If you’ve ever wanted to operate your own nuclear reactor, you probably aren’t going to get one in your backyard shop. However, thanks to the University of Manchester, you can get a simulated one in your browser. The pressurized water reactor looks realistic and gives you controls that — we are fairly sure — are greatly simplified compared to the real thing.
We suggest you start with the tour before you start unless, you know, you’ve operated a reactor before. You have to balance the control rods, the coolant pumping, and the steam output to produce as much power as possible without melting the core.
If the reactor were real, the pressure vessel would weigh as much as two 747 jets! Despite the high-tech, the business end is a conventional steam generator. The only difference is that the steam is made by the heat of the nuclear reaction instead of by burning coal or gas.
To operate the reactor, you’ll turn on the coolant pumps and wait for the high-pressure liquid to reach 290 C. In real life, this takes about 8 hours, but lucky for us, the simulation is sped up. Once you reach the right temperature, you can lift the control rods to start generating heat. This will let you adjust the steam output to try to match the demand at any given time. But if you go out of bounds, the reactor will helpfully shut down. Of course, that doesn’t help your score.
We don’t know how realistic it is, but we do know Homer Simpson probably has fewer shutdowns than we do. There are different types of reactors, of course. Operating them may be difficult, but creating fuel for them is no simple task, either. Just maybe put out your candles before you start playing.
Or you could go back to 1981 and run this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scram_(video_game)
Owned the Atari 800 simulator in the early 80’s and ran a reactor on an aircraft carrier in the mid/late 80’s
You should have played Space Invaders, you’d be a General in the Space Force now.
A version of this called “Meltdown” was actually used by the Atomic Energy Commission to tutor reactor operators.
I’m one of the people who built this ~10 years ago and honestly it’s a bit of a shock seeing it everywhere like this.
We were a small games studio and we were tasked with converting a pascal reactor simulator written by nuclear physicists into a cool game to get children interested in nuclear power.
With regards to how realistic it is, I can confidently say that it’s as unrealistic as we were allowed to get away with because nuclear reactors are boring as hell. We had a lot of arguments with the physicists about things like speed, controls, output levels etc. The comedy nuclear explosion we’d added if you messed up was vetoed immediately.
Phrases like “nuclear fission isn’t supposed to be fun” and “we don’t want to give people unrealistic expectations for operation” were thrown around.
The outcome is that the simulation is extremely realistic, but we massively sped up the responsiveness of the controls and grossly simplified the output/demand system. In reality this particular model of reactor would take several days to spin up and then largely operate at a constant level.
Well, it’s my first comment here, and just to say thanks. I live in Brazil and 10 years after what you have done, i played it and found it really cool. A stranger from a distant place got a little bit of you today. Thank you : )
This will be interesting to try. I was a Nuclear Engineer in the Navy for 20 years.
I’ve just forwarded this link to a friend. He’s actually a nuclear physicist… and has one in his backyard shop.
Nonsense! You can manage a nuclear power station with nothing more than a 16kB ZX81!!!!! Sinclair promised it in 1980 and Sinclair delivers (perhaps with a 40 year delay) ;-) !
https://youtu.be/tB6CC8UbJLU?si=W_FLZkppmHQ8vKKu
USN reactors have no computer controls. They are designed to be inherently safe without computer control.
Does it strike anyone else as odd that in the 21st century we still generate the majority of our power by, in essence, boiling a big kettle?
The most efficient way to harness the power of nuclear, not to mention tokamak reactors when they become economically viable, as electrical energy, is to somehow turn it into rotational energy which we already know plenty of ways to fairly efficiently convert into electrical energy.
Hopefully the supercritical CO2 thing works out for a new turbine.
What do you think we should be using instead? We need to convert heat to electrical energy, steam is currently the best way to do that.
Using water and steam to spin turbines has been around for a long time and has been greatly improved over time and it works reliably. The turbines used in nuclear plants are very complex
I was just commenting on the vast technological changes that have taken place since the 19th century in so many things, but not in energy generation, just seems odd, but I guess if they got it right in the 19th century and nothing better has come along, why change? Now I want a cup of tea.
