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Some Nuke Plants Still Have Y2K Bugs 154

Posted by Roblimo from the slightly-alarmist-in-tone-but-worth-reading dept.
Doug Muth writes "There is an article in Wired about 30 nuclear power plants in the U.S. that still aren't Y2K compliant. The article goes on to explain how the feds have been trying to downplay the severity of the situation, but for some reason the initials TMI seem to come to mind... "
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Some Nuke Plants Still Have Y2K Bugs More

Some Nuke Plants Still Have Y2K Bugs

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  • Surely you mean a reboot.

    Anyway, with a moderately well-designed plant, meltdowns are pretty unlikely. Gravity is Y2K-compliant (neutron absorbing control rods go down and curtail the reaction).

    --
    QDMerge [rmci.net] -- data + templates = documents.
  • please elaborate - is that an metre above the city or two miles?
  • Great, as if we don't have enough to worry about,
    they now suggest we need to watch the cooling
    towers at the nearby nulcear plant new years eve?

    With all the new years celebration how will
    we tell if the "melt down" sirens are going?

    What about the Middletown airport (HIA) that
    is close to TMI? What happens to the
    planes flying over the cooling towers?

    Maybe we should install one of those web cams
    on our roof to let everyone watch as new years
    rolls around...nah, they would probably say
    we were terrorists...

    IN all reality, I will bet that TMI is one of the safest
    nuclear plants in the world, they have to be, because,
    everyone always thinks of TMI whenever
    they mention nuclear plant safety.



  • Which means that Slashdot is about 75 miles from the one double reactor they actually mention, and about 30 miles from one that even if it is Y2k compliant, still worries me.
    The bottom line is even if they say they are Y2k compliant, and they've tested every scenario THEY can think of, generally mother nature or chaos or WHATEVER thinks of a new one.
  • I think the US had one reactor of similar design to Chernobyl.

    Windscale (the site became known as Sellafield) in Cumbria UK was caused by inadaquate instumentation of the core and an incomplete knowledge of the behaviour of irradiated graphite. (Weigner (sp?) energy was released). It was a reactor whose job was purely military.

    I think the lesson for us here is the importance of the instrumentation - they knew they had a problem but not how bad it was.
  • Yes...but why would a computer that controls the location of a motor care what time or day it is?

    The motor computer(s) may have a sequence of
    "raise this rod at time X, lower that rod at time Y" in order to accomodate changing load. Now an Y2K error reset the clock to 1900 and the motor computer figures "hey - it is 100 years and 0.003 sec till have to do this important stuff"
    And all the reduntant computers agree on that...

  • Sure - a dam or chemical factory accident may kill hundreds of thousands. But then it is over, cleaning up is trivial. Not so with plutonium, and that's why people worry so much.
  • So what you're saying is losing hundreds of thousands of lives is no problem, because the
    only thing you have to cleanup afterwords is
    a hundred thousand dead bodies. But the ten
    or so people that MIGHT be lost due to reactor
    problems and cleanup in a contained area is
    something to be worried about?

    -WW

    --
    Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
    When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
  • I submitted this about a month ago as an AP story. I guess it took a wanna-be rag like Wired to make it news?

  • It's the embedded computers actually operating things like the motors for the rods, the valves for cooling fluids, vents, things like that.

    Yes...but why would a computer that controls the location of a motor care what time or day it is? All it should care about is the position of the motor - is it up, 10% up, etc...
  • Almost got it. The positive temperature coefficient of the RMBK design caused a power spike, which flashed the coolant into steam. The resulting overpressure blew the "lid" off the reactor, exposing the 3000+ degree graphite moderator to an oxygen atmosphere -- it promptly burst into flames and the race to put out a 3k fire was on. (Hint: dropping or pouring water on it was a waste of time.)
  • People fear what they don't understand. That is plainly eveident. I Have not only been into one of these reactors but spent my years in college studying Physics. Personally I would rather have Nuclear power than coal. It is just plain cleaner. It produces less smoke.
    Also these things are very safe. When I saw a demo of the reactor I was at shut down it was a matter of 1 to 2 seconds.
    As long as gravity doesn't reverse on New years day (and since MS doesn't own it I don't think it will) we have nothing to worry about.
  • It takes under two seconds to fully insert the control rods -- that's not the same as stopping the reactor. The longest-lived delayed-neutron precursors(*) have a lifetime of around 80 seconds, which means you're going to be generating fission energy for quite some time.

    (*) Among the products of nuclear fission reactions are elements which are radiologically unstable; after they're produced they sit and bobble about for a bit and then decide "I'd be much happier if I had fewer neutrons", so they kick one out. The neutrons are called "delayed neutrons", the elements which produce them are called "precursors", and without them to take part in a reaction, we'd have to have humans with sub-millisecond reaction times to have nuclear power.
  • U.S. nuclear plants, unlike the Russian RBMK (Chernobyl-type) design, have what is called a "negative power coefficient of temperature". This means that as the temperature in the core goes up, the water boils, and the chain reaction slows down and stops because the water is needed for moderation, or slowing neutrons down. RBMK-style reactors have a "positive power coefficien of temperature", which in effect meant that as the water boiled away at Chernobyl, more neutrons were available for reactions, speeding up the reaction and creating a "supercritical" situation which exponentially got out of hand. In the U.S.:

    higher reaction rate --> higher core temperature
    higher core temperature --> water bolis
    water boils --> no moderation
    no moderation --> lower reaction rate
    lower reaction rate --> lower temperatures and reaction shuts down.

