Nuclear Power Station Simulators | Nostalgia Nerd

[Music] the Chernobyl nuclear power plant 26th of April 1986 an event which changed the lives of thousands and sent ripples through time some of those ripples recently led to an HBO miniseries bearing the powerplants name which if you haven't seen yet I wholeheartedly recommend reliving the Chernobyl nuclear disaster events in a vivid dramatized version was miles apart from what we saw and heard on the 1986 news but first that explosion at a nuclear plant in the Soviet Union what caused it and how many people did it hurt flickering away in the corner of our lounges many still hung over from the garish feel of the 1970s and that vividness that intensity enveloped in such a shocking dramatization pushed me to the internet to find out more about the inner workings of a nuclear reactor and more significantly in this case a light water reactor just like Chernobyl but I'm not here to explain that to you that's not my bag that's more appropriate for someone like Scott Manley so instead I'm going to play it using an array of games from various systems but just so you know what we're dealing with so you can better understand the elements of these games here is a brief explanation by scott manley himself although it's Scott Manley here nostalgia nerd has asked me to quickly explain how a nuclear reactor works the important part is in the core you have uranium-235 which when it is hit by a neutron will split into two parts which will release energy and also releasing more neutrons these neutrons can go on to cause more reactions to stop the reaction running away you have control rods which absorb those neutrons and you can slide them into the core to slow the reaction down or pull them out to make it go faster you also need something called a moderator to make sure the neutrons will cause more reactions because if they're going too fast they actually escape the core and don't do anything that in a pressurized water reactor is water which is very convenient water is also a coolant so the reactor has a primary coolant loop that takes heat away from the reactor and they'll have a secondary coolant loop where the treat is transferred through a heat exchanger and that secondary loop will have the water boil and create steam to drive the turbines so you have to keep the core running at a certain power level as it powers up over time it can start to generate Neutron poisons that will slow the reaction down so you will have to pull the rods in a note to adjust how the reactor performs I'm Scott Manley nuke safe we begin with reactor for the Atari VCS released by Parker Brothers in 1983 and a Boxster definitely catch your attention a vibrant explosion almost foreshadowing Chernobyl three years prior to the horrifying event now this isn't the most realistic depiction of a nuclear reactor it's simply a game with some elements of a nuclear reactor thrown in for good measure using the joystick you are placed in charge of a ship with the sole task of preventing a meltdown ever Center is the reactor core contained by the kill wall on the outside in small groups positrons neutrons and photons are released in the area in between and it's our job to smash them into the kill wall in the given time limit doing so will prevent the reactor core from expanding making the next wave even more difficult to aid with our quest we have a couple of tricks first we can place a decoy of which we have three which when placed will can bounce the particles into the kill wall or better yet these side chambers if you get a particle in here then it will bounce around earning you 15 points per bounce until it vaporizes nice of course don't hit 4 kill wor yourself you can also attempt to shrink the core by destroying 4 control rods either side which seems a bit counterintuitive given control rods are usually designed to reduce reaction in the core but that's the way this game works it's actually pretty good fun the for an Atari VCS or 2600 game but how about we move on to something just a little bit more realistic scram is actually a game from 2 years prior 1981 and is one of the first powerplant simulators for a home computer we've only V pertinently named Three Mile Island on the Apple 2 arriving before both games are similar but scram is probably an easier game to pick up and that's saying something this is a title published by Atari for their 8-bit home micro line and written in basic and 6502 assembly by Chris Crawford the word scram itself is a reactor safe word thought up by the University of Chicago in 1942 it stands for star cutting right away man and refers to literally cutting the reactor control rod ties to drop them into the nuclear fuel thereby shutting down the reactor in an emergency now here we have an actual simulation of a nuclear reactor albeit a simplified model you are placed in control of various valves switches and functions of a reactor programmed using differential equations with only your joystick as the form of input so here is the reactor and its primary loop cooling system the water cooled the reactor by absorbing and carrying it out to the steam generator which transfers heat to the secondary loop this is the main feedwater system and hot steam