Nuclear Plant Operators… GASP…. Surfing the internet???

Okay, I admit it.  I’ve been at work in a circumstance where I should have been writing code or responding to e-mails and I may have hit up Facebook or Google News.  Sometimes I had a half-assed excuse to it, like that the weather was bad and I needed to know if there were any impending weather emergencies that might force the business to close early.  I might also say justify my Facebook surfing as “exploring the possibilities of social marketing.”   The fact of the matter is that I was slacking a little from time to time.   Who amongst us hasn’t?

But uh oh… it seems nuclear plant operators may have surfed the net

Via CNN:

NRC: Nuclear technicians surfed web on the job

Nine technicians responsible for monitoring operations at a Louisiana nuclear power plant spent on-duty time surfing the Internet — visiting websites that included news, sports, fishing and retirement information — jeopardizing the safety of the plant, federal regulators say.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission disclosed the web-surfing activities Monday in a letter that proposes a $140,000 fine against the River Bend nuclear power station, 24 miles northwest of Baton Rouge.

No pornography sites were accessed, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. And importantly, the NRC said, the computer use did not present an avenue for hackers to gain access to reactor control systems, a modern-day fear at industrial plants.

But the NRC said the web-surfing control room operators were directly responsible for monitoring the reactor and other plant systems, and that their actions violated plant procedures requiring operators to remain attentive and focused on their work.

According to an NRC investigation, nine operators “deliberately violated” the safety procedures by surfing the web between January and April of 2010. Three of the nine did so with such frequency and duration that they are being issued “severity level three enforcement violations.” (Severity level one represents the greatest significant violation and severity level four is the lowest.) The remaining six operators will receive severity level four violations.

The operators were not named by the NRC.

An NRC spokesman said the proposed fine for web surfing is the only such action for web surfing in memory, and may be the only such action in the history of the agency.

In a notice to Entergy Operations Inc., operators of the River Bend Station, the NRC said that it appears that operators “remained attentive to reactor operations, indications, and alarms” while surfing the Internet.

“However, because most of the operators involved knew and understood” the prohibitions on Internet access, they exhibited “deliberate misconduct” and engaged in “hundreds of instances” of accessing the Internet from the “at-the-controls” area of the control room.

Score one for ridiculously reporting.

No, there was never a safety risk. While I don’t know exactly what the operators were assigned to do or how the systems operated here, all indications are that they were simply passing some time by surfing the net when they didn’t have any need to directly interact with the controls. Nuclear reactors certainly do not require continuous second by second human input nor do they need to have a reactor operator spending hours blankly staring at the dials that usually don’t change. Granted, all indicators are checked frequently, as they should be, but that was never interrupted.

It seems that in this case the operators were doing something many of us have: using company computers with internet access for personal surfing. Companies don’t like this, of course, because it tends to encourage employees to spend their time non-productively. If not for the internet, the operators might be more prone to doing something more useful for the company during the time they spend babysitting the control room. It’s like anything else, where the operator is primarily there for contingencies or if problems arise.

Still, this really just isn’t a news story. The workers never left their posts and they were ready to respond to any incident. That’s the important thing. I guess in the future they’ll have to go back to old fashioned paper crossword puzzles and magazines.

Read more at Depleted Cranium