Inside a Nuclear Control Room

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/nuclear-control-room.html

by NaOH • 14 years ago

21 19 14 years ago

smoyer• 14 years ago

That looks familiar ... In the '80s, I built equipment for Westinghouse's nuclear systems division and love the view of the synchroscopes.

ScotterC• 14 years ago

The good old days of Westinghouse. I left there two years ago and all Westinghouse consists of now is the Nuclear division :)

A whole lot of subgroups within that though of course.

joezydeco• 14 years ago

Rondout, IL sound familiar to you? =)

illamint• 14 years ago

Growing up I really wished that I could work on things like that: I love switches, knobs, dials, klaxons, etc. but the best I have is vim and a command line. Obviously usability can be improved but I'll still lament the decline of big clunky switches and blinkenlights.

ghshephard• 14 years ago

Unfortunately (particularly for those of us with 30" monitors) they don't have a full screen option like the amazing Mars Gigapan: http://gigapan.com/gigapans/113071

Edit: Found it - Awesome on a big monitor http://gigapan.com/gigapans/73573

dmfdmf• 14 years ago

I've worked at this plant, I've been in that control room during a refuel outage. I was there back in the 90's to install some feedwater pump vibration monitoring equipment when I worked for GE as an engineer. Later went on to design feedwater (level) control systems for other plants. Brings back some great memories.

Edit: I'm just hanging out listening to Giants/Dodgers... if anyone has any questions on the control panel systems, acronyms, etc fire away, I'll try and answer if I can. One memory was the all the acronyms I used to know. AMA

waraey• 14 years ago

I really hope they plan to change the user and pass they have printed on two seperate labels on the computer on the right wall near the keyboard

quanticle• 14 years ago

Why would they? That computer isn't hooked up to a network, and there's a very small probability that Joe Random Hacker would be able to talk his way into a nuclear control room.

caf• 14 years ago

Also, it's a simulator control room.

jrockway• 14 years ago

They blurred out the 345KV error annunciator panel and the names of the contacts on the phones , so clearly they tried to censor some stuff. A password seems like a logical candidate that was simply forgotten.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Very cool, my daughter was an operator on the Reed research reactor [1] and its control room is a lot simpler :-) Of course as an operations guy these days I see all those cool status panels and think it would be fun to pick some up for work. Then to find the gal who did the voice overs for Starcraft

  "There is a packet anomaly in router one, there is a
   packet anomaly in router one."

:-)

[1] http://reed.edu/reactor/

mikesmullin3• 14 years ago

somebody needs to introduce a touch screen and some LCD displays to these people.

jonmrodriguez• 14 years ago

more complex software is more likely to be buggy

tarre• 14 years ago

In nuclear power plants you just don't walk in and install new equipment. When upgrading control room to digital, you pretty much also need to upgrade the automation of the plant to be digital and qualifying it to be used in NPP is a real nightmare. In mainstream software markets you can always release bugfixes and add new features afterwards. In NPP your system must work the right way in every possible situation right from the start. I don't think, there are many software companies writing fail-safe programs of that size. And what's even more difficult, you have to prove it to be fail-safe to the regulators.

lutusp2• 14 years ago

> I don't think, there are many software companies writing fail-safe programs of that size. And what's even more difficult, you have to prove it to be fail-safe to the regulators.

That's not possible. It is not possible to prove a nontrivial program to be fail-safe, any more than it is possible to prove a nontrivial axiomatic system to be internally consistent -- and for the same reason: Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems.

The Turing Halting Problem, and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, are deeply connected. The second cannot be resolved because the first cannot be resolved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6dels_incompleteness_theo...

A quote: "The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an "effective procedure" (e.g., a computer program, but it could be any sort of algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the relations of the natural numbers (arithmetic). For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency." (Emphasis added.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

A quote: "Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist. A key part of the proof was a mathematical definition of a computer and program, what became known as a Turing machine; the halting problem is undecidable over Turing machines." (Emphasis added.)

Inside a Nuclear Control Room

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