    Note that control rods, which absorb neutrons, rendering them unable to be used to continue the chain reaction, are also inserted into the core, and reactors are also required to have three (3) INDEPENDENT means of replacing the cooling water in the core once the control rods are in the core.

    In the case of a loss of on-site power, there are two (2) independent diesel generators that are required to come on-line in seven seconds, and to be able to power the site for forty-eight hours each. Also, the control rods in one type of reactor (PWR - Pressurized Water Reactor) are able to fall into the core under gravity alone in a loss of on-site power. The other kind of reactor in the U.S., BWRs (Boiling Water Reactors) use the diesel generators to drive their control rods up into the core.

    As far as installing new fuel, this is only done while the reactor is shut down in the U.S., so a failure would have to include the reactor unexpectedly going critical with the control rods in place, etc.

    TMI was a real wake-up call for the U.S. nuclear industry in terms of reactor design, safety systems, operator training, and computer modeling of accidents. The only was to run the reactors these days is literally safety first, otherwise the NRC will be on your @$$ so quickly it isn't funny. The Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any U.S. industry, and the only way that will continue is if people who operate and design the reactors continue to believe that accidents can happen if people aren't careful and attentive. Accidents will happen when the time comes that people think they can't, which is not the situation today.

    Disclaimer: I am a Nuclear Engineering senior at Penn State, and welcome all e-mail in response to this at efm110@psu.edu
  • Yea, I think I remember palisades having quite a few problems 3 or 4 years back. Wonder if they've gotten their act together.
  • So we lose power, i highly doubt that we'll have meltdowns. Unless the computers control core cooling.. i'm sure theres a guy there to shut it off by hand or something.

  • Remember the big sewage spill in California (Van Nuys?) a few weeks back? They were doing a Y2K test and experienced a power failure. Did you actually read the report or just the headline? One valve didn't reset properly. They caught it fairly quick. I got the impression that any power outage would have caused the problem. How many Y2K test plans included killing the power in the middle of the test? I would suspect that a lot of fringe problems might be uncovered if we actually do lose power during the rollover. How many of you guys have sat down with your utility company to hear what they have to say? I've sat down with the one for the company I work for. These guys have been done with all of the critical stuff for a while. It's pretty much payroll, accounting, and Windows on the desktop that's a problem at companies. This particular power company (in Kansas City, Kansas) just lost their main power plant to a coal fire. They did just fine over the hottest week in the summer. Paid through the ass for grid electricity. They tell us that peak energy in the winter is half of that in the summer and that they have tons of procedures for zero power, zero phone start-ups and manual switching of electric grid blocks. Plus, any site that needs energy mission critical (like hospitals) already has generator backup for emergencies. Their biggest concerns are twofold. 1. People automatically flipping on generators at midnight without putting a manual disconnect to the rest of the electrical system. (This would fry the nearest transformer or something like that.) 2. People going out at midnight on New Years and shooting off guns and hitting an electrical box. They say it happens every year.
    ------------------------------------------------ -------
  • i'm sure theres a guy there to shut it off by hand or something.

    Unfortunately that guy is Homer Simpson.

  • I have yet to see an article how these nuclear plants are controled. Are the steam pipes controled by computers, or by more simple and reliable means such as PLC's, relay logic, or better yet, pressure sensors and valves, with computer monitoring, etc... It seems to me that critical functions are usually controlled by very simple and reliable mechanisms. Things like payroll, etc., may be handed off to those old lines of COBOL and friends. So, where are these Y2K bugs exactly? Do we have Visual Basic controlling the core rod stock? What do we have here? Is this subject to public disclosure?
  • So i didn't pay attention in recent american history. ALthough i do take offense at the average age of readers statement. I WAS alive when this incident happened... granted i was probably only 4 at the time... ;-P
  • Too much information?

    The poster probably means "Three Mile Island".

  • The article mentions that some of the remaining plants will have to shut down to finish their remaining remediation work. This suggests the possibility that it might not be a good thing to leave these plants running without the fixes in place.

    Of course we know that no one would even dream of running a nuke plant in an unsafe manner.

  • I think this could be a serious issue. Because the way technology is moving these days with computers doing most of the work that at one time humans had to do. Who knows what computers are controling at these plants? Whats if a computer is controling the core of the reactor? I think we might have a serious accident when Y2K comes. Also there will be many people with out power when Y2K comes. This is a concern because it will be in the middle on winter, people with out power will be in a serious situation. I think that its easy for some people to huff this off as "Whats the big deal?" but it would be a big deal in the middle of winter. But think about it..its in the middle of august, why would you care if your power went out? Also most people don't get heat/anything else from a nuclear power plant (I know I don't). But I think that we will see many people with no heat/utils this winter or a nuclear meltdown, if these plants don't get Y2K under control.
  • As I've said before when appropriate, Y2K doesn't really affect the critical part of the plant--the core. That's a self-contained unit with hard-wired controls for activation/deactivation (push a button and the rods go up or down to change the neutron flux). The systems that will be affected are the external systems...and those are usually non-critical (like computers used to operate the fuel-loading procedures).

