Millenium Bug May Stop Ukraine Nuke Plants-Expert

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@earthlink.net>]

Friday March 5 12:27 AM ET 

Millenium Bug May Stop Ukraine Nuke Plants-Expert

KIEV (Reuters) - An independent Ukrainian nuclear power expert 
defied official complacency Thursday, saying computers hit by the 
millennium bug might paralyze the ex-Soviet state's five nuclear 
power plants next year.  

``We have to prepare for the worst in our nuclear energy sector, 
and this 'worst' might mean that all stations could stop 
simultaneously,'' Serhiy Parashin, head of the Energy and 
Information research center, told a news conference.  

``We have not yet received all information from our nuclear stations 
... but, unfortunately, have to say that Ukrainian energy authorities 
do not fully understand the problem,'' Parashin said.  

The bug stems from the once-common practice of using only two 
digits for the year in computer program dates, like 99 for 1999. That 
shortcut has the potential, when dates change in 2000, to confuse 
computers and microchips embedded in machines, causing them 
to reject data or not work at all.  

Academician Olexander Parkhomenko, who is also a director of 
the state nuclear power agency Energoatom, told Reuters this 
week the bug would not affect Ukrainian nuclear plants because of 
their unsophisticated computer equipment.  

``Fortunately, our nuclear energy sector is not fully computerized, 
and problems existing in the West are not relevant for us,'' 
Parkhomenko said.  

But analysts argue that the country's electricity supply and 
generating systems would all collapse if three or more of Ukraine's 
five nuclear stations stopped.  

Analysts say Ukraine operates more than 20,000 computerized 
information systems, and most of them have not been adapted
to beat the Y2K bug.

Parashin, who is a former director of the troubled Chernobyl nuclear 
power plant, said the consequences of the bug problem could be 
``most unexpected,'' but did not elaborate.  

Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in April 1986, 
spewing a cloud of poisonous radioactive dust over Ukraine, 
Belarus, Russia and parts of Western Europe in the world's worst 
civil nuclear disaster.  

The memory of that catastrophe has bred fresh concerns about 
how immune the former Soviet republic's five aging nuclear power 
stations will prove to the Y2K problem. 

Sandy Perle
E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net 
Personal Website: http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/1205

"The object of opening the mind, as of opening 
the mouth, is to close it again on something solid"
              - G. K. Chesterton -
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