Nuclear Reactors and the end of the world

[raketenjagdpanzer]

The situation in Japan got me thinking:

A few years ago, those "World Without People" shows were popular (I think they ran 'em on both History Channel and Discovery Science). One thing that the one on DSC:SCI touched on was the notion that at most of the nuclear power plants throughout the US, prior to being shipped to long-term storage, nuclear waste material ("Spent" fuel, they implied), said materials were kept in cooling pools and that like the reactor, water was circulated over the waste material to keep it cool.

Eventually, as the unattended plants fall into low-power states (nobody "out there" using electricity, and eventually grids will fail which to sensors at the power plants means the lights are switched off), the reactors automatically reduce their output, rods are lowered into place, etc.

Meanwhile at the on-site short term storage facilities, generators kick on to keep the water circulated, but soon these generators will run out of fuel. This means the water covering the spent fuel will boil off (or at least evaporate much quicker), and the air-exposed fuel would combust. At every plant that has these types of facilities, you'd have a mini-Chernobyl type disaster happening. Worse, if these facilities were near ground zero on TDM, while post-strike sites without the facilities nearby would be radioactive for years, sites that also had nuke plants nearby would be hazardous for millenia, with fallout far worse than what the bombs kicked up spread across the globe: every industrialized nation suffered some hits, so this type of contamination would be added into the already terrible effects of fallout.

Food for thought.