06-01-2014, 11:42 AM
GGD wrote:
[quote=eustacetilley]
We had two kinds of Big Red Buttons; first were the Crash-Off Buttons, which tripped the 12KV breaker, and reduced us to utter darkness, accompanied with hopefully not too much burning flesh smell.
The other was a SCRAM button; it tripped all safety chains, but left power on. Some chassis had their own SCRAM button, deeply reset so a swinging cat wouldn't accidentally trip it.
Legend has it that the first SCRAM button wasn't a button at all. Somebody yells "Scram", and the "Safety Control Rod Axe Man" swings into action, while everybody else scrams.
Fermi may or may not have invented the term.
Eustace
Any war stories of being in the room when either were used? Or even better, being the one to press it? Funny that you should ask...
Every six months, we had "Chain Checks". These were only required once a year, but they were so complicated that we just did half of them at a time.
As the Cyclotron grew ever more complicated, ever more complications occurred. We dreaded the "Crash-Off" tests, because of all the resultant breakage. (For example, you don't just shut the power off on a CTI 1400 Helium liquifier; a few gallons of liquid Helium soon gets very impatient indeed.)
Very complicated Procedures were developed for testing.
(Note the capital P. It becomes important later.)
And then there are those to whom a Big Red Button is just too irresistible...
The Big Red Button that most people saw was in the Control Room, off to the right in the Main Console, next to the HP RF Synthesizer.
There was a space below the Big Red Button just perfect for an even more irresistable thirties vintage, two-pole, Big Copper Knife Switch.
It didn't appear to be actually connected to anything, but it was. It just appeared one Owl Shift, and it wasn't on any prints.
The Procedures were kept on the Control Room Mac IIsi. On a following Owl Shift, the following was appended to the Crash-Off Button Chain Check:
"Sonalert System Test: pull the knife switch below the Control Room Big Red Button to test the Sonalert System. See Sonalert System Test Procedure for more details." (Or words to that effect.)
There was no Sonalert System Test Procedure.
After the hahadon'tdothatagainjustwhatdidyoudothistime lecture, I was punished. I was put in charge of _all_ the Procedures, and if anything ever went wrong, well, guess who would be to blame?
The Procedures were an absolute disaster, because we were transitioning to the boiler-plate bloated format that the DOE approved of. We even had a DOE watchdog to check up on us.
He was adamant: if there was a Procedure, it had to be done the DOE way. But, but...
What if it wasn't a Procedure. What if it was just an Operations Note, OpNote for short?
OK then, we don't care about OpNotes. Carry on.
I got the Procedures down to 13 by the time that I left; there were hundreds of OpNotes, in pen, in a binder in the Control Room. Every concerned person had to initial that they had read, and had at least partially understood, each OpNote.
The next Accelerator that I then went to had something like 250 Procedures, all in DOE format, guarded by a full time humorless harridan whose knowledge of the Chicago Manual Of Style was impeccable, and whose knowledge of anything else was deplorable. After a couple of skirmishes, we got along just fine.
So, what did the Big Copper Knife Switch actually do? The handle had a hidden strong magnet attached to the handle, and when pulled, it dropped a reed relay hidden in the base, that dropped another relay, that caused half a dozen cleverly-hidden-in-the-Main-Console Sonalerts to start merrily chirping away.
That is all that it did.
Eustace