<story><title>The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018)</title><url>https://designyoutrust.com/2018/01/vintage-beauty-soviet-control-rooms/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_n_b_</author><text>The ones I can see that are clearly nuclear power plant control rooms really don&amp;#x27;t look all that different than the Western designs of the same era. They don&amp;#x27;t even look that different now in those plants, except for more computer screens (at the operator desks mostly, not necessarily many &amp;quot;on the boards&amp;quot;) and digital strip chart recorders.&lt;p&gt;The biggest difference I see is that the Soviet stuff clearly wasn&amp;#x27;t seismically qualified.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DrPhish</author><text>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&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;So much crufty and interesting tech at that place...VAX, AS&amp;#x2F;400, Netware 4...and I could go on about the scale of the place (7 story tall boiler!)</text></comment>
<story><title>The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018)</title><url>https://designyoutrust.com/2018/01/vintage-beauty-soviet-control-rooms/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_n_b_</author><text>The ones I can see that are clearly nuclear power plant control rooms really don&amp;#x27;t look all that different than the Western designs of the same era. They don&amp;#x27;t even look that different now in those plants, except for more computer screens (at the operator desks mostly, not necessarily many &amp;quot;on the boards&amp;quot;) and digital strip chart recorders.&lt;p&gt;The biggest difference I see is that the Soviet stuff clearly wasn&amp;#x27;t seismically qualified.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>trimbo</author><text>I just finished &amp;quot;Midnight in Chernobyl&amp;quot;. 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.</text></comment>