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US Nuclear Power Enters the Digital Age
An anonymous reader writes "South Carolina's Oconee Nuclear Station will replace its analog monitoring and operating controls with digital systems, as part of a $2 billion plant upgrade by its owner, Duke Energy. It will become the first nuke plant in the US to use digital controls, and its upgrade may be quickly followed by others. The main driver for the move is cost savings; worries about reliability and hackers have been the reason digital systems haven't been adopted sooner."
And they said it would never arrive...
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
So let me get this straight. Before, they were too worried about hackers, but now, they feel it's perfectly safe to do this?
Let me guess. They're installing Windows XP, too.
South Carolina's Oconee Nuclear Station will replace its analog monitoring and operating controls with digital systems
Chinese Military Admits Existence of Cyberwarfare Unit
Wait..
Absolutely nothing. We went with the proven nuclear-industry reliability of Siemens(tm)(r) brand PLC hardware. Absolutely nothing could go wrong.
Too late. Beat you to it by a minute.
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
More like -1, -2, -3 at this point.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
...hackers have been the reason digital systems haven't been adopted sooner.
Here's an idea, let's not connect it to the Internet.
Isolate the system, for Christ's sake. There's no reason that a system like this should have any connection to the Internet, any external access at all (except maybe read access for monitoring at home by the chief engineers or something), or -- and this is the part that people don't seem to get -- no freaking 802.11 access.
I find it amazing that, working in the medical field, every hospital I walk into is at least partially dependent on wireless networks. (Hint: Send desync commands continually with an iPod -- network down.) But not only that, but they go through all these hijinks to make life suck for legitimate users, and miss obvious things like direct network access through Ethernet ports. I walked into a room a few weeks ago, and a kid had plugged his laptop into the hospital Ethernet and it was (I later verified) BEHIND the firewall. Another hospital used WEP encryption for its "official" network, and my laptop broke it in about ten minutes in a call room.
You have all sorts of people working in administrative roles in these institutions that think security is defined as:
1. Disable the Windows "run" command to piss me off.
2. Don't allow me to click on the clock to see a calendar.
3. Block web sites randomly for "security" reasons. (Hint: I'm a doctor. If I'm going to a web site I either have some legitimate reason to, or I'm goofing off because I have some critical patient that I'm stuck in the hospital with.)
4. Throw up wireless networks with some idiotic click through screen before it will route anything, thus breaking every automated device on the market.
Probably any of us on Slashdot could do a better job than some of these idiots.
But what we really need to do is hook it up to the internet.
I guess I was an idiot to assume things had already been digital for some time now...
So what are they using right now then, a few vacuum tubes and clocksprings? Or do they have those newfangled "crystal" rectifiers and point contact transistors. (yeah, I know cave-tech and digital aren't mutually exclusive, give me a break ;) ).
Just because there is no computer running the show, doesn't mean it isn't digital. I'm sure there must be some digital bits involved, no? Or is it just big fucking analog panel meters and red buttons? Analog PID controllers for pressure limits, temp limits, water volume, and that sort of thing, or again just gauges and manual control? I'm thinking there is a digital PLC controlling most of those sorts of things as it is... Who knows though, enlighten me.
Sent from my PDP-11
Duke energy is the one that is working CLOSELY with China (they are more chinese than is GE). My guess is that these controls will come from them. As such, it will be VERY prone to control by them at the worst possible time.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Nothing! Absolutely nothing!
Given the arrogant and secretive corporate culture of current nuclear power companies, nothing we'll ever hear about anyway.
Slashdot fanboys will still love them though.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
kill -9 all
sounds very safe
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
a china syndrome, Chernobyl or Fukushima. The last thing we need is a BSOD taking out the cooling system.
They better be non networked of side of the plant and maybe not running windows.
AND NO Homer Simpsons
I'm sure this will work out just fine.
As digital a geek as I am, I actually downgraded my pool. The garbage "computers" I''ve had foisted upon me by pool guys are absolute crap. So I pulled all the expensive valve actuators and run it by turning valves, and backwashing manually.
I love tech and all the things I do and can do with it. But sometimes, simpler and analog works.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Meanwhile Germany plans to abandon all it's nuclear power by 2022.