It’s actually, just plain physics. There are not so many ways to generate electrical energy from a nuclear reactor, and most have horrible efficiencies. Around 3.5% of the energy goes as gamma rays, and 2.5% as fast neutrons. Both of which you can hardly use. The rest is kinetic energy of fission fragments, ie: heat. Thermopiles (an inverse peltier, known as seebeck effect) can turn heat straight to electricity, but practical efficiencies hardly go into 2 digits, and they have a hell of challenges to use. You don’t want reciprocating machinery as a stirling engine, as maintenance is a hell of a lot more than rotating stuff. So you end with turbines. Thermodynamics gives us the limits there (Carnot efficiency), but there are tricks, like combined cycles in fuel burning plants, or multiple turbines at different pressures, but you can get real world efficiencies over 40% up to 60%. The best we could do today is remove the crappy water as a working fluid, but other than making stuff cheaper and simpler, efficiency won’t go up a lot. Supercritical CO2 as mentioned above gives a 10% rise in efficiency only, not a lot, but the turbines are 10x smaller thus a lot cheaper, but without doing the math, I say maybe we could go even higher as CO2 allows higher delta-T, thus higher theoretical efficiency.
The fun fact is that one of the first solutions we found for turning heat into mechanical energy (placing a sophisticated fan over a kettle) ended up being the best over time. I do wander what aliens use sometimes…
No, not at all. We’re not very good at converting arbitrary fuels into electricity except by using heat engines – though fuel cells are definitely being worked on and there’s been various neat alternatives to the normal idea of an engine while still being thermal, like thermionics, thermoelectrics, thermophotovoltaic, etc.
At first water was incredibly easy to find and boiled at a low temperature, letting us do work with pistons and vent the relatively harmless steam when we were done. As we got better with high temperature materials, water turned out to be something that can keep going all the way into decently high temperatures and pressures on the hot side without decomposing or something. And while transferring plenty of heat around, which is sort of necessary for a heat engine. But while we’ve still got water, there’s a difference in using it to make a vacuum in pistons and using it to spin supercritical turbines.
The sim leaves out the use of boron in the coolant to help regulate reactivity. Don’t let the pressurizer go solid!
Scientists – “We have to make this simulator more realistic.”
Developers – “BORING!”
Scientists – “Yes, boron would be a good addition.”
Boron is great at moderating reactivity and corroding pressure vessel heads (Davis-Besse NPP, 2002)
As a youngster, I thought it would be cool to work in the design of reactors (though I knew really nothing about them). In college, circa mid-70s, I planned to be a Nuclear Engineer, then after the first year, realized it was mostly the design of boilers and then subsequently changed to EE.
You do know that Siemens once built the SUR-100 (“Siemens Unterrichtsreaktor 100mW”), a dedicated trainings reactor with 100mW thermal power. But apart from that quite the real thing. A few universities had one.
Link here: (German) https://um.baden-wuerttemberg.de/de/umwelt-natur/kernenergie/kerntechnische-anlagen/sonstige-kerntechnische-anlagen/siemens-unterrichtsreaktor-sur/
University of Arizona used to have one back in the early 80’s. Until they realized how bad security was. How easily anyone could get into the facility. It was dismantled shortly after.
The UA TRIGA reactor ran for 51 years and shut down in 2010. Not because of access either because it was a training reactor much like the TRIGA2 running at KSU right now.
TRIGAs are only about 20% enriched and not capable of generating electricity. They use light water and basic control rod function for training purposes. There was no reason to keep people out of a training facility.
Got a chance to stand over the tank at the KSU reactor in 2013 and see the Cherenkov glow. Very cool.
Thx from a German for the Info , didn’t knew such things were build 😉
This doesn’t hold a candle to water boiling simulator 2000
I remember “Oakflat nuclear power plant simulator”. Got it on a boot sale special collection of disks. I remember it being quite challenging.
Seems to be playable here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oakflat_Nuclear_Power_Plant_Simulator_The_1992
There’s also Chernobyl: the Legacy Continues
Don’t forget “Three Mile Island” by Muse Software on the Apple 2
Remember that Simpson’s Episode with Homer and that drinking bird toy to control the powerplant?
https://youtu.be/SGzkUgTgpa4?si=wY3o6Q1zaYrz_qIu
xD
Extremely basic. 25 year licensed operator. Reactor Coolant Pumps don’t regulate temperature at power online. Boron concentration and control rods can be used to regulate temperature. Power follows steam demand. This simple simulator could be more realistic and more challending if you raised control rods it would of course increase steam pressure and cause more steam flow. You’d have to throttle back on governor valves to keep power stable if that was your goal and only raise temperature a little. Synchronizing the generator to the grid would be awesome on here, and include steam bypass or atmospheric dump valves when starting up with generator offline.