from here flows into the turbines which generate electricity any excess heat is transferred to the tertiary loop where it is released as steam by of a hyperbolic cooling tower depending on how much power we can generate before losing all our staff and having to shut the generator down determines whether we pass the operator exam and what level fix all the problems created by the frequent earthquakes do exceedingly well and you pass as a senior reactor operator and I guess I've been legally qualified to operate a real nuclear reactor excellent if you take a peek in the manual it compares it to be Three Mile Island power plants in Pennsylvania which itself suffered a partial meltdown in March 1979 a combination of mechanical and human failures led to a large amounts of coolant escaping but thankfully did not cause the same level of catastrophe or contamination that was witnessed at Chernobyl it did however galvanize anti-nuclear activists and Safety campaigners whilst also bringing nuclear power into the public eye and as with all good anxieties sublimated into entertainment in the form of these games indeed scram even encourages you to recreate the three-mile Island incident from the go the manual is filled with a lot of information in fact it's more like a nuclear reactor handbook than a game manual giving you a tour of the nuclear facility breaking down each component before giving you a rundown of how to keep the plant running effectively and more importantly safe but even an entire section devoted to thermodynamics this is heavy stuff which resulted in equal parts praise and upset from reviewers of the time I presume those upset were the ones who just wanted to belt out a quick review without having to dedicate a week to the cause I feel you're friends I really do [Music] [Music] let's move on to a ZX spectrum reactor game is it me or does all this box arts have a kind of Cold War Soviet feel to it I find it quite so warming Gemini leisure software oh yeah this is wherever measure really starts released in 1984 by Gemini marketing again this is a game playing into me fears and excitement of the new and ever-present nuclear age it's simply called reactor once again unlike scram the manual here is a leaflet it feels ill-fitting would be more serious boxing their sturdy wasteful plastic packaging and dark foreboding colors inside we get three main points a maintain the power level above zero B keep the radiation level below maximum C have at least one life left well that sounds fairly simple let's get cracking or we could if the game would actually load no matter what spectrum model I tried or what release of a software it failed to start there are reports of a glitch in the loading sequence of the game I could get nothing not even a smidge out of it on real sinclair hardware of course sinclair will cover it up he always does as NX spectrum simply cannot fail i just hope you find these tapes and do the right thing you okay now this is a very different game it feels more like reactor on B Atari VCS but vulajin here is possibly more sound and actually this is a compelling little game in its own right a bit like beehive bedlam used to be on the sky digital box you didn't expect it but after you found yourself playing for three hours straight you knew it was addictive here it's about balance just like a nuclear reactor and just like reactor on the VCS you achieve balance by smashing particles against an inanimate object in this case for central discharged units rather than random deflection however the metal is floating about diverge at a right angle to your control unit meaning some form of puzzle and tactic is in order of course you can't smash all the metals into this charger as your reactors power will fall but have too many annual risk in excess of radiation neutrons are the multi player here and when they hit a moving metal that metal divides just like reaction you can absorb a few of these neutrons however you'll have to discharge yourself if you absorb more than four you also lose a life if you get hit by a piece of metal immediately after absorbing a neutron adding a further tactical element it's pretty absorbing stuff although I'm not sure how much of it will teach you about managing a nuclear reactor as the game seems to claim once the timer has reached 1500 then you have to contain the B reactor entirely in concrete you do this in a snake style by leaving a trail of concrete blocks in your wake you need to fill every gap or keep trying until you do before moving on to the next reactor not a bad game at all [Music] well I guess talking about balance we should try something on the Commodore 64 now how about the appropriately named chain reaction by jor-el software and released in 1987 now this is actually a conversion of v ZX Spectrum game which is probably the best version but we get a - more color here so let's go with it this is a game which ties in more with one of the Chernobyl cleanup scenes rather than trying to control a reactor here we are at the mercy of the anti-nuclear party who have reprogrammed the power station robots to empty the containment vote and attack all human staff ok maybe not quite like a general cleanup scene you have 30 minutes to retrieve all