...that the previous Slashdot story was 'Chinese Military Admits Existence of Cyberwarfare Unit". So obliging of the US to pre-install a few dirty nuclear bombs. At minimum, one would hope that they are going to use hardwired ROMs for all code. It would also be nice if the CPU was hard wired, so the program counter could not leave ROM space.
Like in the old days when you had a cash register. All it did was be a cash register day in and day out without any problems. Currently most cash registers are cheap computers running complicated operating systems. The number of failure points is staggering.
You want digital controls? That's fine. Design some hardware to manage those controls and then STOP. You won't have to worry about drive failures, locking down USB ports, operating system updates, people doing things they shouldn't....
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I hope they're at least using ECC. I wonder if neutrinos are more prevalent near nuke plants...
is much less of a danger in this case I think. You couldn't convince a dedicated, highly paid engineer to endanger a digital system any more easily than you could convince him to endanger a system based on analog controls. These aren't bored medium waged desk workers, they are among the world's best educated and most aware of the systems they control. I think it wouldn't take a huge amount of effort to train them on how to keep the systems isolated.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
You know, when I wrote software for a nuclear reactor in 1977, it was definitely on a digital computer, albeit a PDP11 in FORTRAN.
"Cats like plain crisps"
next-gen plant that'll run for 50 years, cost less and be safer
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
the Blue Screen of Death
Clearly you didn't read the article :-).. In it they describe their simple goal, right there in black and white, as plainly as they possibly can.. Let us know when you catch it...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
And I suppose your opinion is based on something other than hear-say? Like maybe a little personal experience? Until then I suggest you avoid putting your foot in your mouth. I worked in the industry for 20 years and while I wouldn't paint them as choir boys, I know that the Corporate bean counters aren't the demons you portray them to be.
Nothing... just the old HCF. Not like it will never happen.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I still got one of these.
And do you know what we would call the catastrophic failure event in which Duke Energy might irradiate a large swath of land? Hint: it includes the word Nukem!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
In it they describe their simple goal, right there in black and white, as plainly as they possibly can...
Taken from the context, but I think still relevant and true:
In a nation where a digital blender can be bought for about $30 at Walmart, the ...
... goal of going digital is to save money.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Target practice by the, uhh, 30-strong commando unit of Chinese cyberwarriors.
Given the arrogant and secretive corporate culture of current nuclear power companies, nothing we'll ever hear about anyway.
Why in the world would a corporate culture, arrogant and secretive or not, want to have anything to do with a bitter, whiny Slashdot drone such as yourself?
Futher, any attempt at cooperation or openness by a nuclear plant operator is seen by the anti-nuke forces as either weakness or some sort of ploy. As a result of this adversarial relationship with a large portion of the population, there's little reason for nuclear operators to volunteer anything beyond what is legally required.
Slashdot fanboys will still love them though.
Here's why I'm a fanboy. Like most of our industrial infrastructure, nuclear plants help build civilization. I don't mind having them compete on even grounds with the other means of producing power, even if nuclear fails hard as a result. But I'm not going to hamstring nuclear power just because it has a corporate culture you don't like.
It'll be interesting to see if Germany actually goes through with that. It doesn't sound like they have a real plan for replacing the roughly 30% of their power that they get from nuclear.
this is OT of course but I wonder - are these installations insured and its waste disposal secured?
Nitpick: next-generation designs are meant to run for 60-80 years, then be refurbed to run for 100-120.
(if current experience holds, they'll then be refurbished once more and ultimately run for 150-200)
... the german Government just decided yesterday to finally abandon and decommission all nuclear power by 2021. That's in 10 years. We'll be having a little extended backup reserve of 3 nuclear power plants, but their countdown has begun already.
With regular nuclear power, we are now talking about a technology that Germans considers unmanageable, safety wise. You might want to ponder that for a minute.
I for my part am glad that our current conservative government has finally gotten a clue (25 years after Chernobyl, none-the-less), also due to recent problems with our 'eternal' nuclear dump sites.
Nuclear, as of current state of technology, is a bad idea. There is no fucking way that *anybody* can take over responsibility for 50 000 years worth of deadly toxic waste. Anyone who thought that needs a clobbering.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Yes, neutrinos are more common near nuke plants. At least that is what theory tells us. If you find a cheap way to PROVE this experimentally, you would become moderately famous among physicists. Getting extra glitches from memory would qualify...
