Commonwealth Edison captures intruders on screen

Commonwealth Edison has developed three software programs, with the supporting hardware, that significantly upgrade security monitoring capabilities at nuclear power stations. These are Video Capture, the Alternate Perimeter Alarm Reporting System, and the Redundant Access Control System. Conventional video systems only display what is happening at the moment and rewinding a VCR to discover what occurred earlier takes time. With Video Capture the images can be instantly restored to the monitor screen and printed out. When one of the security devices used to monitor the perimeter of a Commonwealth Edison nuclear power station is tripped, the Video Capture program stores the visual image digitally. This is done using similar technology to the employed in fax machines. The security staff are thus able to distinguish immediately between disturbances taking place simultaneously at different security zones. They can magnify and compare the stored images and print them out. The Alternate Perimeter Alarm Reporting System was developed to speed the transmission of alarm signals from the security sensors to the security computer. The Redundant Access Control System (RACS) was originally developed to meet the requirement of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a secondary computer-operated security measure to monitor employee access to a nuclear power station. When employee drug testing became an additional NRC requirement, the Nuclear Division of Commonwealth Edison asked their programmers to modify RACS to generate a random list of personnel to be tested for substance abuse. RACS was then further modified to produce numerous station operating reports that had been previously compiled manually. (author)