Chernobyl Faces Millennium Bug Problem

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

Friday April 23 11:55 AM ET 

Chernobyl Faces Millennium Bug Problem

KIEV (Reuters) - The Chernobyl nuclear power station is likely to 
be affected by the ``millennium bug'' but officials said Friday there 
was still enough time to fix the computer problem.  

Chernobyl, site of the world's worst civil nuclear disaster, has aging 
Soviet-era reactors. Nuclear experts are worried that computer 
problems linked to the year 2000 could cause trouble for such 
plants throughout the former Soviet Union.  

``We have already started working on this problem and are sure 
that Chernobyl will be ready to come into the year 2000,'' Yury 
Neretin, Chernobyl's deputy chief engineer, told a news conference. 
 

Earlier this year, local nuclear officials said the bug would not affect 
the ex-Soviet state's nuclear plants because of their 
unsophisticated computer equipment, but Neretin said this was 
incorrect.  

``We understand the importance of this problem and have to say 
that it will affect our station,'' he said.

The bug stems from the once common practice of using only two 
digits for recording the year in computer program dates, like 99 for 
1999. That shortcut has the potential, when dates change in 2000, 
to confuse computers, causing them to reject data or to crash.  

Neretin said the problem could threaten only secondary computer 
programs at Chernobyl, not linked directly with the electricity 
production or operating a nuclear reactor.  

It was 13 years ago this month that Chernobyl exploded, spewing a 
cloud of poisonous radioactive dust over Ukraine, Belarus,  
Russia and part of Western Europe.

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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