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."

Duke Energy Forever

[Tau Neutrino]

And they said it would never arrive...

Great timing.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Absolutely nothing. We went with the proven nuclear-industry reliability of Siemens(tm)(r) brand PLC hardware. Absolutely nothing could go wrong.

Re:Great timing.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

We wouldn't want to fall behind Iran...

Re:Duke Energy Forever

[jd]

What about the Nukem part? :)

Re:Great timing.

[jon.siebert1]

no, Sony is going to take care of the security.

Re:Great timing.

[Iamthecheese]

Windows XP was a stable, hugely popular operating system that has had over a decade of bug and security patches. Give me XP over the latest xnix flavor any day.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[dotancohen]

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!

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear they're going to shovel hippies into furnaces.

I don't get it...

[inthealpine]

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.