    I was interested to see the Farley plant mentioned as one that is behind on the testing...it belongs to the Southern Company and is operated by its subsidiary Alabama Power. Given the recent PR campaign, I would've figured that they would get all the Y2K issues out of the way long before time was up...you really don't want to break your arm patting yourself on your back about what a good job you do, then have to own up to the public that they've been paying for power they didn't receive because the plant had to be shut down...

    OK, so you pay based on the meter, but my point is still the same... ;)


    Who am I?
    Why am here?
    Where is the chocolate?
  • All the nukes down before midnight just to be safe. OK, as a joke, everyone turn on all appliances and heaters at the stroke of new years and during the blackout, watch people panic as promised by the sensationalist media. ATM machines run dry, people run in the streets with guns, all because of some man made number calendar year, once limited memory in financial calculations, and a popular operating system that crashes. Add them all together and we have something very interesting.
  • According to a US Navy nuclear engineer of my aquaintance, the difference between the way the Navy designs and runs nuclear reactors and the way the power companies do it is that the Navy does it right. (I gather this is partly a legacy of the late Admiral Rickover.)
  • If you kill the power during any test, you will have problems. Kill the power during the summer and you will have people complaining about the heat. Power goes out at night, your problem will be the dark. On December 31, 1999, you may have lots of clocks stuck flashing 12:00 in the bitter cold. So?
  • I read another article the other day.
    One of those plants that is not prepared is located in Bridgman Michigan.

    Bridgman is about 60 miles south of Holland, MI
    The home of Slashdot.


  • A stuck door, perhaps? Mechanical failures are the number one failure of things that break. Think about that.
  • Woops...forgot that part ;) (seriously, tho, if gravity ceases to function, meltdown is the least of our troubles) (although I guess the spring is also there in case the rod sticks)


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    Why am here?
    Where is the chocolate?
  • Just goes to show that there are nerds from all different walks of life on slashdot.org

    thanks.
  • with all the nuclear plant here in France, i hope everything is correct! I think France have the highest ratio nuclear plant per habitant :o)
    youhou! France is first!
    --
    http://www.beroute.tzo.com
  • Last semester I co-oped with a power company (who will remain nameless) working on y2k testing for the software used in the nuclear power plants. The company owns 5 nuc. plants and is working on buying more.

    Nobody in the y2k testing teem ever encountered a significant problem with the software. We ran many tests--rolling over the machines to 2000, upgrade of all database and database components, and extensive testing of homebrew software. None of the core systems will even be affected. The only potential problem is with these external systems.

    The thing to remember (at least for our nuc. plants) is that we have many failsafe plans. The plants are so government regulated you have to fill out paperwork to sneeze, and you can only do so in approved areas. If something goes wrong, the plant goes into a safe mode.

    Don't be disapponted when nothing happens (at least in the nuc. plants) because of y2k.
  • You have to consider the source...of course a Navy person would say that...doesn't mean it's true tho...


    Who am I?
    Why am here?
    Where is the chocolate?
  • The book I read was called "We almost lost Detroit". I originally grabbed it because I thought it was about the Michigan/Ohio Toledo argument.
  • Note:

    The Fermi accident happened on October 5th, 1966. Just a little something to help with searches / put it in perspective.

  • 1. it's a doomsday book (lots of FUD)
    2. if it was an anti-(whatever your OS is) book, you'd shout "FUD!" so loud that all of earth, heaven, and hell could hear
    3. government doesn't subsidize nuclear power (not in the US)
    4. FUD-mongers have caused the NRC to crack down on nuclear plants so hard that it takes a whole team of people and ream of paper to change a light bulb (OK, I'm exaggerating, but you get my point)
    5. Other forms of energy require government regulation (coal, gas)
    6. because of the regulatory nightmare, no one builds new plants--which is fine for the coal companies, the railraods, the miners union...but not for the miners, the atmosphere, or the earth's appearance
    7. disposal of by-products from non-nuclear plants is massive--tons of coal ash every year...I don't know the current figure, but the estimate was that the entire waste disposal from US nuclear plants from the beginning of all US nuclear activities up until 1989--all of that waste--would fill one football field to a depth of 10 feet (as opposed to mountains of ash and soot and poisonous fumes)

    Read a more reliable book, next time :)


    Who am I?
    Why am here?
    Where is the chocolate?
  • My sources tell me it's a FUD book (anti-nuke to the point that facts don't matter but fear does)


    Who am I?
    Why am here?
    Where is the chocolate?
  • The men who were killed at Fermi, of course, were military personel. That is why you always hear "there have been no civilian deaths caused by nuclear power."

    At least one of the dead men's heads and extremities had to be severed and buried as high level radioactive waste.
  • while the US's plants may be just fine (knock on wood) what about the rest of the world? with a good wind, it wouldn't matter where the plants were if there was an accident.

    the confidence of everyone elses posts only serves to make me more uneasy.
  • Yes...but why would a computer that controls the location of a motor care what time or day it is?

    The possible problem, as with many failures, involves systems doing something outside its design limitations. Common embedded system boards are often off-the-shelf boards with custom code. Many of these boards (especially the ones that are built with a PC-like architecture) come with a (potentially noncompliant) real-time clock. This clock noodles along until rollover, whether or not that rollover actually coincides with 01/01/2000, at which point a noncompliant RTC returns an invalid response (if you're lucky) or does a convenient buffer overflow in a badly written BIOS. Presto, confused embedded system.

