A year and a half after the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Hurricane Sandy pounded the East Coast of the US, flooding the country’s oldest operating nuclear plant, Oyster Creek, and cutting off power to it. Unlike Fukushima, though, generators at the New Jersey plant weren’t inundated and coolant continued to flow in the reactor, which was already down for maintenance. Three other reactors in the Northeast tripped offline during the storm, but power to the sites wasn’t interrupted.
The March 2011 nuclear incident in Japan (see Physics Today, May 2011, page 18) prompted the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to order that several steps be taken to bolster the safety of US reactors in the event of natural disasters. Acting on a set of recommendations developed by its Japan Near-Term Task Force, the NRC instructed reactor operators to deploy additional generators and other equipment, both onsite...
