Inside NIRMA - Spring March 2018 Issue
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A Retrospective on Information<br />
Management in Nuclear Power<br />
By Eugene Y. Yang, Principal Consultant,<br />
KISMET Consulting, Inc.<br />
his column takes a look back on<br />
information management (data,<br />
documents, and records) in the nuclear<br />
power industry. I have been fortunate<br />
to either be employed by or consulted to many of<br />
the utilities and power plants in the U.S.,<br />
seeing where things were and how they evolved<br />
over the past 35+ plus years. The plan is to<br />
make this a regular column in the <strong>Inside</strong><br />
<strong>NIRMA</strong> magazine.<br />
You know the story that you tell<br />
your children on how tough you had it<br />
growing up (“I had to walk five miles to<br />
school everyday, in the snow, winds howling,<br />
wind chill in minus 20’s…even in the spring…<br />
and it was uphill there and back!”)? You<br />
think you have it rough today?<br />
Scanning documents at 100 ppm,<br />
processing “born-digital” documents<br />
and records, uploading them into an<br />
electronic repository, so that you can<br />
view them in less than five seconds in a<br />
web browser, smartphone, or tablet<br />
(“Five seconds! Man, that’s SLOW.”). And<br />
then there are the times when the<br />
technology folks sound like a John<br />
Wayne movie (“We have to figure out how to<br />
build a cyber defense so Apache Tomcats don’t<br />
take our Red Hat!”).<br />
Well, back in the day, at the start of<br />
my career, all this processing stuff was<br />
paper-based. I found myself helping the<br />
plant folks navigate the nascent use of<br />
computers in data, document and<br />
records (“…in howling winds, freezing<br />
temperatures.” Hmmm. Actually, for<br />
plants under construction, it was the<br />
truth!).<br />
My first job in the nuclear power<br />
industry, in 1983, was with a southernbased<br />
utility. Computerization occurred<br />
with mainframes and minicomputers,<br />
accessed through monochrome or color<br />
terminals. Even then, however, there<br />
was a need to envision integrated<br />
systems, linking plant control systems,<br />
management systems, and administrative<br />
systems. I had the opportunity to cut<br />
my teeth on “information systems<br />
architecture” – conceptualizing business<br />
and system architectures that sought to<br />
provide the path forward from current<br />
implementations to holistic integration.<br />
Back then, it was a fundamentally datadriven<br />
exercise; paper-based records<br />
were stored on shelves, in banker boxes,<br />
file cabinets, desks, floors, etc. At that<br />
time, there were three stations: one in<br />
construction, another in startup, and the<br />
third one in operation. For a young<br />
engineer in IT, it was great to be able to<br />
get into the battles of mainframe vs<br />
mini, integration vs. standalone, and<br />
plant vs. plant.<br />
Three Mile Island caused the<br />
industry to address the need to have<br />
accurate record indexes, available to a<br />
wide audience, accessible in near realtime,<br />
and have it redundantly stored.<br />
One of the interesting reactions to these<br />
requirements was the use of Tandem<br />
Non-Stop systems, fault-tolerant<br />
computer systems (used for ATM<br />
networks, banks, stock exchanges, and<br />
other similar commercial transaction<br />
processing applications requiring<br />
maximum uptime and zero data loss).<br />
The thinking was that Tandem<br />
computers provided that redundant,<br />
“we’re always going to be up” that<br />
would allow access to records in case of<br />
another TMI incident.<br />
Did you know there used to be<br />
word-processing pools? Wordprocessing<br />
computer equipment (think<br />
Wang; IBM Displaywriter) was so<br />
expensive, you could only justify having<br />
them by centralizing the resources. We<br />
would type up our drafts in the<br />
mainframe-based terminal text editor,<br />
print them out, then hand the printout<br />
to the word-processing staff to type it.<br />
Then we would “stet” or otherwise<br />
redline in a vicious cycle to get the final<br />
document. (Some luddites in our office<br />
wrote their stuff out WITH A PEN, and<br />
then handed it to word-processing.<br />
Hah. I was “modern”.)<br />
But, then the emergence of the<br />
microcomputer. I was an early adopter<br />
of the Apple II+ and educated my way<br />
through spreadsheets using VisiCalc. At<br />
the office, we got our first IBM PC,<br />
shared among our section of 16 people.<br />
It had 256K RAM, a 5 ¼ “ floppy drive,<br />
and a whopping 10 Mbytes of awesome<br />
hard drive. Pretty much processed<br />
words and spread sheeted budgets with<br />
that puppy. Later, at another position, I<br />
actually had in my desk my own Iomega<br />
10 Mbyte cartridge disk (think Banquet<br />
fried chicken dinner packaging…hmm,<br />
hungry…). I was being “efficient” by<br />
not clogging up the drive on the PC.<br />
Eugene has been a member of <strong>NIRMA</strong> for<br />
over 32 years. At the time he joined,<br />
<strong>NIRMA</strong> had only been in existence for 10<br />
years. He would love to hear about the early<br />
days from others, so please email stories and<br />
anecdotes to him at<br />
eugene.yang@kismetconsulting.com.<br />
6 <strong>Spring</strong> <strong>2018</strong> <strong>NIRMA</strong>.org <strong>Inside</strong> <strong>NIRMA</strong>