  • Too bad, but safety comes before profit...

    Then you must not work for Florida Power. I can't believe that the NRC lets them keep their plant. Go to the St. Petersburg Times [sptimes.com] and search for "florida power crystal river" to see what I'm talking about.

    They bringing in record profits while complaining that they can't afford to pay some outstanding fines. They are simultaneously lobbying (constantly) the Public Service Commission to increase the rates for residential customers. And they have the sporadic power flickers on perfectly clear days -- enough to reset the computer, but not enough to turn off the television.

    I hate them.

    Mike
    --

  • "TMI was a real wake-up call for the U.S. nuclear industry in terms of reactor design, safety systems, operator training, and computer modeling of accidents."

    What many people overlook about the meltdown at TMI-2 is that in almost every instance where plant operators had a decision to make, they made what hindsight would show to be the wrong one -- and there was virtually no radiation released from the plant (some volatiles got out, which had they been concentrated in a single individual would have delivered about as much radiation dose as a single chest X-ray).

    We learned a hell of a lot from TMI, and the most important thing is that the safety features _work_. The greatest loss was that of the multibillion-dollar plant. Most of the improvements made post-TMI have been along the lines of "OK, now that we know the safety features work, how can we save the plant itself in the event of an accident?"

    The real bummer of the situation is that the nuclear power industry in the US effectively died with the double-whammy of TMI and Chernobyl. All that's left is to finish the operating lives and shut down the remaining plants (down to 103; there were 112 when I was in your shoes as a senior NucE student). Because people are afraid of safe reactor technology, we don't build new reactors -- which means that the even safer designs like the ABWR go unbuilt and old people roast in their apartments every summer.
  • "the confidence of everyone elses posts only serves to make me more uneasy."

    This is because you are scientifically ignorant. If someone asked where to look for the sunrise on 1/1/2000 and the mass responded "East" in a confident manner, would you begin to sweat?
  • Slashdot is in Holland, Michigan.
  • Surprisingly, there's not too much info out there. This is the best that I could find:
    http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~p iccard/entropy/perrow.html [ohiou.edu]
    It's a review of the book Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow. The bit about the Fermi incident is about halfway down the page.
    --
  • you speak as if this is a game and we never make mistakes anyway.
  • As I said above, certainty of accidents not being able to happen is what will cause them to happen. Nuclear plants in the U.S. have to prove more saftey, and more redundancy in their safety, than any other industry. New designs, which are currently being sold and built in Japan, Taiwan, and S. Korea, allow plants to shut down in the case of an accident with no operator action whatsoever. Safety is not assumed or "certain", it is planned, checked, and checked again.
  • Reactors are still being built and operated, in spite of the risk and the history of accidents, because of the Price-Anderson Act. In the early days of promoting "civillian nuclear power" the Military needed weapons grade plutonium. The only way to kickstart a civillian nuclear power industry (to produce that plutonium) was to grant blanket immunity for any potential nuclear accidents. The utilites could never have afforded the cost of liability insurance for as unknown and major of a risk as a major accident at a nuclear power plant.

    So congress passed the Price-Anderson Act, which grants blanket immunity to the power industry for nuclear accidents.

    Civillian nuclear power wouldn't exist if the companies had to pay insurance premiums to operate the plants. (something people like to refer to as a free market) Thats how safe they are considered by insurance company actuaries. Of course, congress knows a lot more than the insurance industry. Or, they wanted more weapons grade plutonium and didn't care. Pick and choose which one you want to believe.
  • Many plants are run on very old computers from the later 60s early 70s. Can you say PDP-7, PDP-11, GA something or other... You're talking 64k ram if you're luck and coding in fortran 66?
    Of course, how many computers do you know that have been tested to be operational inside ovens, freezers, earthquake simulators, etc. Many safety systems are powered by relay logics (smart). Other times by redundant computer systems(not so smart).
    Y2K isn't the worst thing, it's finding replacement parts. You can't just replace an entire system because you have thousands of operating years experience (each unit*#computers*plants*years). Would you be ready to trust your safety to something like a *NIX system??!!
  • With nuclear plants, the design is very different than nuclear bombs or missiles. The result is that if something goes wrong in a nuclear plant the contaiment structure (which is designed to withstand a direct impact from a jetliner) will NOT rupture (I have this feeling that the nuclear plant construction kept the steel workers fat and happy with all the rebar that went in). Oh...should the reactor vessel melt (as with TMI), the worst that happens is it puddles on the floor...the "China Syndrome" (after the movie, where the nuclear mass eats its way through the ground) is a fiction...bombs kill tens of thousands of people, poison gas can kill tens of thousands, even a very well placed gas plant explosion can kill a few thousand, but nuclear plants don't explode and don't have the potential for killing thousands of people (unless you have one of the crummy Russian designs and decide to disable all the safety equipment).

    oh, and that doesn't even begin to address your NASA remark...AFAIK (unless you know something I don't) the most people NASA has ever lost at one time was 7--far from a thousand, let alone tens of thousands...now if you want to talk about gas/chemical/paper plant explosions, we have some ground to stand on...


