Well, Mr. Pollyanna, you advised **DOOMSAYERS** not to read your post, and since I consider myself to be among the ranks of the resonably concerned (a position which for some reason you have difficulty recognizing).....I went ahead and read it. What great news. I want the power grid to work!
BUT.
Who's pulling a *Clinton* here and splitting terms and meanings? Look how carefully they narrow the nuclear power question, and then read Rick Cowles view of the situation below. (the section marked with ***** deals with the shut down statement) Notice how they only mention safe shut down ( no small thing!) I can't find anyone at this point who differs with Cowles's broader view of the problem. So, I remain.... REASONABLY CONCERNED.
>>>"At nuclear power plants, no Y2K problem has been found that would prevent any safety system from shutting down a plant in an emergency," said Gent. <<<
More on the nuclear power industry
PARKHILL: One other thing you mentioned a while ago was that we may see some surprises out of the nuclear power industry. What sort of surprises?
COWLES: I think domestically, in the US, the nuclear industry is not so much confronted with an operational issue with Y2K as with a regulatory and paperwork issue. What they're confronted with is the necessity of meeting very strict regulatory guidelines in operating the plants. They have a certain operating envelope that they have to be in at all times. And if you're outside that operating envelope into a region where you don't know where you are, you can't run the plant. That's the concern with Y2K and the nuclear industry. I'm not concerned that there's going to be a nuclear plant meltdown in the United States that's initiated by this issue. What I'm concerned about is that if you've got a plant operating, and all of a sudden they start losing all of their monitoring and indication, and the operators don't know the status of the plant- that's when you get into a TMI or a Chernobyl situation.
PARKHILL: So they wouldn't relax regulations just to keep power running because of concerns of that sort of situation?
COWLES: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's mission in life is not to keep the plants operating under any circumstances. The NRC's mission in life is to keep the plant safe. And that means that they require them all to shut down because that's the only way they know they're going to be safe. They'll have them all shut down. That's why they put in a hard deadline of June next year for all the nuclear plants in the country to certify to them that they are or will be Year 2000 ready by December 31, 1999. They've got to certify that in June.
PARKHILL: I have read that nuclear plants have more analog controls, so they may be easier to get up to speed. Is that accurate?
**********COWLES: The analog controls in the plants are in the safe shutdown systems. So I think that's a bit of a smokescreen. They are more analog in nature, but that's because of the operational nature of the plants and how they're designed. There's still a tremendous amount of digital and automatic control involved in operating the plant, and the auxiliary components of the plant. Let me give you an example: digital feedwater control is the system that is used to control feedwater flow into the nuclear reactor. Now digital feedwater flow is not considered a safe shutdown system for a nuclear power plant. But, if you can't supply feedwater to the reactor, the reactor isn't going to operate. If the reactor doesn't operate, it's not making steam, and the turbine isn't going around, and electricity isn't coming out the other end. So it doesn't matter. There's a big smokescreen going on.
The nuclear industry is so sensitive on this issue. It really bothers me. I spent a large part of my adult life involved with nuclear energy in one way or another, either in the Navy or in the commercial power industry. I spent most of my time on the nuclear end of the business, and I know how sensitive the nuclear industry is to any criticism at all. And when you start talking about this, they get defensive. Instead of talking openly and honestly about what the issues are, and what they've got to accomplish, and how they're going to go about accomplishing it, they just put up this big defensive wall that's almost impossible to get through. And that's the nature and culture of the business.
The overall picture: the interdependency problem
In large part, the folks who are running these programs not only in nuclear facilities, but in most industrial facilities, are technicians. And the technicians who are looking at Y2K are not taking a broad view of this thing and its impact.When you look at a nuclear plant, and all of the different pieces that have to come into play: the external emergency preparedness- for example, if emergency services are down in in the local area, the plant can't operate. They continue not to think about all of the external tentacles and the impacts even under their own control. I'm talking about such things as radiation monitoring. If your radiation monitoring systems aren't working, that plant isn't operating. If your security systems aren't operating, that plant isn't operating. If your operator training database, computer-based training database is not operating, and you can't verify qualifications of the operators, that plant isn't operating. And I agree with the NRC. I agree with the Nuclear Energy Institute that safe shutdown systems in nuclear power plants are by and large not going to be impacted by the Year 2000 problem because it's solid state based, or it's analog relays, the actual safe shut-down systems, themselves. But in the necessary support systems, you have a lot of digital control out there.
And everybody keeps hearing: "Yeah, yeah. There's no impact on shutdown systems." No, there isn't. But the frustrating thing about this whole thing- and apparently myself and the NRC are the only ones that realize this- is that there's a lot of digital control in support systems out there that absolutely has to be operational, or, again, the plant doesn't operate.
PARKHILL: That leads into a question that I was going to ask, which had to do with what could be called the "interdependency problem" (or what economists call the division of labor), which goes beyond nuclear plants but deals with what you mentioned, which is the phone system, 911, and fuel, for instance coal- stockpiling coal and so forth. Now the good news is something like coal, in theory, plants can do something about that. I don't think that every plant in the country can necessarily stockpile six months worth of coal. I don't know; maybe they could.
COWLES: That'd be a mountain of coal.
PARKHILL: That's a lot. And if you have just in time delivery systems for coal, you probably will not by definition have the room to store that.
COWLES: That's correct.
PARKHILL: Unless you find that room somewhere. But even then you have to transport it to that location.
COWLES: That's correct. I gave somebody an example the other day: I said, "Imagine if you had a flip chart out and you started doing the layers on simply making power in a fossil fired facility. In a fossil-fired facility, you've got a boiler that boils water, and turns it into steam, which turns the steam turbine, which in turn turns the generator. And electricity comes out the other end. But when you start peeling the layers away on this thing, starting with the steam boiler, and you turn that flip chart over, and you say, "okay, what makes that steam boiler go?" Fuel! Where are you going to get that fuel from? The fuel is either going to be oil or coal-based for the most part for fossil facilities. You're right. You've got transportation networks that that absolutely have to be considered there.
PARKHILL: Not to mention the fact that the coal mines have to work?
COWLES: The coal mines have to work. The oil tankers have to work. The pipelines that deliver oil have to work. You just keep peeling back the layers until you get to the point where the only part in that whole supply chain that possibly isn't impacted is dinosaurs dying and decomposing.
PARKHILL/COWLES: (laughter)
PARKHILL: I tell people, "Breakfast cereals and wooden staircases are exempt. Everything else is suspect."
COWLES: (laughter) You get the pumping facilities to get the oil out of the ground. And like I said, the pipelines, the shipping networks and the actual shipping terminals themselves. And it just goes on and on and on. Now granted, there are breakdowns in that in those supply chains everyday. But they're individual, isolated. There's other methods to bring in oil, or there's other ports that you can go to, or there's another coal mine.
PARKHILL: But with Y2K, you can develop bottlenecks we've never seen?
COWLES: Yes, that's the biggest concern with supply chain issues: where is the bottleneck going to occur? There are going to be bottlenecks which will impact everybody. Where are they going to be? I don't know.
PARKHILL: And that leads into my next question, which is: what type of coordination efforts are going on now? Is the work that's being done now mainly focused on internal systems? How much work is being done with power company 'A' talking to its coal supplier, or whoever?
COWLES: If you go to just about any electric company's Web site, and look at their Year 2000 statements or go to their SEC. statements, and their 10Qs or 10Ks, and take a look at those, almost every one of them says, "We're doing what we can with our own internal systems. We can't guarantee, we're at the whim of the power grid, our neighboring electric utilities, our suppliers, blah blah blah blah." They almost all have that disclaimer now. And reasonably so.
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