Russia's Atomic Energy Ministry is fairly laid-back about the millennium bug. "We don't have any problems yet," spokesman Vladislav Petrov told reporters recently. "We'll deal with the problem in the year 2000." Closer to home, much closer to home, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL), which runs Sellafield, and British Energy, the massive Scottish company which produces one fifth of Britain's electricity, are working steadily on their Y2K projects.
Perhaps it should not seem worrying that British Energy's handout on the subject says: "Important items are to be completed by October 1999," and BNFL plans to finalise its Y2K project in September next year - just three and four months, respectively, before Y2K hits.
"The testing of our highest priority items will be finished, probably, by the first quarter of next year," says Brent Moore, BNFL's Y2K co-ordinator at Sellafield. "Then it's a question of getting our justifications together, and our date for delivering that to the regulator is about September next year." Moore says there are no plans to close off the project ahead of time: "We want to leave ourselves as much room as possible to do as much work as possible. It would be foolish to close it off prematurely."
British Energy defines the Y2K problem as having "the potential to affect anything with a microchip, such as process control computers, PCs, mainframes and other computer systems including non-IT equipment with embedded microchips," and says that it is running company-wide projects, reporting to executive directors.
In the US, the General Accounting Office has been quoted as saying that the Y2K problem has the potential to affect any computer system, including hardware which is microprocessor based (embedded software), software, and databases at nuclear power plants.
At Sellafield, Brent Moore says IT systems play a very small part in the overall inventory: "Typically, about 2 per cent of the things we're looking at are IT, so it's not the emphasis for us - the emphasis is the safety of our plant systems." BNFL started its Y2K project in 1996, as did British Energy. "We swiftly realised that the main emphasis was in fact plants, and not IT," says Moore. "So from about the middle of 1997 we've been concentrating on plant systems - equipment which controls plants and records information and so on. Not necessarily a computer, but it might have some time-related issues."
This could be anything from fire alarms, to turnstiles to allow people into the plants, to pressure switches - anything which might be date-aware. "We went a lot further - we put on our inventory absolutely anything that we need to guarantee the safety of the plant."
This meant an inventory of tens of thousands of items: "Many, many of which aren't in fact date-aware, but we're putting them on our inventory so we can be satisfied, our regulator can be satisfied and you can be satisfied that we have indeed verified that everything that guarantees the safety of our plant is okay."
The most important category is safety-assurance equipment. "We have a clear methodology for arriving at that - we have risk assessments of the plant which list the things that must work if you're to guarantee safety of the plant," says Moore. Many of these are not date-aware, and a lot of the Y2K project involves demonstrating that the date is not an issue.
Britain's Nuclear Installations Inspectorate "is very clear that if we're unable to demonstrate the safety of our plant in any way, then they'd be very quick to close us down - to close any plant down, or any site that wasn't compliant", says Moore.
Most of the actual computers used in nuclear installations are for monitoring and reporting to operators what is happening with the reactors. "If you want to shut a reactor down, there's not a computer involved - instruments detect something, trip something, closedown starts, and there are no computers in that loop," says Moore.
Although shutting down the plants and keeping them safe does not depend on computers, part of the Y2K process is to be absolutely sure. "So we've added to our inventory of things we're going to check (because they do process dates) absolutely everything that our plant risk assessments show us is needed to keep the plant safe. We're going through a process of satisfying ourselves that it isn't date-aware. It's not a question of assuming it's not date-aware, we're actually demonstrating it."
British Energy's handout says the company is "working with 40 other utility companies, as part of the IMPACT Year 2000 Programme to ensure we are using best practice, and are involved with an IEE (Institution of Electrical Engineers) group investigating embedded systems," which is "playing a significant role in the Y2K Utilities Group, which comprises most of the UK's leading utility companies".
The handout asks the question: "Can you guarantee that the lights won't go out at midnight on 31 December 1999?" It answers: "Whilst we can work internally towards ensuring that we continue to generate safely, security of supply is also reliant on the other generators, the national grid and the regional electricity companies. There is significant co-operative effort between the electricity industry companies and the Electricity Association to minimise the likelihood of problems."