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    Why am here?
    Where is the chocolate?
  • Nope, looks like a somewhat garbled version of Peach Bottom to me...look it up.
  • Trust me, it really will not be a problem. There are numerous safeties on US plants--Chernobyl, for example, used the cheap single-walled BWR (boiling-water-reactor) while US plants are double walled PWRs (pressurized-water-reactors), much safer.
  • Nuclear power plants usually pay several million dollars a year [each] for insurance. GPU is still paying for TMI, and there are no cases of injury or death involved.

    Also, civilian energy-producing plants are not used to create plutonium for bombs, and never were. The military has enough of its own reactors for those purposes. The early nuclear power industry did receive quite considerable subsidies from the U.S. government, but those are comparable to the support that other renewable energy sources have been receiving for decades now, with far fewer results than nuclear power so far. I agree with the support of these renewables, just as I agree with the early support of renewable nuclear power, as a good use of tax monies, to "kickstart" a civilian industry.
  • Since Nuclear plants account for about 20 - 25% of US generating capacity, it is unlikely that having all nuc plants shutdown would cause the lights to go out.

    You seem to be suggesting that we have 20-25% excess capacity, which is untrue. Depending on the time of year we are talking about, it is estimated for 1999 we have approximately 15% excess capacity during the middle of summer, and aprox. 25% during the middle of winter. So I believe some of us would be in the dark, if we were to take all the nuke plants out.

    Besides, if SimCity is any indication, you don't want to be running your powerplants at 100% capacity for too long! :)

    Anyway, as you've said, worst case, we won't have to power ALL of them down since some are already "compliant". I'm just trying to bring some real numbers to the table.

    Try here: NERC [nerc.com]

  • Just a couple of weeks ago at the newest NASA mission control center (in Utah, where we depend on hydroelectric power, not nukes... yeah!), I laughed as the guy who designed and built the whole thing told of when CNN and other major news agencies sent huge crews to see what would happen to this military base as they did a test rollover to 2000 (the reporters were hoping for nuclear meltdown or something like that), and absolutely _nothing_ happened. I think it's going to largely be like that when we hit 2000. It'll be like when the Jehovah's Witnesses claimed many years back a particular day and time for the end of the world (despite the fact that even the Bible says nobody can know when it is), and they all gathered together and waited, and waited, and waited... Needless to say, they don't mention that when they're out knocking doors. Year 2000 will probably be the same.

    The only real nightmare on the year 2000 is that thousands of people are trying to have their children born on new years, and there will surely be several times more births than room/staff for them at the hospitals. Anyone stupid enough to try to have a baby in those circumstances should have been neutered years ago to improve the human race.
  • There's absolutely no danger of nuclear contamination.
    Besides the computers and circuits that control the power plant, there are several layers of physical protection.
    Even if all the controlling power had been shut down for a reactor, the mechanical devices would shut it down.
  • I'm a senior tech at a manufacturing plant. When its kept simple, we have no problems. My opinion may not be worth much, and not an expert opinion, but based on 15 years of my experience of a technician. (Clueless?) Critical functions, such as the boilers are controlled by simple relay logic. No crashes, no dates, and NO YEAR 2000 FUD. It amazes me how much crap how this is sensationalized. If you have something to share as an AC, please do, but I didn't get much from your critical post.
  • Let's put it another way, I'm so glad your willing to bet tens of thousands of people's lives on your certainty.

    No. Every time we build a hydroelectric dam, we're betting tens of thousands of lives on our expectation that no major accident will occur. But modern reactors just aren't that dangerous, for all the reasons given in the earlier postings.

    The worst conceivable accident related to energy production would be if the Folsom Dam (right above a heavily populated area) collapsed; that could easily kill over a hundred thousand people in a flash flood. Oil and gas refinery explosions kill at least hundreds (thousands?) of people every year, as do coal-mining accidents. But the worst conceivable accident in a U.S.-style nuclear plant would kill only tens of people, not tens of thousands. This is much less deadly than even the normal-case level of risk we accept in every other industry in the country.

  • You'd think that a web-based information dispersal site like slashdot wouldn't fall prey to the "trendiness" of traditional media. We're all geek enough to know about Y2K and related issues -- like why it is a problem and why it isn't.

    What could possibly be tied to dates in a nuclear power plant? Let's think about this. The most obvious is monitoring equipment... okay, so the logs show the wrong year on them. Whoever goes to read them and say "oh, nothing interesting happened" will be able to compensate for that.

    Now, let's say that the system is date-controlled to automatically raise the output levels a bit around, say, christmas and thanksgiving. Okay, so they miss by a few days since the calendar doesn't quite line up. Or, if it's time sensitive, then the evening power boost comes at 9 PM because daylight savings time started on the wrong day.

    Give me a break, critical systems in a nuclear power plant (in the US, anyway) are well constructed by people who have to answer to some of the most paranoid freaks in the world: the public. If Greenpeace wasn't down with your computer controlled nuclear plant, it wouldn't have been built.

    Now that we've all taken a moment to recover from the initial shock of worrying about waking up on that fateful saturday with our house glowing, take a moment for a DEEP BREATH and a reality check. (Of course, we *will* all have to get up that saturday to go to work and try to find backup tapes so we can reinstall the systems that died overnight and we've called the manufacturer to dropship newer ones...)

    -Chris
    The world can't end on 1/1/2000. 1/6/2000, though is a Thursday... that's what we need to worry about.
  • I recognize the Amadeus quote above.

