[HN Gopher] Spending an afternoon in the Sizewell control-room s...
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Spending an afternoon in the Sizewell control-room simulator
Author : speckx
Score : 68 points
Date : 2024-05-06 16:27 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bentasker.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bentasker.co.uk)
| stuff4ben wrote:
| TFA states that they're moving towards touchscreens instead of
| physical switches. To me that doesn't sound like a good idea. But
| maybe I just hate that it's happened in so many vehicles these
| days.
| EricE wrote:
| It's a horrible idea. In a crises the last thing you need to be
| doing is searching through pages of soft buttons looking for
| that critical control vs. reaching out to a physical control
| that's always in the same spot no matter what.
| pasabagi wrote:
| It's definitely a bad idea, but at the same time, are nuclear
| power plants the sort of things that go horribly wrong if a
| human doesn't press a button quickly enough? I would have
| thought all the things that need to be timely would probably
| be automatically managed, leaving humans to do the high-level
| decisionmaking.
| kimixa wrote:
| Also depends what buttons - it makes sense to have the
| "Might need to push quickly in an emergency" buttons big
| and physical - they're already shown to be treated
| differently in the current implementation, being larger and
| red in the photos.
|
| But for things not really needed in such a situation? Or
| even access to things that aren't available within reach
| otherwise due to size constraints? A touchscreen might be
| the best solution.
|
| There's probably more total sensors in the reactor than
| there can be physical dials for in a room of that size -
| there'a probably already some level of ordering which are
| the "important" ones, or which are at prime real-estate by
| the operators on the panel and not the other side of the
| room.
|
| There's lots of steps between "Huge array of switches and
| dials for every possible thing" and "Single ipad in the
| middle of an empty room", after all.
| Gare wrote:
| I'm sure the really important switches (like the big "red"
| SCRAM/trip button) will still be physical. As they are in
| SpaceX Dragon capsule.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| With the touchscreen control interfaces that I myself have
| designed and built (which were for things far less important
| than nuclear power), there was no paging involved.
|
| Everything had a place, and that place was always the same
| day-to-day (barring infrequent redesigns of some aspect or
| other, but old-school buttons-and-knobs control panels
| sometimes see revisions as well as the reality of what they
| control changes over time).
| aftbit wrote:
| Let's hope for more like airplane MFDs and less like iPads.
| smartmic wrote:
| You are not alone. Volkswagen is already rolling back to
| physical buttons.
|
| https://www.engadget.com/volkswagen-drivers-want-more-physic...
| littlestymaar wrote:
| The biggest issue with touchscreen is that the tech they are
| using is likely going to disappear in a few years at best, and
| getting replacement parts is going to be a mess.
|
| Fun fact, Olkiluoto's EPR and Flamanville, the upcoming French
| power plant, must use 4/3 screens because all the GUI stuff
| where design for this kind of display, but in the retail market
| such a screen format has long been replaced and now they are
| already struggling to get spare parts.
| toast0 wrote:
| If they have room, most monitors let you put a 4:3 signal in
| and will pillar box it for you with the proper settings. They
| may stretch by default, and if you need the visible portion
| to be a specific size, you've got to have a lot of extra room
| for the blank section... So I can see how that might not
| fit...
|
| I have seen some new 4:3 displays around 25" sold on amazon
| for arcade machines... Price is too high for me, but I'm not
| a power plant.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| A quick Google search shows no particular shortage of 19" 4x3
| touchscreen monitors for sale, in a variety of forms:
| Desktop, VESA-mount, open-frame, and 19" rack-mount. (Other
| sizes were also shown to exist, but this was not an
| exhaustive search.)
|
| It seems like a thing that is unlikely to disappear soon,
| since a lot of industrial customers -- globally -- are very
| comfortable with rack-mounted displays, and 16x9 rackmount
| screens are kind of meh compared to 4x3.
| dylan604 wrote:
| In a car, you want to be able to operate controls with minimal
| eye contact, and ideally with no eye contact necessary. A touch
| screen is the opposite and require eye contact.
|
| In a control room, you want the operators to be looking at the
| button/switch/knob they are about to operate, especially if
| they have warning/status lights on the button.
|
| These are not the same thing. However, I agree that touch
| screen still seems like a not good idea, but for different
| reasons.
| nsteel wrote:
| Can you get touchscreens that are still usable when they get
| water on them? Say, from sprinkler system? I'm sure they have
| thought of this, but that's one pretty common situation where
| you really don't want a touchscreen for anything important. Of
| course, it might be almost impossible to get the screen wet in
| a nuclear control room, they probably have a different fire
| suppression system anyway.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Sure. Use a resistive digitizer instead of a capacitive
| digitizer.
| wincy wrote:
| As other people have said, I think auto makers are learning the
| error of their ways. I just bought a 2024 Toyota Sequoia last
| week, and love that basically every control has a button!
| There's some infotainment stuff but that works with voice
| controls, like navigation and CarPlay.
|
| There are dozens of different buttons, so it definitely takes a
| period of learning to get proficient, but it just feels so
| nice, like I'm playing a multi ton musical instrument.
| thesimp wrote:
| Interesting that they move to touchscreens. With all the Hacker
| News stuff that comes by every day I can easily say that 99.9% is
| not what I do in daily life. But building control rooms for large
| industrial installations is. And from my perspective we see very
| little requests for touchscreens. They have a place, for example
| on a machine in an environment were a keyboard would be in the
| way. But only if the operator would not be wearing gloves. Very
| specific applications.
|
| For large modern control rooms users will have either a keyboard
| and/or a custom button panel next to the mouse/trackball. With
| the mouse/trackball being the primary input device to click on
| objects on the screen. In many cases they don't even type in
| values but click on buttons on the screen to ramp up or ramp down
| a process value. Then they don't need a keyboard.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| One advantage of using touchscreens in that very specific
| application is that it makes it easier to build simulators.
|
| Every nuclear power plant has its own, somewhat unique control
| room, and to train operators properly, you have to replicate
| all the panels that make up that room, and it is much easier
| with touchscreens.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| In France, one day every year ( _les journees de l 'energie EDF_)
| you can go visit nuclear power plants: you'll get access to the
| control-room simulator (where my wife used to work, BTW) and even
| visit the "machine room" where the turbines are. This is a very
| cool visit, which I deeply recommend if you are into this kind of
| things. (Idk if it's open to foreign visitors though, likely yes
| for EU citizens, but other nations seems a bit less likely but
| not completely impossible given you don't get to see any
| sensitive stuff).
| nsteel wrote:
| You used to be able to visit Dungeness but they are apparently
| still waiting for COVID19 to pass.
| https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g3318368-d21...
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