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Comment by _n_b_ | Hacker News Reader

The ones I can see that are clearly nuclear power plant control rooms really don't look all that different than the Western designs of the same era. They don't even look that different now in those plants, except for more computer screens (at the operator desks mostly, not necessarily many "on the boards") and digital strip chart recorders.

The biggest difference I see is that the Soviet stuff clearly wasn't seismically qualified.

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I also agree. I was IT lead for a Kraft paper plant in the recent past, and the control rooms were indistinguishable from these. The big difference, which you wouldn't realize from pictures, is that the guts of all the old relay-based control systems had been ripped out, and the entire place was being run on a few racks of Delta-V automation controllers.

The also had an enormous data centre room in the admin building that had been knocked back to two sparsely populated racks from maybe 50 at its peak.

So much crufty and interesting tech at that place...VAX, AS/400, Netware 4...and I could go on about the scale of the place (7 story tall boiler!)

I agree - many older particle accelerators in the U.S. have/had control rooms that look very similar to these photos (go see the 88-inch cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab if you ever get a chance!). I think this is more 'vintage control system aesthetic' than a particularly soviet look.

In fact one of the photos in this collection is from the American ship NS Savannah (launched in 1959)... it's not easy to spot which one is the odd one out!

I’ve toured the Savannah. It’s docked at Baltimore, MD, and they do tours one a year (but not this year). And yeah, the control rooms are very retro.

This?

https://s.hdnux.com/photos/41/20/33/8718076/9/rawImage.jpg

I used to work near there[1] (and take prom dates on the spook show at the then abandoned Bevatron[2]); the Soviet stuff does have a distinct look to it. The US racks were filled with this grey stuff, generally put together rather haphazardly by EM techs, where the soviet stuff is vastly more .... designed. At least in these photos. Possibly because the control systems were for larger, longer lived technology. Though the 88 has had a pretty good run. By contrast the ALS control room looks like a devops room; just a bunch of Sun workstations. Just for contrast; the Dubna cyclotron in Russia is pretty equivalent to something like the Bevatron or 88", and it has that swoopy designed look to its control room[3].

[1] https://s.hdnux.com/photos/41/20/33/8718076/9/640x0.jpg

[2] https://nara.getarchive.net/media/bevatron-control-room-fred...

[3] https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-dubna-moscow-region-ussr-t...

I just finished "Midnight in Chernobyl". One of the things mentioned in there was that the automation for their RBMK reactors was primitive compared to Western reactors. Even for normal operation, the operators had to be hands on continually to keep those beasts under control.

They are very similar to the nuclear control room I worked at except mine had orders of magnitude more annunciators and didn't have the schematics of systems on the board. I really can't imagine running a nuclear plant with so few alarms.

I've been to plants with the P&ID schematics on some of the boards. I worked at a new build where we had to adjust some of them after design changes, which was done with racing stripes and squirrel hair paint brushes from Amazon.

Interesting. How can you tell that they're not seismically qualified by looking at the exteriors of the instruments?

Not necessarily the control boards, but look at the consoles and tables around--they don't look like they're ready to survive an earthquake.

That part of the world is not exactly known for earthquakes.

A lot of architecture and design around the world a better sense of aesthetics than most English-speaking countries, but this nuclear power plant control rooms are indeed quite plain.

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