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Well, being an Power Systems Controls Engineer at a major utility, I can tell you we already do analogs via a digital stream. The protocol of choice is DNP. It is a standard That also accepts the analog transducers used for the last 50 + years. I don't actually see why this is worthy of a story. The bigger story is how all of the utilities are going to adapt to the latest NERC-CIP regulations and adapt to "secure" versions of the various protocols. Things like secure DNP and a secure version of 61850.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
The biggest problem with digital I&C is the “software common cause failure issue"
Imagine modern nuclear plant with multiple-channel redundancy in instrument and control systems, if one instrument fails, there are others. Same applies to whole cooling systems, if one cooling system fails, there are other completely independent systems that continue to work. Typically redundant systems use instruments from different manufacturers or instruments that are implemented with different technology.
This is not possible for digital systems because they are too costly to implement multiple times. What this means is that redundant digital control systems use same software. If one system fails because of software error, others may follow. This has already happened in German nuclear plant that had new digital system installed. Only the old analog system that was still operational saved the reactor.
This is why Finnish radiation and nuclear safety authority required changes in Areva's plans for the most modern nuclear reactor being build, Olkiluoto 3. They added analog safety requirements. Reactor must be able to shout down even when digital I&C has total failure. Relying for all digital systems compromises redundancy.
More info:
http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2053091
http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Instrumentation-Control-Systems-Nuclear/dp/0309057329
Dyslexics have more fnu.
If that's so and they can really build them as cheaply as they claim, bring 'em on!
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Do terrorists work in a analog world? Yes. Do terrorists work in a digital world? No.
So this upgrade from analog to digital will stop terrorists!
Sorry, just showing how stupid your post is. :)
I certainly hate to think what would happen if humanity were always too afraid to advance for fear of what could go wrong.
Really, I think a casual glance at today's news on the Cyber attack on Lockheed Martin shows that the bad guys are using Analog computers? Do you believe that a bad guy is going to walk up to the front gate of nuclear facility and lite their pants up? You're funny.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I hear they're going to shovel hippies into furnaces.
From TFA "The computer can instantly figure out if a sensor is broken and ignore it."
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Germany was down to 4 online nuclear power plants (out of 17) last week and the lights didn't go out. It is certainly imaginable that these 4 power plants and any net import could be replaced by fossil fuel power plants combined with an increase in renewable energies by 2022. As long as fossil fuels are mostly used for filling gaps in the renewable supply, that's also not going to jeopardize the environmental goals. The current speculation regarding possible blackouts during the winter is about network capacity, not about power generation capacity. The network is structured for centralized power sources in southern Germany, whereas most renewable energy is decentralized and located in northern Germany.
Germany doesn't need much of a master plan to get out of nuclear. Substantial subsidies for renewable energies have been in place for several years and are in the process of being throttled down, because at the moment the installed solar panel area grows exponentially and it looks like a little less encouragement will suffice. Exiting nuclear power is mostly a matter of declaring the firm intent, making the rules accordingly and watching it happen. Other countries have made much stronger commitments to nuclear power and can't turn around as easily and quickly as Germany.
The "digital" portions of most instrumentation sit on top of the analogue loop. They were designed to give you the exact same thing you had + diagnostics and early fault prediction. Instruments which could not only give you 4-20mA but tell you that if you don't attend to them then within the week there's a good chance you'll get 3 or 25mA out of them and your control system spits out NaN.
Reliability wasn't getting in the way of the upgrade, $2bn was. There's not an industrial plant in the world that wouldn't drop everything and upgrade all their instrumentation and control systems if they could do it in a cost effective manner.
Oh yes, because the Japan's disaster as anything to do with hackers... They hacked the planet and made the earthquake happen. Wait, that's bad! It means they can do analog too!
(\__/) This is Lapinator
(='.'=) copy it in your sig
(")_(") so it can take over the world
Thanks to a reliable inner Europe electricity network. As usual "we don't do nuclear", but that the electricity then gets imported from France or some other country is easily forgotten.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Like it did on Air France flight 447?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The way to tackle that is obviously to not create one big moloch that monitors and regulates everything, but break it down into a tiny little subsystems, doing a single task that CAN be completely tested. Microcontrollers, not serverracks is what you want. These subsystems can report to an application that veryfies periodically if everything works withing parameters and report any anomolies sorted on priority to the humans. This is how it is done in alarmcentres with all the firealarms, burgalryalarms, medical alarms etc etc.
