c. A reasonable amount of preventive maintenance is done, mostly

during the one week of four that the reactor is shut down.

d. One person serves as operator and programmer (for simple jobs). He also transports magnetic tapes to the computing center for off-line data processing and performs smaller tasks. The average user does not need to do any programming.

e. Fortunately, the people who have written most of the programs have remained in attendance and have updated the programs frequently. Machine-language programming has not proved to be a bad chore because the system is a fixed-hardware setup.

f. Modes of data collection can easily be changed.

g. The overall performance is excellent. The only problem is an occasional wiping out of a program due to the fact that there is no hardware memory-protection feature in the computer. These accidents are estimated to cost at most a loss of a few percent of the running time.

4. Costs

The costs in manpower and dollars of the MSCS are given in Table 7.

TABLE 7 Cost in Manpower and Dollars of MSCS -------------------------------------------------------------

a. Engineering Design and Costs (Professional Only) over 12 Calendar Months

Man-Months Cost ---------- --------

Electronic equipment Development, design, construction, and startup 15 $ 28,000 Mechanical development and liaison 4 7,000 System coordination, development, design, coding, etc. 30 56,000 Parameter generating, data analysis, and programming 15 28,000 ---- -------- TOTAL 64 $119,000

b. Construction Time and Costs (Technical) over 16 Calendar Months

Man-Months Cost ---------- --------

System construction and interconnection 15 $ 17,000 Debugging and startup 6 7,000 Documentation and drafting 12 14,000 ---- -------- TOTAL 33 $ 38,000