ERSS stops working for an hour

February 22, 2013

Nationwide nuclear plant monitoring system stops working for over an hour

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20130222p2a00m0na007000c.html

The Nuclear Regulation Authority announced that on Feb. 21, the Emergency Response Support System (ERSS) that monitors the status of nuclear plants around the country stopped sending temperature, pressure and other readings for over an hour.

The Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization (JNES), which manages the ERSS, noticed around 8:25 a.m. that it was not displaying data from the nuclear plants. They rebooted the system, and at around 9:40 a.m. it recovered. JNES is investigating the cause of the trouble.

The ERSS is designed to predict events in the progress of nuclear disasters, such as the time of a meltdown, using information sent from the plants. If a nuclear accident had occurred during the downtime, JNES would have had to receive data from the relevant energy companies via phone or e-mail and enter the data in manually, which could delay responding to the disaster.

The ERSS experienced the same problem at the end of 2011.