ALL nuclear power will be ended in Germany by 2022. All but three stations will closed by 2021, wityh the final three being shuttered and buried the next year, if they need the power still, but not after. In related news, Germany plans to double renewables by 2020. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/europe/germany-decides-to-pull-plug-on-nuclear-power/article2039434/ Go ahead and troll rate me down, it won't change the news.
More like 22%, barely more than from renewables. And it is pretty manageable. We've got only four of 17 nuclear reactors running for a full week already, no blackouts at all. Too funny actually, because the nuclear lobby has prophecied the end of the world starting 21.05.2011. I guess they now have to wait until 2012, just as the rest of the world ;-)
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Digital doesn't mean "connected to the Internet." As long as you need physical access to the system, it's no less secure than an analog system.
Dilbert RSS feed
Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't the memory glitch count be raised by the extra gamma radiation? How then would you be able to isolate the neutrino-errors?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
I'm not a fanboy because at all points of contact with that industry I could see it was driven almost purely by politics and greed with very little thought to practicality. The only advances we've seen are in the niches where the honest can work while slipping under the radar of the confidence tricksters plotting to get a handout from the taypayer for building TMI painted green. Thus "modern US designs" came mostly via Toshiba and Hitachi in Japan or from government labs. It's depressing to see a civilian nuclear industry that is even twenty years behind South Africa. It's hard to move towards anything decent when the fanboys insist 1970s crap is perfect thus the thorium research was cancelled and synroc had to struggle against idiots that insisted there was no such thing as nuclear waste.
Did they have to shut down any factories during that time?
You don't know what you don't know.
Are you really suggesting that some new electronic control systems cost more than reactors, turbines, pipework, condensers, cooling towers, water treatment plants and the rest put together? WTF is this trend here of people pretending to be incredibly stupid in an attempt to push their agenda?
It's obvious you are not that stupid because you managed to type all that without blacking out so have the brainpower to type and breath at the same time - so why be such an amoral weasel?
Canadian nuclear stations have been using digital computers for reactor and overall unit controls since the 1960s. I, for one, would like to welcome the United States to the 20th century.
37.8 TWh is the figure I got for wind turbines in Germany in 2009.
Not all renewables in 2010.
http://www.germanenergyblog.de/?p=3063
For context that's 6.5% of Germany energy.
Until recently 26.1% of germanys energy came from nuclear.
Now let's ignore that wind farms get built in the best locations first and assume they do even better over the next ten years with wind than they did in the last 10 years.
lets say they build just as many extra wind farms.
that still leaves them supplying only half the power they were getting from nuclear.
On a side note:
http://xkcd.com/605/
appologies, I misread the 37.8TWh bit- funny coincidence that it happens to be the same figure.
So scrub the first sentence but the rest remains the same.
in 2009 wind accounted for 6.5% of Germany energy.
etc
I wouldn't hold my breath for serious solar PV in germany- it's a bit far from the equator for anything but expensive vanity projects.
One big thing they want to do is off shore wind parks. The offshore wind mills are larger than land based and have a 98% uptime. Following the calculation, something around 100 wind mils can replace one nuclear power plant. But these are also getting some opposition, since the construction disrupts marine life. (Though it depends on who you ask, since new artificial reefs also let marine life flourish.) But yea. The French and other European neighbors have euro signs in their eyes. Just as a figure, something around 80% of french nuclear power is exported, that includes Germany. Everybody want to go back to nature, but no one wants to walk.
THIS, why should something this critical be exposed externally?
Too late.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You shouldn't admit that you watched "The Core" on /.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Don't network any of the systems. That's it. Problem solved.
Watch the first season of Battlestar Galactica and you have a design model for the cost of a netflix subscription.
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
I don't mind having them compete on even grounds with the other means of producing power, even if nuclear fails hard as a result.
How can competition be on an even ground when there are laws limiting their liability to a miniscule amount compared to the damage that could be done?
How can it be considered fair competition it the total costs of dealing with fuel aren't included (whether you call it vaulting "treasure" or the cost of running a fuel mortuary makes no difference)
How can it be considered fair competition if there's land made unusable to society far into the future?
