Remote emergency data acquisition and control in a nuclear reactor facility

All industrial and commercial facilities can be subject to the need for emergency evacuation. This could be caused by an internal event such as fire, flood or explosion, or by an external event such as fire in an adjacent plant, a plane crash, or terrorist action. In many plants, there is a need to continue control even after evacuation. In others, there is the need to carry out a safety shutdown. In nuclear plants, this need is extreme and, therefore, the system that carries out the continued control or shutdown should be extremely reliable, even if the system itself has suffered damage during the event that caused the evacuation. It is, therefore, necessary to employ a fault tolerant system that is augmented to be damage tolerant. A description is presented of such a system that is distributed over five sites and which must provide reliable remote operation of four nuclear reactors