful.

A brief history of Design

Now there are lots of discussions about the construction of new power plants worldwide, due its environmental influence over nature, but we want to focus on their design that sometimes resemble a dystopic urban landscape or the massive mobile robotic structures projects designed by the avant-garde architects from the 60s and 70s. It is often claimed that nuclear stations are inflexible in their output. Whilst it may have been true for certain reactors, this is not longer true of at least some modern designs, as we can see e.g. in France, where the French government decided in 1974, just after the first oil shock, to greatly expand the country’s nuclear power capacity.

We can also read in The History of Nuclear Energy: Nuclear powerplants generate electricity like any other steam-electric powerplant. How the nuclear emergency unfolded. How the nuclear emergency unfolded. The Crippled Japanese Nuclear Reactors - Interactive Feature. How to Cool a Nuclear Reactor. The 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan is causing problems for at least one of its fleet of nuclear reactors—and authorities have shut down 10 of the country's 55 units.

How to Cool a Nuclear Reactor

Tokyo Electric Power confirmed that pressure had been rising inside reactor No. 1 at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the northeast coast, one of the largest nuclear power plants in the world. That means cooling water is not getting to the reactor core, causing a build up of steam inside the containment vessel.

The problem, according to Japanese media reports, is a loss of grid electricity to run the pumps that bring in cooling water. The backup diesel generators that are supposed to provide emergency power in that case are out of order, according to the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, but replacements were being taken to the plant. (Similar diesel generators were providing power to the nation's Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, which recycles spent nuclear fuel.) Evacuation Zone Around Nuclear Plant.