If it allows society to enter into having population, housing, or industrial densities that are otherwise unsustainable, aren't we walking into a trap by using it? (locked in - I'm sure some feel that has happened already) How long can society sustain building plants that tie up resources long term but only produce for perhaps 50 years?
Doesn't this encourage us to use other resources at unsustainable levels? Are we failing to see a bigger picture for the future of mankind?
Shouldn't we be moving towards technology that can sustain society indefinitely? Is this supposed to be it?
Ok, the GP is modded into invisibility right now, so I'm wiling to ask you... Are you talking about coal, oil, gas, or nuclear power plants? Or are you talking abut the chemical industries in general? I guess you are not talking about hydro power, because their "fuel" cost them nothing, but the rest of the post aplies quite well for it too.
Rethinking email
The GP said a cheap way.
Rethinking email
That is easy, you atribute all the errors to gamma and neutrons (if those are present), and none of them for neutrinos.
Rethinking email
Obviously more than the eco freaks are paying you to act like an idiot.
Too funny actually, because the nuclear lobby has prophecied the end of the world starting 21.05.2011.
Uh huh. Because the problems will all show up on the first day. I lived through the California "electricity crisis," a failed privatization of California's electricity markets. The same sort of hubris was on display going into that. Their failures didn't start till a couple of years into the program, but were entirely predictable from a knowledge of the conditions going in. Obviously, phasing out your base load power (both nuclear and coal) without replacement is a different sort of issue than privatization of the electricity markets, but the same smell of failure permeates.
Europe has already had days where the entire continent experienced low wind conditions and days when it's been entirely overcast. What is Germany going to do on those days? Where is its base load power coming from? So many of its neighbors are similarly dependent on wind and solar power and will compete for the same electricity imports.
"Cost savings" is an extremely poor reason to switch to digital controls for an operating nuclear power plant. I worked with digital and analog controls over the years and digital controls allow you to amazing things that are not possible with analog controls. However, digital controls also ALWAYS have bugs in the operational logic. The only way to remove the bugs is with extensive testing and even them some survive to be discovered when a wrong thing happens during operation. The problem with a nuclear power plant is that it is so unforgiving. If the wrong thing happens at an oil refinery, there are overpressure valves, thousands of manual valves, etc. that can be used to keep things from getting out of hand until the unit can be shutdown, the program corrected, the control element repaired, or whatever. In a nuclear power plant, after a wrong thing happens, a portion of the plant may be irrevocably damaged or contaminated. The potential cost savings seem trivially small compared with the risk of losing a portion of the plant and/or releasing radioactive materials and contaminating the surroundings.
The day Germany finally phases out coal would be the day coal runs out - or fusion power plants finally generate all the baseload - whichever comes first.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Call bias if you want, since this company is in the nuclear business, but the details regarding the overall process are much better. This issue is a regulatory one as changing the safety system from the original design basis is a big deal. In response to the above post regarding China taking over...leave your FUD at the door.
http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sc=2058654
"You have the right to free speech...as long as, you aren't dumb enough to actually try it." - The Clash
How can competition be on an even ground when there are laws limiting their liability to a miniscule amount compared to the damage that could be done?
That's a patch for a failure of human society, especially in the US.
How can it be considered fair competition it the total costs of dealing with fuel aren't included (whether you call it vaulting "treasure" or the cost of running a fuel mortuary makes no difference)
The nuclear plants are paying the cost of storing used fuel and disposing of nuclear waste. They'll also pay the cost of shutting the plant down.
How can it be considered fair competition if there's land made unusable to society far into the future?
Since the nuclear plant owner also owns the land, this cost is already accounted for.
If it allows society to enter into having population, housing, or industrial densities that are otherwise unsustainable, aren't we walking into a trap by using it? (locked in - I'm sure some feel that has happened already) How long can society sustain building plants that tie up resources long term but only produce for perhaps 50 years?
Recycle the materials that were in the first plant to make the next plant. Repeat.
Doesn't this encourage us to use other resources at unsustainable levels? Are we failing to see a bigger picture for the future of mankind?
Nope to the first question. Yes to the second. I think it's remarkably foolish to elevate sustainability to such a high level. Sustainabilty is a constraint on humanity not a purpose. If we develop technology that changes those constraints, sure, I see concerns about whether the technology will always be (which is a class of moral hazards present in a lot of new technologies) there as valid, but not in itself a reason to not implement the technology.