    "Confutatis maledictis flammis acribus addictis..."

    Yes, lines from Mozart's Requiem. (And I own the movie, so I won't debate it's merits.) This is also known as the "really cool tune" some ad guy from Madison Avenue put in the background of a Microsoft TV commercial a couple of years ago.

    Where do *you* want to go today? ;-)

  • see my post at this link [slashdot.org] further down.


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  • It's the embedded computers actually operating things like the motors for the rods, the valves for cooling fluids, vents, things like that.

    In theory, any nuclear reactor where the computers fail for whatever reason, should automatically set itself into a safe configuration.

    In practice, as Chernobyl and (less spectacularly) Windscale have demonstrated, things are rarely that simple. Components do all sorts of exotic things, through bugs, inadequate maintenance, sloppy design work, etc.

    Whilst meltdown is improbable, it is far from impossible. All it would take is for the computers to raise all the controlling rods, due to an error, and for the emergency shutdown to fail for any reason at all. (Spilt coffee shorting the switch'll do it.)

    Much, much more probable, though, is for the generators to fail, and all the safeties to slam in, shutting the reactor down. It could take a long time to fix the Y2K fault, and even longer to restart the reactor. Reactors aren't particularly designed for prolonged shutdowns.

    Another, much more probable fault is that any computer-controlled device used in installing new fuel in the reactor could fail, thus causing the reactor to simply burn up all it's fuel and stop. Again, it would take a while to fix the Y2K fault, refuel and restart the reactor.

    The most probable fault of all is that nuclear reactor techs will be forced to stop playing minesweeper, and get back to work.

  • My guess is that reactors are still using the old, reliable technology they were built with and subject to normal maintenance when it came to replacing parts. The computer upgrades were most likely confined to the offices and out of harm's way. I work in manufacturing and get to see New Technology get a reputation for hiccuping and having bugs. The more important production lines get a wait and see attitude before adopting curiously marketed operating systems. When there is potential for creating scrap at over $40/second, no high tech is sometimes better if you want to get the job done.
  • I've been job-hunting in the Charolette area and I'd like to know if I'm moving to a hot zone before I actually go there.

    .. though if a nearby plant went tragic, I could at least save on night lights and read by the glow of my fingernails.

    -fester(ing)
  • Proof that the average age of a /. reader is a number way smaller than mine.

    Three Mile Island, an accident at a nuclear power plant and a media feeding frenzy (call me biased -- my Daddy was a nuclear physicist) happened sometime in the late 70s, I believe. I remember my dad discussing the media hype over dinner many, many times during the whole fiasco.

    Feelin' kinda old, now.
  • At least some nuclear reactors in Europe use Commodore PETs to control major functions.
  • Will the power plant give out a different amount of power if it thinks its 1900? The only problem that the power companies may have is with their billing department.
  • As I seem to recall from my HS days when I was fascinated with nuclear power, this really isn't a big worry. First of all, AFAIK, the machines that would actually do the controlling, such as dropping rods and such, aren't time-sensitive. Second of all, the default configuration in emergencies for the control rods is to scram the reactor - they'll drop if there is a problem. Compare this to Cherynobyl, where the reactors had to be pushed up!! into the reactor to scram it.

    I'm not real worried about these reactors giving us problems here. Way to much regulation, to many trained people. Other countries, yes. But, I'm worried about other countries a lot anyhow.

    BTW - TMI doesn't scare me a bit. It was relatively innocous, it just got a lotta press. You wanna be scared? Read about the Fermi accident outside of Detroit. I can guaran-damn-tee ya that if that had gone any farter, many, many people, including myself and CmdrTaco, wouldn't be here anymore.
  • If you're living by Lake Norman (just north of Charlotte, NC) there's one right there. Keeps the water nice and warm year round. 8)
  • Remember the big sewage spill in California (Van Nuys?) a few weeks back? They were doing a Y2K test and experienced a power failure.

    How many Y2K test plans included killing the power in the middle of the test? I would suspect that a lot of fringe problems might be uncovered if we actually do lose power during the rollover.
  • Yea well Admiral Rickover was an amazing guy from what I know about him. But I think that Both were mostly built by GE. I would imagine the designs are more or less similar. (Except the navy's may be smaller to fit on a ship)
  • Aren't the chips used in nuke plants going to be radiation hard? RH chips are very expensive, they aren't something you'd buy off the shelf.

  • Do you remember the Dec 31, 1999 almost core meltown in the Scottish reactor? Power lost to the reactor, backup generators failed, everyone off duty because of the holiday--a coupla guys had to push the cadmium rods by hand... owww!

    Wow, you are awesome! Could you tell me how to remember things that happen(ed) 5 months from now? That is so cool.
  • A power outage during the actual Y2K rollover might cause all manners of problems that less well-timed power outages would not. This thread started out trivializing any likely Y2K power outages. My point was that, during that unique point in time, a power outage might wreak far more havoc than if the clocks weren't rolling over the big two.

    The article I read blamed the four million gallon sewage spill in Van Nuys on a power outage during a Y2K test of the system. I am hoping massive sewage spills aren't normal consequences of routine power outages! ;)
  • I think you're wrong about that....The bombs were dropped from planes and there was a mushroom cloud, which is particles from the explosion as much as it is stuff from the ground, like rock and dirt. How would an air blast create a phenomenon like that?

