Digital Computers in Nuclear Power Applications

There are a number of interesting applications of digital control computers in the nuclear power field which demand highly reliable, high speed, automatic operation. These include (a) the monitoring of radioactivity levels, (b) conventional monitoring and data recording, (c) operation calculations on reactors, (d) economic calculations and plant optimization. In the case of gas-cooled reactors with a thousand or more cooling channels one problem is to detect and localize dangerous increases in radioactivity due to gas leakage in the face of background radiation which is subject to normal statistical variations of random types and variation in the mean level. This application of digital computers for monitoring radioactivity will be discussed and an existing installation will be described.