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Some Nuke Plants Still Have Y2K Bugs
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... "
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?
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.
slashdot broke my sig
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.
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?
A stuck door, perhaps? Mechanical failures are the number one failure of things that break. Think about that.
Slashdot is in Holland, Michigan.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
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.
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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!
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