[pjc50]

I'm not an expert, but there's an interesting discussion on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Can-an-American-nuclear-power-plant-bl...

The key factors seem to be:

1) the plant must be capable of running as an island. It seems not all of them are; I suspect the problem is the plant consuming a variable amount of self-power e.g. 1MW being connected to a 100MW generator results in a very unstable system.

2) whatever safety event causes the problem must not trip at the generators themselves but disconnect the plant cleanly from the grid. Since these events are by definition exceptional, this may be very hard to avoid.

> with abundant nuclear + hydro you could easily over-produce a bit

Both of these are exorbitantly expensive to build, and hydro requires specific geology.

[snowwindwaves]

Most of the plants I've worked on can't island themselves by design. It costs more to do it and sometimes requires additional or more expensive equipment, more attention to details in the design, and there is no point for a lot of generators that just get paid for MWh and they probably aren't going to generate many MWh islanded over the life time of the plant. Some generators even get paid for the energy they would have generated if the grid is down.

How many people have a manual transmission car just so they can pop the clutch if the batter is dead.