[RodgerRoentgen]

NRC Events for today (7/19/2016) show 9 reactors lost off-site communication yesterday at 3PM central time. It appears there was testing of the Everbridge ERO (Emergency response) and failure of the system to notify all concerned staff within 10 minutes is considered a technical 'loss of off-site communication'. It is unclear if just these 9 reactor sites had failures (and other sites did not) or if these 9 sites are the only ones operating Everbridge ERO systems. The system notifies emergency Response personnel.  In the NRC reports, it is listed as an 'undetermined loss of system communications'. After about 4 hours of troubleshooting, the system Vendor (Everbridge?) claims this has been fixed.

Interesting that all of these systems are networked and that they are not independent per reactor site. On the surface it seems like a central point of failure that could affect multiple sites is not wise for this industry. Additionally more networked systems creates more security vulnerabilities. So if there were some sort of widespread emergency and folks that need to know aren't notified within 10 minutes, then what? we know minutes can make a huge difference when discussing the unrecoverable damage that can be done to a reactor from accidents or other events. 

See the notifications for each reactor here:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collec...719en.html

[Horse]

The more complex the machine the more possible failures.  It looks to me like the nuclear industry spends more money and effort lobbying to loosen regulation than they do making their machines work cleanly.  

I used a telephone alert system that called if computer room conditions changed.  It would call when power went out so we could check that systems had rebooted correctly and all was working again.  It was pretty reliable and got tested all the time.  It only failed when the UPS battery backup died.  We had to use an analog phone line because the digital phone lines went down when we lost power.  I hope NPP operators know that the internet is for amusement only and shouldn't be relied on in an emergency.