This got me thinking, imagine what will happen when people start dying en mass from the Wuhan shot. How will they safely shut down all the nuclear power plants? Imagine the catastrophic situation when the plants all go into melt down. Chernobyl and Three mile island multiplied many times over.
If systems are operating, the plant will continue until some critical error is reached and it tries to scram. If one operator is left they can initiate emergency shutdown and take it offline.
That's not a pretty situation, it still leaves fuel rods laying around - but at least the plant shouldn't explode. Coal plants will just run until the coal feed stops and the boilers don't.
Modern reactors have dead man fail safes. Should they reach danger they'll automatically scram unless overridden or physically prevented from doing so.
I'm fuzzy on the "modern" definition. Many plants were built in the 60s and 70s.
Most anything built post 70s.
Edit: that's not to say anything before that won't. It's just that I'm sure anything more modern does.
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