Shouldn't we be moving towards technology that can sustain society indefinitely? Is this supposed to be it?
We have other priorities. For example, elevating billions of people out of low standards of living. Maybe we can't give everyone a particular fossil fuel-based standard of living, but we can vastly improving the quality of life for everyone on the planet. Nuclear power is a very effective tool in the box for doing that. I'll relinquish that tool for a more effective tool, but not for moral hazard arguments.
I consider a free, high standard of living society a higher priority than "sustainable" societies, especially when the threshold for sustainability is set arbitrarily without regard for what humans can actually do. Further, the society can shift to sustainable technologies at a future time. There is considerable flexibility and capability in our use of unsustainable resources. Let's do the stuff that matters first.
The day Germany finally phases out coal would be the day coal runs out
We also have the European cap and trade markets. They still have fixed "hard" caps on CO2 emissions by country and Kyoto Treaty obligations. I don't buy the claim that coal will be there to compensate for the absence of nuclear.
There is no technical reason for the digital control system to be any less reliable than the analog, and many reasons it could be much more reliable, the problem, as always, comes down to money. A properly implemented Safety Integrity type SIL3 digital control system is extremely safe and reliable, but it is also expensive and somewhat complex to implement. Hacking is a non-issue when properly designed, but the problem with that is the bean counters or plant management/plant engineering will demand access to data from inside the control network at home or the corporate office a couple states over.
What is not safe is being completely reliant on analog instrumentation and control systems which are probably no longer manufactured and are 30 to 40 years old. To make it worse, when something does fail on you, you are held hostage by companies who have made their very lucrative career maintaining and repairing the old stuff. My experience in my current job exemplifies this, where a piece of equipment that would have run us $2000 even a decade ago is now in the $12-16k range, if it is available at all. We're talking mainstream stuff, like Square-D SyMax controllers from the mid-90s, not exotic radiation-rated control systems from the '60s and '70s.
In my experience there has always seemed to be a real disconnect between the expectations of management and the safety desires of control engineers. Coming from the engineering side of things, it is vitally important to educate the decision makers in how safety systems are put together, and the stringent requirements that make them safe. I have found a great way to get things going is to find a good local control systems rep and let them come in and present their wares, they typically have the correct mix of technical and business staff to keep both sides happy.
Which is, for Germany, an easy thing to do, since the benchmark for the Kyoto protocol was the emission level of 1990, that is for FRG and GDR together. The GDR emissions were bad and most of its industry was closed after the reunion, so Germany does have an unfair advantage in this case.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Add a few tonnes of non-radiactive lead around the computer if you must. It is still much less expensive than the current neutrino detectors.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
It's also worth noting that Germany has already hit their cap once in 2005. As the cap is lowered and their industry continues to increase demand for electricity, I think we'll see substantial impact on coal plants.
I would not bet on it since the production continues the move to China, as it happens in most industrial countries.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I can understand why the "upgrade" -- parts just aren't available. We had similar problems.
However, we ran into trouble with the control of some touchy reactions (time-dependant, gain up to 5). Single local A/D would work, but data highway definitely had interactions with the Proportional-Integral-Derivative control algorithms. We had to hard-wire the signals into the PID.
I don't understand the reasoning behind being afraid of hackers. JUST DON'T PUT THE FUCKING NUKE ON THE INTERNET!!! Keep the thing off the grid and you're golden. Then all you have to worry about is physical security, which is exactly what you had to worry about before when you were analog......
This is the dumbest thing I ever heard of. I recall when we got the first MIG-29 and the radios all had tubes instead of transistors. We were all laughing at how primitive the soviets were then there was that blinding flash of the obvious and we realized that these aircraft wouldn't fall out of the sky in the presence of nuclear blasts and resultant EMP. So, now were are deliberately making a nuclear power station susceptible to EMP and running out of control? Dumb, dumb, dumb! Digital gauges add complexity and unreliability. Give me a gauge and lever any day.
....2012? Hey, what do you know...it couldn't POSSIBLY be hacked and lead to anything bad, 2012 should be a quiet year, right?? RIGHT?!
