The "merit" of simulators

NRC has had this stuff for a long time. It is likely misleading in its LOCA training.

The caption below refers to a photograph from today's (May 5, 2010) NRC web page.

NRC Commissioner William Ostendorff (center) recently toured the agency’s Technical Training Center, established in 1980, in Chattanooga, Tenn. where nuclear plant simulators, like the one shown here, provide hands-on training for NRC engineers.

Of course, I wonder about the quality of that hands-on training for NRC engineers. Baker-Just and Cathcart-Pawel are alive and likely the 2200 Fahrenheit game is in the NRC's simulator.
The NRC engineers' time would be better spent in a study of PRM-50-93 and its associated public comments.

The above caption says the Technical Training Center was established during 1980. Following is my experience with that Center during 1984. Click to enlarge; your return arrow gets you back.



Here is an additional entry to this blog on June 29, 2010: Flying magazine, June 2010, page 38 discusses flight simulators in a discussion of a fatal crash. Anther one of the usual suspects was the lack of realism 0f flight simulators, especially at the edges of the flight envelope, and the misleading quality of flight training that emphasizes the approach to stall, but not the stall itself or the post-stall gyrations. Indeed, pilots who are trained from the onset in simulators and in turbine aircraft have very little experience with, or sense of, the natural evolution of a stall. To further mislead those pilots, one criterion of a proper recovery from an impending stall is minimum loss of altitude, whereas, as light aircraft pilots know, the essential considerations are angle of attack and airspeed. A significant loss of altitude is willingly accepted in the name of avoiding a dangerous secondary stall.