Recovery of off-site power in nuclear power plants

A serious accident considered at nuclear power plants is station blackout, which is loss of all alternating-current (ac) power to the plant. If power is not restored, core cooling is eventually lost and meltdown results. Recovery of off-site power can prevent core meltdown. In the past, recovery has been quantified with either simple approximations or with specialized computer codes. Mathematica is a user-friendly, commercially available computer code that performs sophisticated mathematical calculations on a personal computer. This paper summarizes the application of Mathematica for the calculation of recovery and shows how recovery can be quickly and accurately quantified and plotted parametrically using this software. The result of this work is a tool that is readily available to all risk analysts for accurate calculation of recovery