I made an earlier post concerning problems that might occur at the rollover to 2001, based on Y2K testing I did at a nuclear plant. Today, I had to go in to work (at another nuclear plant, not the one I did testing at), and found out that the plant had experienced numerous minor computer glitches at midnight, last night!

That jogged my memory a bit, the problems I had found during testing last year showed that some computer systems couldn't handle a 366 day leap year properly for the year 2000. We tested for the last day of 2000 (12/31/2000), and for the rollover to 2001 (1/1/2001), however some plants did NOT test for these dates (although they tested many others, including 12/31/1999 and the rollover, and leap years 2004, 2008, etc).

Apparently, my current plant didn't test for 12/31/2000 and the rollover to 1/1/2001. At midnight last night, several computers rolled over to 1/1/2002, and several control room monitors froze up. All but one restarted upon a system restart. System wide there was a problem with loosing a satallite time signal.

Funny in a way, not so funny in others. Y2K was never a big deal since we knew about it and dealt with it. But what occurred last, although minor, should never have occurred. To put it in perspective, if we had not done anything for the plant systems for y2k, we would have still have kept running, but likely would have had a a few more moderate problems that could have affected our ability to comply with regulatory monitoring requirements. Will keep you posted for what might happen for tonights rollover.

-- Anonymous, December 31, 2000

Answers

we're all gonna die...

-- Anonymous, December 31, 2000

http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/DAILY/psr.htm

looks like most are up and running except for refueling.

-- Anonymous, December 31, 2000

Welcome to doomerhood David. We'll all still cleaning the egg of our faces and now you tell us we were right all along? GO FIGURE!

-- Anonymous, December 31, 2000

Have you got your KI?

-- Anonymous, December 31, 2000

Have you got your KI just in case?

-- Anonymous, December 31, 2000

shitdavid.Didn'tyoulearnanythinglastyear?(Sorry,myspacebarisstuck.)

-- Anonymous, January 01, 2001

Why do you sell Doomers short?

You have an ice storm that knocks out your power? Where can you go for a hot cup of coffee?

The recession hits and you get downsized. Where can you go to borrow a cup of flour? Not to mention the endless amusement that Doomers like DJ Olson and his friends provide>

And don't believe that crap about Doomers being armed and ready to take out the neighbors. Just hold up a can or two of pineapple or some other "treat" (ever lived on MREs for longer than 48 hours? Then you'll understand about the pineapple) when you go to visit, and all will be well.

Now, seriously. Of course the nukes are having problems. The nukes have *always* had problems. And planes will fall from the sky. Gravity makes that happen, you know.

There's lots to worry about: Fighting in Israel (now going into its bazillionth year), that the Chinese have our nuclear secrets and recipe for McDonald's Secret Sauce, and that G.W. is going to offer CPR a position in the Dept. of Energy!

The latter scares me most!

Happy 2001, everyone. Pass the bottle over here.............

-- Anonymous, January 01, 2001

There is nothing in this mornings Plant
Status Report nor in the Daily Event
Report that supports this allegation.

This is only one reference to any problem
at about this time:

SAN ONOFRE 2

MANUAL ACTUATION OF CONTAINMENT EMERGENCY COOLER UNITS

"On December 31, 2000, at about 0130 PST, containment normal cooler unit ME201 tripped on indicated high temperature (cause under investigation). During preparations to start the opposite train containment normal cooler Unit (ME202), in response to the expected slow increase in containment temperature, Operators manually started the 4 containment emergency cooler units (an engineered safety features system). At about 0220 PST Operators started normal cooler unit ME202 and stopped the 4 ECUs. Consistent with the guidance provided in NUREG-1022, Rev 1, SCE is reporting this occurrence in accordance with 10CFR50.72(b)(2)(ii) for a manual start of an ESF component.

"At the time of this occurrence Unit 2 was operating at about 100% power, Unit 3 was operating at about 85% power; and Unit 1 remains permanently defueled. SCE will notify the NRC resident inspectors about this occurrence and will provide them a copy of this report."

-- Anonymous, January 02, 2001

General observations:

1. We do seem determined to rehash Y2K over and over, don't we? :)

2. How anyone could read what David said above and think, "he's become a doomer!" is beyond me. Anything but.

David was like me in one very important respect: he never said that there would be no Y2K problems whatsoever. He said that they wouldn't have been beyond our ability to workaround.

