Thread

1. freeli · 1790375986 · focus · HN ↗

   A certain nuclear power plant had a Windows NT 4.0 machine running as late as 2007. The reason is interesting.

   The machine's purpose was to report status of the control rods that mitigate nuclear reactions. Basically, "are the rods inserted, and if so, how many / how far?". I want to emphasize that this was reporting only, NOT control.

   The original software was written back in the 80's, when the plant was originally commissioned, for AmigaOS. Of course, it's hard to buy Amigas anymore, and the original one died long ago (nobody remembers when).

   So in the mid '90s, the utility purchased an AmigaOS emulator that ran on Windows NT 4.0, which was current at the time. The emulator (IIRC) was developed by a firm in the UK. The firm went out of business sometime in the late '90s. The control rod monitoring software ran under this emulator on top of NT4.

   Windows NT 4.0 was the last OS to allow the emulation software direct access to the physical hardware that produced the status signal. Later versions of Windows abstracted the hardware access away, and the monitoring software broke. Because the emulation company had gone belly up, there was no way to fix the incompatibility.

   So the utility had a choice: get new hardware/software certified (by NRC?), or keep doing what they were doing with the software (and hardware) that they had. They chose the latter.

   So this is how, in 2007, during a tour of the facility, I stumbled across a Pentium 1 system running an AmigaOS emulator on Windows NT 4.0 that was responsible for displaying the status of the control rods of a nuclear power plant.

   Spare hardware for this setup was purchased off of eBay and stocked on an adjacent shelf.

   1. sajithdilshan · 1790413535 · focus · HN ↗

      This is crazy. Why on earth wouldn’t the respective government spend money to modernize a critical infrastructure like a nuclear power plant?

      This is how we would end up with nuclear disasters, not because the technology is bad, but purely because of mismanagement and human negligence.

      1. onion2k · 1790414426 · focus · HN ↗

         This is crazy. Why on earth wouldn’t the respective government spend money to modernize a critical infrastructure like a nuclear power plant?

         Safety and reliability come from understanding the system. Something that's old but that you know everything about is far safer than something new. This risk is that the people who know move on, or the sources of replacement parts stop working, or that other things around the system change. Then the risk curve inverts and you find the old system more of a liability than a asset.

         Almost always people choose to update things either too early or too late. Knowing when to do something is hard.

         1. sajithdilshan · 1790419185 · focus · HN ↗

            That’s pure negligence. It’s not like the people that have the know how disappear suddenly . It’s the responsibility of the management to make sure the knowledge transferred to new generation.

            I guess that kind of thinking is what led to the collapse of ancient civilisations like why even bother to improve anything and let everything decay and die out

            1. somenameforme · 1790423386 · focus · HN ↗

               You can only say such things with hindsight. In the moment, nobody knows what the future will hold. Take the space program in the US for instance. In 1969 we landed a man on the Moon. We'd repeat that several times until 1972. At that point Nixon made a speech which implied various unpleasant things about space's future, but he'd be out of office, disgraced, a couple of years later, so how big a deal could it have been anyhow?

               I think almost nobody from that era would have believed you if you told them that more than 50 years later not a single human would have traveled beyond low Earth orbit, and that we'd now be struggling to recreate what we did in 1969. Furthermore a significant chunk of the world doesn't even believe we landed on the Moon anymore, no doubt in part because of this apparent anachronism.

               It's not like there was any sort of collective or even singular decision to just let things die out. I mean sure Nixon did his thing intentionally, but even as a President in the golden years of the US, he was still just one man.

               1. ac29 · 1790520544 · focus · HN ↗

                  > I think almost nobody from that era would have believed you if you told them that more than 50 years later not a single human would have traveled beyond low Earth orbit

                  Four people went around the moon earlier this year (leaving earth's orbit for the first time since '72)

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.