  • No, I speak as someone with a PhD in nuclear engineering and a knowledge that surpasses that meager bit of pseudoscience you've picked up from "The China Syndrome", "Silkwood", and the latest panic-stricken report from Dan Rather.

    Nuclear power is safe. The plants are designed with the full realization that people make mistakes, so the physical facilities better be able to compensate. It's _damned_ difficult to make a Very Bad Thing happen in a US nuclear power plant and you should be reassured by what you've read here today, not alarmed by the fact that the nukes among the /. readership aren't running as far upwind as they can get.

    It's not a game -- but you are posting as though you think that nukes are somehow unaware of that fact. Believe me, we're very aware of it -- we spend our careers striving to get the odds of an accident down from one in a trillion to one in ten trillion, only to be told by people like you that our statements of confidence make you uneasy, that you worry about our cavalier attitude towards the bogeyman atom, that you want Zero Risk and won't settle for anything but.

    Go back to watching "Dawson's Creek" and let the big people take care of the power, mmmkay?
  • Shutting down a Nuclear power plant isn't like shutting off your car . The process is something that can take anywhere between 24 and 48 hours on a fast shutdown . And yes , computers do control the flow of liquid cooling agents through the core even though there is always a manual control for the smae mechanisms . I hope they actually run a little cooler than normal when Y2k comes around .
  • In case the squishy machine goes super-crit, er, syrup-critical.
  • What you say is true, but you missed the point of the first message: OTHER countries are NOT up to the standard that a US plant is. We could practically have a full-on melt-down in a plant and not know it.

    Russia, however has already proven that to be false for them. And that was after they disabled one safety. What happens when Russia/Bolivia/Bum-Fuck Egypt loses all their safety systems. Third world countries can't always afford the physical barrier.

    Your condescending and extremely insulting "PhD in nuclear engineering" attitude doesn't help either. You have to admit that when it comes to common knowledge and common sense, Americans are MORONS. You can tell the masses m&m's will kill them and sooner or later, everyone will be without the candy that melts in your mouth. If, instead of insulting people who don't know for sure, you politely explained that a 747 at 500mph couldn't knock down a nuke reactor, maybe people would learn and not be the paranoid freaks they are.

    I can understand your frustrations though. People don't seem to understand that anything in this country that poses a threat is severely regulated and has triple redundancy in the safety systems. (I think I heard that a US plant has three times the safety systems as those in France.)
  • I have a cool little book from 1971 called Perils of the Peaceful Atom. It is the ultimate doomsday book. Y2K was the least worry back then, if they even thought about it. But I mean, there's still 30, 40 year old reactors out there. As if to deal with the waste wasn't bad enough...


    I don't know why reactors were still being built after all those accidents. It just defies logic. I don't think any other form of energy relies so heavily on government cash and regulation (tho I could be wrong on the cash part). It just boggles my mind, like the engineers in the 70s were still riding on the dreams of the 30s.

  • For some real-world data on nukes, computers, and Y2K, deja Peach Bottom (Nuke power plant in PA). Short is, they ran a Y2K compliance test on an off-line system and ended up losing (due to some 3 Stooges stuff) all real-time control data. Pretty funny/scary, IMHO.
  • There are a ton of devices to control a nuclear plant. Most all of the nessecary. For some of these failure is a critical problem. Most of these sites have redundant seperate controls. Or they are supposed to. I have heard of at least one instance where one of two control panels froze. No big deal. That's why there's 2. Well the second one was suddenly not reading properly - way too high temp, way too quickly. Or so it seemed. Turns out it was reading right. But when the 1st controls froze they started sending bad commands. The reactor could have gone into some bad situations if someone hadn't figured it out almost immediately, and yanked the 1st control boards. Thus allowing the second to rectify the situation. Nothing to do with Y2K, but a bug none the less.
    As for the date stuff. Well a lot of things have dates programmed into them as to when they need to be replaced. This might stop working suddenly. Or at least that is one potential concern.
    -cpd
  • My Boss, used to Run reactors for the US Navy. It takes under 2 seconds to stop the reactor, (You just drop the controll rods) then you can bleed off the heat and pressure, this does not require a pump as the thing is desinged to use the heat already there to create a convection. (hot water rises, and is replaced by cold water.)

    It takes about 12-24 hours to bring it back online.
  • As several people have said, it stands for Three Mile Island, a nuclear plant that had a problem in one of its reactors (It has two or three). The biggest hype about the incident was a movie about a nuclear meltdown ("China Syndrome" staring Jane Fonda.) came out about the same time which didn't help
  • Since Nuclear plants account for about 20 - 25% of US generating capacity, it is unlikely that having all nuc plants shutdown would cause the lights to go out.

    In addition - the article states that 73 of 103 plants have completed Y2K work on their systems. Of the remaining 30, only 6 will not be ready by the end of Sept.

    My local utility has already moved the clock on all plant systems to 2027, so they will be operating next year. I may never get a bill, but I would not complain about that!
  • According to a book by Bernard L Cohen, the accident at Chernobyl could basically be attributed to gross human error. He said that the operators in the plant were instructed to disable all safety measures, then to simulate a LOCA (loss of coolant accident, for those who don't know). Apparently the reactor was a German design, and was designed to work under most forseeable circumstances except for the one where the operators do something very foolish. He also stated that the Soviet government had run out of money, so they bought the reactor design, but not the contaiment shield. When the operators stopped the coolant, the fuel bundles overheated and melted the graphite moderating material*. The resulting slurry then cause other problems like reactor breach, fire, ....