Moble phone vendor supporting the OS, does that make you sleep at night? It fine with it, Black Berry's QNX division's software is actually really reliable, uses a mature and stable micro-kernel, so it very very rare for it to need a reboot. They use QNX on carrier grade Cisco routers too.
or the omega catalog, or Digikey, or any place that sells this stuff ?
(i know, nuke stuff costs 5X more cause it is "certified" or whatever, but it is the same crap, re badged and repriced)
like buying a laptop with a non std screen size, buying analog probably costs more - cause it is no longer std
and, I would guess, the morons they now have running the plants might not be able to interpret an analog scale....
Actually I think they are less common. Don't fission reactors emit electron anti-neutrinos?
I hear they're going to shovel hippies into furnaces.
iAgree. This would be dobleplusgod.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
I was a small part of one such project a bit over decade ago with the recommisioning of a retired coal fired plant for automated operation so no point in attempting to blind me with science to push your line. How many billions will the control system cost? It won't? How many billions do you think the rest of a new nuclear power station will cost and can you spare the decade to build the thing?
Of course - but what you apparently do not even know is that thermal power plants of all kinds are typically shut down every three to five years for preventative maintainance anyway and only someone pretending to be a homocidal idiot would propose replacing the control systems in a nuclear reactor while it is running!
Give up. Stop trying to mislead people here. Since you are obviously doing it deliberately you deserve any insults you get. Is this a silly game of pretending to be stupid to catch out the poorly educated and the inexperienced?
Many of the old reactor designs suck (the real horrors in the USA at least were shut down after TMI anyway) but what Westinghouse et al will sell you today is not much better. Prototypes of new designs are not going to able to supply much electricity as people tinker with them to make improvements so if you want nukes to generate power you are either stuck with what you've got or a vast amount of expense to build something almost identical and have it ready a decade later when it's already obsolete.
Just because that doesn't describe you personally does not mean that it does not describe many that post comments on this site. Look at just about any story on this site that mentions any form of energy which was posted before the tsunami and you'll see such cargo cult nuke fanboys coming out of the woodwork writing bullshit like "nuclear waste does not exist" and singing the praises of stuff we gave up on as a dead end in the 1970s.
It's also worth looking at the history of synroc (now finally being deployed after decades) as an example of idiocy and cheering for the team getting in the way of real science to solve a real problem. Nuclear fanboys don't advance nuclear power. People that treat it with respect instead of assuming it is already perfect advance nuclear power.
U.S. nuclear workers have LOWER than average incidence of cancer deaths and heart deaths, please provide the sources for your imagining that it is higher for them. It's called the "healthy worker effect", and having worked in nuclear plants they take safety much more seriously than other industrial plants.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/04/11/nuclear_power.html
all candian reactors are CANDU design and are dumping tritium into the great lakes and elsewhere. In no way should the U.S. emulate Canada's reactors, designed by and for beer-addled Canucks
If it is digital it will contact the net -eventually- Stuxnet used sneaker net.
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
" A recent study based on many years of weather data found that a combination of wind and solar is base-load compatible with surprisingly small storage capability."
If it isn't published by the photovoltaics industry association of germany or similar I'd be very interested in seeing that study.
Normally PV produces power at exactly the wrong points in the demand curve except in places where a lot of air conditioning is used and most power storage methods are hopelessly expensive and ineffecient for anything large scale.
Hmm . . . actually I left the industry in protest of radiological practices at an US power station. I considered suing for a period of time. To the average joe, it would seem that I had many reasons to bad mouth the industry. I have my problems with how things run but wouldn't compromise my integrity by representing things falsely. No matter who it hurts or helps. You might want to look up that word "integrity".
So tell me, how many people have died due to radiological conditions there? Give it a break. The plant survived an above design basis accident (at least what they could imagine in the 60's and 70's). IT IS A MESS from my perspective, but at the end of the day, not nearly the boogie man the media has led us to believe.
Let's forget Germany here and look at Austria. We boast we are non nuclear (we have one full ready, never stocked, never turned on) and say NO to nuclear energy. We get most of our electricity from water (river, damns), coal, a bit oil and gas. A think you can forget wind here. There are no constant wind areas.
Water is great in spring to autumn, but in winter, when rivers are low and glaciers are frozen we import energy from our nuclear producing neighbor countries ...
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919