Which is what I said all through 1999. And which is what he says again, above, if you read it carefully.

3. I thought I was done repeating this, but I'll do so one last time, since we seem determined to keep rehashing it. I'm speaking just for myself, but I rather imagine that most of us former "Debunkees" would say about the same thing.

I've never said that common-sense preparations for shortages, power outages, etc., were a bad idea. Not once. (I defy anyone to show me the post if they say otherwise.) What I tried to address last year was panic, gloom, doom, and Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt (FUD).

As Dirt Road used to say, "wear a seatbelt, don't drive a freekin' tank." A great analogy. That was my attitude as well.

In fact, I am on record as having complained (several times) that we Americans are "instant" and "convenience" people. We just ASSUME that the store will be there on the way home, that we can always stop and get gas or important medicine or milk. We live from store-trip to store-trip.

That's not wise. You SHOULD keep some extra around the house in case the power fails, or the roads get iced up, or whatever. I've NEVER criticized that, and never will, BECAUSE I MYSELF DO IT.

(My big one, is medicine. If you depend on a prescription, DON'T wait until you get down to your last pill to get it refilled; do it several days in advance; give yourself time in case there are problems!)

And yet, as regular as clockwork, Doomers mistunderstood where I was coming from. They thought that, because I specifically and pointedly disagreed with them about the capability of computers to cause problems equivalent to a natural disaster, I was specifically opposed to preparation for the unknown in general.

I was not, and am not. A lot of people who got hit in this current cold weather are GLAD that they have a generator. Perhaps many, many more wish they did! :)

What I addressed was FUD: buying a year's worth of barely-palatable food, gasoline and water against the possibility that a computer bug could bring civilization to its knees.

Storing a week or two (or even a few months' worth) of food, medicine and other supplies is just common sense. I've been doing it for years, having been raised in hurricane country down in NC. :)

-- Anonymous, January 02, 2001

Well, not much left to say, Steven said it all quite well! I will give an update however, the glitches appear to be soley related to a glitch in the satallite date/time interface signal protocol.

In the power industry, as far as control systems and instrumenation, Y2K was never a big deal as long as we properly addressed it (we did) and probably wouldn't have been a big deal to control systems even if we had NOT addressed it. All in all,it was just another potential problem that had to be evaluated and solved.

The financial and accounting programs that used dates extensively on the business end, and to a lesser degree some trending algorithms in the monitoring software, were much more prone to serious problems with Y2K. These were fixed. I did loose power at the house today for 7 hours, so my preps were handy (gallon of milk and normal stock of food).

God bless and happy new year!

-- Anonymous, January 03, 2001

David, why did the plant not have an
entry in the Daily Event Report?
Or was the San Onofre report related
to this incident?

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2001

spider, The y2.001k bug I reported didn't affect any systems to the degree it would have had to be reported, so thats why it isn't in the the NRC daily event report. I did take a look at the NRC event reports on Tuesday myself, but I also didn't see anything attributable to y2.001k. I don't remember the San Onofre event, so I can't speak to it other than to tell you that this was not the plant I am at (there were no events listed for my plant).

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2001

December 31, 2000 was listed as a possible critical date in the NRC's 1998 contingency plan.

http://www.nrc.gov/NRC/COMMISSION/COMS/com1998-036/y2kcplan.html

Link

December 31, 2000 (366th Day of Uncommon Leap Year)

Some programs operate by counting the days in the year. If the writers of these programs were unaware of the uncommon-leap-year situation, their systems may not fail until December 31, 2000, the (unexpected) 366th day of the year.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2001

Interesting footnote, good find. I'm not sure if I was ever aware that the NRC contingincy plan document included 12/31/2000. Most (all?) of the nuclear plants relied heavily on NEI/NUSMG documents, including NEI/NUSMG 98-07 Contingency planning and 97-01 Bottom line is interesting, I saw many test plans, and very few tested for 12/31/2000 to 1/1/2001. Ours did, I put it there for testing embedded systems. Nonetheless, the world survived with only a few glitches reported (and probably many unreported).

-- Anonymous, January 07, 2001

survived with only a few glitches reported
David, make that thousands of glitches reported.
But that may be what you meant by a few.

-- Anonymous, January 08, 2001