    Basically it was a preventible accident that resulted from very foolish, very preventable human acts (not computers or even poor design).

    * Now for a little reactor-workings theory ;)

    The outermost part of the plant (at least in the US) is a concrete building, usually with metallic lining inside (e.g., lead). This part is designed to withstand a direct airplane crash....
    Inside you have a reactor set into a depression with a minimum of two (usually three or more) water tanks to pump a moderator into the core. This "moderator" absorbs neutrons and performs two functions. First, it controls the amount of neutrons bouncing around in the reactor, preventing a runaway reaction. Second, it absorbs the heat from the reaction. Various moderators exist. The most popular is water (it's cheap ;) ), but others are used, like liquid sodium.
    The reactor has a set of control rods made out of some neutron-absorbing material. These may be at the top or bottom of the reactor. If they are placed at the top, then the reactor can be shut down by gravity (this is becoming a popular way of doing things). Their purpose is to stop (or modify) the flow of neutrons. When the rods are fully inserted, the neutrons can't reach critical mass and start a reaction. When they are fully withdrawn, the reactor can boil madly. The rods have hard-wired electrical controls, so that they can be inserted quickly into the core if the reaction goes out of control.
    The coolant/moderator material passes through a loop from the reactor into a heat exchanger. The liquid in the heat exchanger then passes to the turbine to generate power. This provides the power, but keeps the radioactivity inside the reactor.
    The inside of the reactor contains a series of fuel bundles (square sheathes of fuel rods (IIRC, about 20 feet long)). Each bundle contains several rods, and each rod consists of uranium pellets about the size of your pinky finger. The bundles are arranged in a grid to fit inside the reactor. There is space between each bundle for the coolant/moderator to pass, and at several key points there are spaces for the control rods to slide in.

    The interesting thing about this is that a lot of work goes into determining what mixture of fuel goes where in the core, and how far the rods should be pulled and when, so as to maximize the benefit of the fuel and minimize safety issues. I've seen the work involved first-hand...it's months of time and lots of double- and triple-checking before a fuel plan is implemented.

    I'm not worried about it. Usually fears that a plant will meltdown are based on ignorance and propaganda. As long as you know how the system works, and why, you know why there won't be a problem ;)


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  • "Mr. Burns, I have the report you requested about our Y2K compliance."

    "Excellent! What does it say?"

    "Run for your lives."
  • but don't quote me ;)


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    Why am here?
    Where is the chocolate?
  • The french haven't done any atmospheric tests for some time. They did let off a few underground at Mururoa Atoll a few of years ago, ostensibly so they could check their simulators (they didn't want the US ones). Their atmospheric ones used to be done on the nearby Fangataufa (sp?) atoll.
  • Windscale = Selafield (sp?)
  • Z80s??!!!! Hell, you mean these things run on SINCLAIR SPECTRUMS???!
  • I was a baby and my family stuck around because my father had a booming biz running the local pizza hut. All the clean up workers for some reason did not bring their wife and kids with them and ended up always eating out. :>

    I'm supposed to be counting my xrays for radiation overdose - I had 8 today. Oops.

    I recognize the Amadeus quote above.
    Good movie, but not sure it belongs on the AFI's top 100 movies list.
  • In practice, as Chernobyl and (less spectacularly) Windscale have demonstrated, things are rarely that simple. Components do all sorts of exotic things, through bugs, inadequate maintenance, sloppy design work, etc

    Hmmm, yeah, but at Chernobyl safety systems (including the flux equalizing rod group's control computer) were deactivatd. Also, by design the Chernobyl reactor type actually has an upsurge in power before shutting down during an emergency rod insertion. Also, in the Chernobyl design rising water temperatures causing reaction rates to rise, not fall as in most US reactors (most pressurized water reactors use coolant density to control reaction rates...the denser the water the more neutrons bounced back into the fuel...Chernobyl's design was 180 degrees from this). I know of no reactor in the West that could duplicate Chernobyl...there were just too many f****d up design choices there.

    I'm not familiary enough with Windscale (unless I know it by another name) to comment.

    Another, much more probable fault is that any computer-controlled device used in installing new fuel in the reactor could fail, thus causing the reactor to simply burn up all it's fuel and stop. Again, it would take a while to fix the Y2K fault, refuel and restart the reactor.

    Do we have at power refueling in the West? I thought this was mainly a Soviet phenomena. Fueling at power does all kinds of weird things to power and neutron distribution that makes it hard to control. You must have computerized controls in a large reactor like that, whereas you can allow physics to do a lot for you if you refuel the whole thing at end of core life.

    Harmast

  • Daddy has nuc physics degrees and works for a power company...he said the only casualty at TMI was one of the regulatory folks had a heart-attack while running around assuring everyone that it was perfectly safe...ironic, don't you think?


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  • The problem won't be hardware or software it will be wetware. People will be rioting,fearing Y2K problesm. People will hoard food and withdraw ALL their money from the bank. Companies and some people will switch to generators and overload the power-grid.

    So what to do? Have complete financial records, backups, expect the shit to hit the fan. But don't think soceity will collapse.

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