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Three Mile Island Memories
theodp writes "Thirty years after the partial nuclear core meltdown at Three Mile Island, Robert Cringely describes the terrible TMI user interface, blaming a confluence of bad design decisions — some made by Congress — for making the accident vastly worse. While computers could be used to monitor the reactor, US law prohibited using computers to directly control nuclear power plants — men would do that. So, when the (one) computer noticed a problem, it would set off audible and visual alarms, and send a problem description to a line printer. Simple, except the computer noticed 700 things wrong in the first few minutes of the TMI accident, causing the one audible alarm to ring continuously until it was shut off as useless. The one visual alarm blinked for days, indicating nothing useful. And the print queue was quickly flooded with 700 error reports followed by thousands of updates and corrections, making it almost instantly hours behind. The operators had to guess at what the problem was."
If your user interface lags behind by two hours and the UI is the only way to find out about the extremely complicated and intricate details coming out of a myriad of sensors that are inaccessible to people for safety reasons... I suppose you might be entirely wrong.
In this case, yes, the user interface was necessary for the operators to do their job. Are you going to tell me that submarine operators should rely on their "gut feeling" rather than a measurement of external pressure or depth to determine whether the submarine is safe? These are jobs that can't be done by even the most skilled operator because the information is completely walled off from them for the safety and integrity of the facility.
As far as I can tell, you're advocating that we should hire psychics to determine the safety of the nuclear plant and pay them exorbitantly because spending a single dime on a good interface is wasted money. Sometimes, a $50,000 idiot proof interface is exactly what's called for, rather than intentionally using outdated technology and hoping a printer will provide information fast enough to prevent imminent disaster.
See, See. UI is important!!!!
I'm a nuclear engineer and I think the use of the term UI for the control room is somewhat 'simplistic'. I personally think a major issue was over design in a certain area (redundant alarms), and lack of safety systems that would prevent the core from melting even with a LOCA in place. It was two hours after the shutdown when the fuel melting began at TMI-2. This was a scenario where the operators couldn't understand what was happening. Now from an operator's perspective (who sits in the operator room) you're not looking at a "UI" in the traditional CS sense. Here is an image of a control room: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/v38_1_05/images/a11_controls_full.jpg The events leading up to the disaster started on the secondary side (non-core) leading to a LOCA (Loss of Coolant Accident). For those unfamiliar with the term "secondary side". The secondary side of a Nuclear Power Plant is similar to that of any power generating plant, meaning the secondary side does not contain the reactor core.
How many people get sick and die every single year due to the emissions of coal plants?
How much radiation do we all absorb every single year due to the TONS of uranium and thorium oxide particles released by burning coal?
The modern environmentalist movement is the epitome of intolerant idealism. Fossil fuels are a horrible and destructive source of power and they really are slowly poisoning the planet and everyone agrees about this. But then why the hell won't you let us get away from them? We try to build new hydroelectric dams, and we hear about how the lake will destroy the local ecosystem. We try to build wind farms, but Ted Kennedy sues because they'll get in the way of his view and they kill birds. We try to build solar plants in the middle of the Mojave desert, and the Sierra Club protests. We try to ramp up solar cell production, even, and protestors are demonstrating because of the chemicals used in silicon processing. We try to build nuclear power plants, but despite one western incident (which resulted in at most almost no casualties) happening in fifty full years, a safety record probably unmatched by any other industry in history, you refuse. We try to build a repository to get rid of the waste, and Harry Reid stops it. I have not a single doubt in my mind that when the first commercial fusion plant opens, you will be protesting because some of its components will eventually become radioactive and need to be disposed of.
You demand that we engineers and scientists come up with a better alternative, then kick us in our faces every time because nothing is perfect. Nothing we ever come up with is ever going to be good enough, is it? Not even a magic-based reactor that poofs free electric out of nowhere! Well, welcome to real life. Enjoy your stay - America now burns more coal than ever because we aren't deploying the one presently-viable alternative (nuclear) that we have.
I used to work in the nuclear power plant operator training industry. Believe me, whatever else those operators were, they were not cheap. The CEO could not skimp on salaries and hire idiots. In fact, in a time when $40K was an excellent salary, the training costs per operator was more than $1 million.
On the other hand, there were cultural obstacles. In Europe (Sweden), they hired engineers with masters degrees to become nuclear plant operators. In the USA, they were mostly high school grads who were union members and promoted from running older coal plants. Union politics, not merit decided who got promoted. They were not the best and brightest. Of course in Sweden they also attract the best and brightest to be civil servants. Can you imagine that happening here?
There are always plenty of suggestions as to where society should apply its best and brightest. It is much harder to place the worst and dumbest. Consider the bottom 25%. They have to have jobs. No matter where you assign them, the public will in some way be depending on those jobs being done well. So filling jobs becomes less of a question of rational allocation of resources, but more a matter of attractiveness and recruiting.
A plant operator must stand there and do nothing but monitor year after year, yet react swiftly and accurately in those rare seconds of pure terror, and then have the whole world second guess how well they did it. In addition, they have to do shift work for 24x7 operation. Most people think that it is a hell of an unattractive job. I think that the plant owners do a hell of a job trying to find and retain the best people they can get, and to enrich the jobs to make them less boring. It takes much more than deep pockets to succeed.
So you tell me. You play CEO and tell me how would you convince Google engineers to quit Google and become operators, and how many of the lower quartiles you would assign to invent Google. Convince those bright college students that they don't want to be environmental scientists, but nuclear power plant operators instead.