the fuel rods armed with a machine gun and thankfully our anti radiation suit if our radiation level does get too high there's a nice decontamination shower which will help us and this is a fun --is-- game but it does break away from the nuclear reactor simulation quite a bit it's more of trying to fit an isometric explorer into a literal nuclear suit and there are better isometric games out there so then how about this another Commodore 64 game but this one carries the name Chernobyl oh yes just a year after the disaster itself cosmic corporation were releasing a game based around we potentially still present a threat of the Soviet nuclear disaster you can imagine if this disaster had been in the United States with hundreds and a thousands of deaths this would have been the pinnacle of poor taste but this was the 80s and the USSR so apparently with the West having been fed penty communist propaganda for the last few decades sympathies were numbed somewhat however some publications did point out of their lack of taste but apparently the name of Chernobyl wasn't developer Paul Norman's original plan here now this was something pushed by a publisher Cosme to play on the disaster which was still clearly ripe in so many minds of the time in fact Norman having built it as a generic nuclear reactor game tried to fend off its marketing label but to no avail poor Norman of course is B creator a rubber simulation such as DEFCON 5 and the president is missing so here we are Chernobyl nuclear power plant simulation as it's known to us or the Chernobyl Syndrome as it was known in some regions inside the box we actually get the story of Chernobyl in an attempt to tie the game in as much as possible and a manual which is again nowhere up to the standards of scram we do however get a mention to Three Mile Island as well in the manual introduction might as well go in for both disasters I guess we also get page after page detailing how many things can actually go wrong with a nuclear plant there's a lot here if anything it does a really good job of instilling fear into your soul [Music] like scram the simulation on offer here is a light water reactor so at least baptizing with Chernobyl after a finicky starter procedure where you have to enter a code from the manual and the time and your name we get a list of goings-on in the reactor a nice reactor type hum from the 64 sid chip and a command-line interface to interact with the beast good god to take control of the station we type online the manual is then thoroughly unhelpful as to what to do next instead we need to reference an in-game manual which is itself padded out with background story and information the whole procedure is quite clumsy but delve deep enough and there's a pretty good simulator here when I was young I had dreams of running large important systems from my humble Commodore 64 I tried to program a version of mother from aliens in basic for example so this simulation would have fitted my bill almost exactly I could imagine watching a nuclear power station dramatization in the 80s and then spending hours playing with this simulation you can view different parts of the power plants by typing its name in the command line you can even view a blueprint of the plant so you can see where staff are and but like there isn't really a game here instead you just get a slightly megalomaniac feeling of running a nuclear power plant remotely from your house I quite like it it certainly feels more engrossing than scram but unless you're really into learning about reactor then there isn't much to keep you entertained I'm not sure if it's even possible to induce meltdown Paul Norman was so concerned with realism here but all the fail-safes you might expect are present and as it's not even an exact copy of Nabi MK reactor recreating the events of Chernobyl would likely end in relative safety how disappointing 3.6 Ranjan not great not terrible but this isn't where the Chernobyl video games story ends Oh No in 2007 GSC game world developed stalker a first-person survival horror based around the chernobyl disaster site where you have to find people and to kill them standard stuff I haven't played it properly but it actually looks quite compelling but if you want to get back to the safety of the nuclear reactor relative safety then there are a few modern games which allow you to do so they may not have the Cold War feel of our 1980s games or the simplicity of scrams nuclear reactor but we do get all the pleasures of modern day gaming combined with meltdown sequences which I'm sure makes scram look like a windows 3.11 screensaver in comparison go have a fun days of simplicity and nuclear no way we still have better way anyway that's my roundup of nuclear reactor games I hope you enjoyed it there'll be more videos soon in the meantime you can click some more here for the normal YouTube actions anyway thanks for watching have a great evening [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Nostalgia Nerd

Views: 80,445

Rating: 4.890377 out of 5

Keywords: nuclear energy, nuclear reactor, scott manley, chernobyl, chernobyl game, nuclear reactor simulator, nuclear power plant

Id: u95GXlKBESw

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2019