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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.
...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.
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.
...enlighten me.
Can it be any more obvious??
FTFA:
"The goal of going digital is to save money."
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I found a pretty neat site that has a lot of cool pictures of what appears to be a modern Russian plant.
In this picture we see the control panel and yeah, it looks like it is big fucking analog panel meters and red buttons. But there's a display that is obviously some sort of digital status..not sure if it's electrical or some valve array thing, but as OP said there is already apparently some digital already.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
I was and electrician in the Naval Nuclear Power Program from 94-00 and they used hardly any digital anything. Motor controllers were made up of relays. Voltage regulators worked on saturated cores and such. Even the control rods were moved using AC or DC motors, depending on the plant. It seems hard to believe, but nuclear power is a technology from the 50s. The USS Nautilus, the first nuclear powered submarine, was launched in 1954, which I find amazing that 57 years ago they had nuclear power plants that could operate a ship while underwater, and that ship wasn't decommissioned until 1980. Yes, for alarms there are mostly just various things that trip relays such as thermocouples, pressure switches, salinity cells, etc. If you understand how the plant works, it's easy to see how it doesn't require anything digital to run. However, you could definitely save some serious cash in manpower by automating things.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
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
you could definitely save some serious cash...
Yes, and the article made that perfectly clear:
"Those utilities need to keep those plants running. To have unplanned outages as a result of an analog system isn't doing what we need it to do — that's a financial risk..."
It has nothing to do with such frivolous things like safety
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.
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.
Redundancy.
We have much the same on most oil rigs in the north sea.
While the whole HMI system is computerized there is also a "Critical Action Panel" that contains hardwired safety functions.
For example, you can trigger an "Abandon Platform Shutdown" from a single push button should the need arise. This button is independent from the computerized control system.
For something as important as a nuclear plant I would sure hope they have hardwired redundancy for the important functions.
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.
... 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
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.
I hear they're going to shovel hippies into furnaces.
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
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
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/
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.
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?
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.
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......
If you don't think there aren't fanboys who want to see older plants replaced by newer, more efficient, safer designs, please, come to Illinois. The lobby against this has been raging for a decade.
So, I don't know the Illinois case specifically, but most of the time when I hear about arguments against plant upgrades, the people doing the argument tend to be of the theory that if you don't upgrade the plant eventually it will get shut down.... very occasionally this is confused with a power company who wants to build a totally new plant instead of upgrade an old one, but . . . in general its not nuclear power 'fanboys' in the anti-upgrade lobby....