Read what happened witht he alarms in the control room during the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant fire. It was as close to headless chickens as you ever want to see. A manager finally oredered the operators to ignore all the alarms and only work to keep the cooling pumps running. I bet the alarms at Fukushima caused the same confusion, even though they had been tested to the nth degree.The notion of people running round like headless chickens after a power outage, as suggested earlier, does not happen on systems that have been programmed to correctly recover, or to enter "safe state" from power outages.
http://www.ccnr.org/browns_ferry.html#pr"Control board indicating lights were randomly glowing brightly, dimming, and going out; numerous alarms occurring; and smoke coming from beneath panel 9-3, which is the control panel for the emergency core cooling system (ECCS). The operator shut down equipment that he determined was not needed, only to have them restart again."
The flashing lights, alarms, smoke and continual restarting of the ECCS pumps went on for a full ten minutes before the reactor operators began to wonder whether it might be prudent to shut down the reactors.
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