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."

Re:Really?

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

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.

Re:Ooo! I can solve that one!

[antifoidulus]

and if it's not connected to a network it becomes a very labour intensive task to push out updates to the systems to prevent against the viruses.

Maybe it is with windows with all that Microsoft Genuine advantage bullshit, but pushing out updates to Linux and OS X systems that are not connected to the Internet is pretty easy, i should know, i admined a huge network of them. Linux is probably the easiest. I just created a kickstart with the absolute minimum # of packages, used that as my base, and then put a copy of that system on the Internet to automatically download updates. All I have to do is periodically airgap the files(DVD works fine) over to the update server I set up on the LAN. All the machines just connect to that server and download their updates. Pretty damn simple. And if you are really hardcore, you can configure your machines to only download signed packages from trusted vendors(this is the default in RHEL for example). I spend maybe 15 minutes a week airgapping the things over... Now if you use that festering pile of insecure shit called Windows then you may have a point.

umm we already do this...

[gearloos]

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.

Re:Duke Energy Forever

[LordKronos]

Just wait for the next tsunami/earthquake combo.

If a tsunami hits there, then I think we've got FAR bigger things to worry about:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Oconee+Nuclear+Station&aq=&sll=33.779147,-78.706055&sspn=6.883004,16.907959&ie=UTF8&hq=Oconee+Nuclear+Station&hnear=&z=7 [google.com]

I'd bet anything big enough to reach that far inland is big enough to wipe out our entire eastern coast, from Maine to Florida.