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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>

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