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100% touchscreen nuke control room - improvement or abomination?
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coppercone2:
I got to the bottom of this shit, the problem you see is that the switch manufacturers after the fall of the USSR all got bought out by a few companies to keep legacy production up but it did not help the price. They need to keep that going, CNC machines make molds cheaper, cheap molds make bakalite cheaper, so the switches should be cheaper, they are easier to make now. The main factor is probobly dealing with the little brass contacts and rivets and shit (keystone products, aka precision stampings), it is too non standard for any random shop to say 'we are building high reliability switches now". They can build everything but the contacts cheap (small hurdle to overcome). A smart switch designer program would keep these switches around IMO, so you can select pole/throw count, give it physical dimensions, and have it make a switch.

Personally for reliability I think its non sense, a nuclear power plant is the last thing you want these in. Everything else is big and heavy and going to be around for many years and nothing gets changed quick.

Can you beat a brass shaft reliability with multilayer ceramic liquid crystal LED doped glass ? So long you orient PCB sideways a wafer switch will likely operate if you spray the technician down with a large hose while he is working. touch screen a drop of water makes it act all funny already. My refrigerator is heavy on this stuff, moisture on the bottom drawer that has some kind of fancy recessed touch temperature control shit already made the whole refrigerator act funny (it was effecting the ice machine that is 3 feet away and supposedly controlled by other items!)

IMO the whole argument with 'aviation is going this way' is bullshit, aviation only cares about weight. Unless the nuclear reactor is flying there is no reason for it. And last I heard those touch screen modernization to fighters are not as good as originally thought, particularly for EMP survival. Is it going to work any better once its a little shot up ??? You keep raising impedance on highly important controls till the whole thing works like a electrometer  :scared:... thats great for not blowing up the neighborhood. And thats just the electrical part. The other part is glass.. do you really trust glass? most stuff that relies on glass has it like either 5 inches thick or reinforces it with wire... its for corporate accounting.. absolute maximum voltage : 0.5V, energy needed to trigger.. 0.3fA

A transformer (or chemical battery) connected to a mechanical switch connected to a relay is just not even in the same planet as this stuff in terms of reliability

How much I love touch screen controls.. my oven decided to turn the burners on at 10pm once by itself to highest level, greeting me with glowing disks (old IR range,switched to induction now). honeywell air purifier with touch buttons once kept going on highest settings by itself until unplugged and plugged back in. give me my fucking switches back before you kill me with electrostatic sensors .............. >:(

For a training system, I don't know. I don't think so. I think if you had a real panel you can do the improtant training of showing people how good switches sound and feel and how partially worn switches sound and feel and what a bad switch is. You train a buncha people on paper (basically you can print out paper, have people on camera watch who touches the paper and have them turn on lights), they will have no idea what a fucked up un maintained panel feels or looks like.. so its not much different then having them read a book. Once you are working that thing the slightest difference in pressure or change in sound will tell you something is off.. not to mention tactile learning is way better.. you can turn the thing off even if you are temporarily blinded (ok this is maybe more of an issue for a pilot that got a chunk of hot fragmentation from a missile delivered into his eyeball).. and you are less likely to make a mistake because you have strong physical assosiates with operating the panel that serve as memory reminders and are conducive to mental refocus in a stressful situation.. i.e. if you know there are 5 switches in a row that require heavy force, and you make it a habit of gracefully sliding a finger over to count the switches (even while you are looking at it, you feel the count), it refocuses you to the procedure you are attempting. 

IMO a simple test is, get severely drunk, try to run something, the easier it is to run the better the UI is, for safety things. its a decent simulator of bewildering confusing stress that occurs in people sometimes
johnboxall:

--- Quote from: Circlotron on August 17, 2021, 12:05:23 am ---AFAIK nobody does car* braking by wire, so why do they think this is a good idea?
*Trailers sometimes.

--- End quote ---

Alfa Romeo Giulia.

I'm also in the anti-touchscreen club. After a few months ownership, I can use muscle memory to adjust the HVAC, stereo, headlight angle etc. in our car - without looking away from the road. No way I can do that at 110 km/h with a touch screen.
jmelson:
Abomination?  It is a TRAINING simulator!  You can't turn newbies loose on a live reactor (see Chernobyl to find out why) so you really need life-like simulators.
This one is really visually good, compared to some.  A complex system I have some experiece with is the ion accelerator at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Lab at MSU.  They went from pretty much a steam gauge console covered with meters and dials to all LCD screens over a period of 20 years or so.  But, the graphical representation of what was going on got SO MUCH better, it was a great help to outsiders, and must have been to the operators as well.  Then, they remoted everything, so an operator could crawl into the beamlines with a laptop, bring live camera views up on his screen, and operate valves, shutters and viewers while right next to the components involved.  I was REALLY impressed!

Jon
AlbertL:
I think these are the kind of high-quality switches used in nuclear control rooms: https://www.electroswitch.com/products/utility-power-switches-relays/manual-standard-instrument-and-control-switches.  I'd trust these way more than any touch screen and all the software/firmware behind it.
David Hess:
Another disadvantage is that if manual physicals controls are included as backup controls to make up for unreliable touch screen controls, then when the backup controls are needed, they are less likely to work because they are not regularly used.  They will be tested less and the operators will be less familiar with them.
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