Interesting that they move to touchscreens. With all the Hacker News stuff that comes by every day I can easily say that 99.9% is not what I do in daily life. But building control rooms for large industrial installations is. And from my perspective we see very little requests for touchscreens. They have a place, for example on a machine in an environment were a keyboard would be in the way. But only if the operator would not be wearing gloves. Very specific applications.
For large modern control rooms users will have either a keyboard and/or a custom button panel next to the mouse/trackball. With the mouse/trackball being the primary input device to click on objects on the screen. In many cases they don't even type in values but click on buttons on the screen to ramp up or ramp down a process value. Then they don't need a keyboard.
One advantage of using touchscreens in that very specific application is that it makes it easier to build simulators.
Every nuclear power plant has its own, somewhat unique control room, and to train operators properly, you have to replicate all the panels that make up that room, and it is much easier with touchscreens.
TFA states that they're moving towards touchscreens instead of physical switches. To me that doesn't sound like a good idea. But maybe I just hate that it's happened in so many vehicles these days.
In a car, you want to be able to operate controls with minimal eye contact, and ideally with no eye contact necessary. A touch screen is the opposite and require eye contact.
In a control room, you want the operators to be looking at the button/switch/knob they are about to operate, especially if they have warning/status lights on the button.
These are not the same thing. However, I agree that touch screen still seems like a not good idea, but for different reasons.
It's a horrible idea. In a crises the last thing you need to be doing is searching through pages of soft buttons looking for that critical control vs. reaching out to a physical control that's always in the same spot no matter what.
With the touchscreen control interfaces that I myself have designed and built (which were for things far less important than nuclear power), there was no paging involved.
Everything had a place, and that place was always the same day-to-day (barring infrequent redesigns of some aspect or other, but old-school buttons-and-knobs control panels sometimes see revisions as well as the reality of what they control changes over time).
It's definitely a bad idea, but at the same time, are nuclear power plants the sort of things that go horribly wrong if a human doesn't press a button quickly enough? I would have thought all the things that need to be timely would probably be automatically managed, leaving humans to do the high-level decisionmaking.
Also depends what buttons - it makes sense to have the "Might need to push quickly in an emergency" buttons big and physical - they're already shown to be treated differently in the current implementation, being larger and red in the photos.
But for things not really needed in such a situation? Or even access to things that aren't available within reach otherwise due to size constraints? A touchscreen might be the best solution.
There's probably more total sensors in the reactor than there can be physical dials for in a room of that size - there'a probably already some level of ordering which are the "important" ones, or which are at prime real-estate by the operators on the panel and not the other side of the room.
There's lots of steps between "Huge array of switches and dials for every possible thing" and "Single ipad in the middle of an empty room", after all.
The biggest issue with touchscreen is that the tech they are using is likely going to disappear in a few years at best, and getting replacement parts is going to be a mess.
Fun fact, Olkiluoto's EPR and Flamanville, the upcoming French power plant, must use 4/3 screens because all the GUI stuff where design for this kind of display, but in the retail market such a screen format has long been replaced and now they are already struggling to get spare parts.
If they have room, most monitors let you put a 4:3 signal in and will pillar box it for you with the proper settings. They may stretch by default, and if you need the visible portion to be a specific size, you've got to have a lot of extra room for the blank section... So I can see how that might not fit...
I have seen some new 4:3 displays around 25" sold on amazon for arcade machines... Price is too high for me, but I'm not a power plant.
> The biggest issue with touchscreen is that the tech they are using is likely going to disappear in a few years at best, and getting replacement parts is going to be a mess.
It is pretty easy to build a new physical button if you have the one not working on your hands. It is not easy to build new software/screen if you have a non working screen on your hands.
It's not that economical to build physical button either, especially in small number, but you're right that it's still much easier than a complete screen.
A quick Google search shows no particular shortage of 19" 4x3 touchscreen monitors for sale, in a variety of forms: Desktop, VESA-mount, open-frame, and 19" rack-mount. (Other sizes were also shown to exist, but this was not an exhaustive search.)
It seems like a thing that is unlikely to disappear soon, since a lot of industrial customers -- globally -- are very comfortable with rack-mounted displays, and 16x9 rackmount screens are kind of meh compared to 4x3.
What about Sony playstation controllers? What could possibly go wrong. We spent millions on human factors engineering for the space program, but for version 2.0 and the gods of NIH ( not invented here) we are going with Dunning-kruiger.
"The core is going critical... Has anyone seen my charger?"
As other people have said, I think auto makers are learning the error of their ways. I just bought a 2024 Toyota Sequoia last week, and love that basically every control has a button! There’s some infotainment stuff but that works with voice controls, like navigation and CarPlay.
There are dozens of different buttons, so it definitely takes a period of learning to get proficient, but it just feels so nice, like I’m playing a multi ton musical instrument.
Can you get touchscreens that are still usable when they get water on them? Say, from sprinkler system? I'm sure they have thought of this, but that's one pretty common situation where you really don't want a touchscreen for anything important. Of course, it might be almost impossible to get the screen wet in a nuclear control room, they probably have a different fire suppression system anyway.
In France, one day every year (les journées de l'énergie EDF) you can go visit nuclear power plants: you'll get access to the control-room simulator (where my wife used to work, BTW) and even visit the “machine room” where the turbines are. This is a very cool visit, which I deeply recommend if you are into this kind of things. (Idk if it's open to foreign visitors though, likely yes for EU citizens, but other nations seems a bit less likely but not completely impossible given you don't get to see any sensitive stuff).
Back in the day, when you could also blag a jump seat ride in the cockpit, nuclear plants used to do tours. Had a fascinating afternoon once in the Wylfa plant in Anglesey that included walking over the top and seeing the refuelling gear.
I visited Sizewell A for a tour as a young teenager, though I don't remember much about it beyond walking over the top of the reactor, and getting an educational comic booklet about how nuclear power worked. I think this was when they were going through the planning process to build Sizewell B, so they were probably in a "community outreach and PR" phase.
You can see both from a way along the coast; personally I think they add to the landscape rather than detract. The sea is also apparently noticeably warmer in the immediate vicinity due to the cooling outflow.
In France too, and they have an efficient way of solving the “what if there are terrorists among the visitors” problem: the groups are escorted by armed members of the French special forces (there's an on-site platoon of them on every nuclear site to act as a rapid reaction force).
I did too. I also visited Hinckley Point as a teenager, but for that we could just turn up whereas for last year's trip we had to book well in advance and submit ID information for vetting.
For large modern control rooms users will have either a keyboard and/or a custom button panel next to the mouse/trackball. With the mouse/trackball being the primary input device to click on objects on the screen. In many cases they don't even type in values but click on buttons on the screen to ramp up or ramp down a process value. Then they don't need a keyboard.