/ Mark Frauenfelder / 11:03 am Fri Mar 18, 2011

Nuclear power plant simulator game

NuclearPowerPlantSimulatorGame.jpg

It doesn't have an earthquake scenario. Anyone know of a simulator game that does?

Nuclear power plant simulator game

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  2. Can’t help you on the earthquake part.

    Back in the ’80s there was a Commodore game based on Chernobyl. It was pretty much exactly what you might expect: you ran the power plant and tried to keep doing so for as long as possible. It was not well-received, from what I recall; the reviews I remember mention how boring it was, with at least one commenting that it eventually made you want to have the plant meltdown just so that there was something happening.

  4. Turns out, when presented with questions, you can actually just type “y” instead of “y-e-s”, thus tripling your productivity.

  11. It really wasn’t hard to win. It’d be better if it automatically moved along as a certain pace, day by day. That way you can see how each thing affects the output/heat more directly.

    I ended up at 141 days and 1755kw average output, with very light damage.

  12. After a few tries I got an average power output of 1500 KW, “Power costs in your area will drop.”

    I might have gotten more, but I didn’t want to risk damaging anything and taking the hit of bringing the plant down for maintenence.

  13. I remember a DOS game that put the player at the helm of a nuclear power station. It was all text, similar to a BIOS settings layout page for a mother board, and just about anything I did resulted in meltdown. What a fun idea for a game, right up there with a doing your taxes game.

  14. There probably *is* an “Earthquake” feature, but just as with the real-life reactors it doesn’t affect them in any way. You’d probably not exactly struggle to implement a “Tsunami” feature, but again, that wouldn’t hurt the reactors.

    The “Tsunami” button might wipe out your badly-placed standby generators…

  16. I loved this game as a kid! You don’t understand (well, the collected “you” probably does, but the general public “you” does not) how many blank stares I’ve gotten from friends as I’ve tried to explain how much fun we had playing this game at camp growing up.

  17. 1850 kW or go home!

    Crank the rods up to 100% for the first round, 40% for the second, then adjust down to about 14%. Start the secondary coolant around 50% and adjust upwards to 100% over 3 or 4 rounds to avoid overspin of the turbine. 1881 kW was my best with this method.

    It took just two meltdowns to figure this out. I wonder if there’s a lesson there…

    1. cant resist – I played this one:

      OnTopic: Avoided meltdown on 2nd try with a measely 1080 average. hmpf!

      1. played that a lot as well, and somewhat ironic now that ol’ daffy is having troubles in Libya.

  19. I wrote one that randomly generated earthquakes … back in 1981 on my TRS-80 Model 1. It was graphical. Not sure I still have the code though.

  22. The game Mark linked is actully based on a Basic game I used to play on my C64. Damned if I remember what it was called, though.

    / M.C

  25. I played Chernobyl on my Commodore 64 for hours at a time. I loved the fact that the simulator made it sound like the rumble of being in a nuclear power plant. While I couldn’t find a webpage describing the game I did find a link to a Java emulator and a pirated version of the game. It’s probably not legal and there’s a lot to read (this is a simulator) but if you really want to try it… http://www.vizzed.com/vizzedboard/retro/game.php?id=22545

  26. FYI: Instead of a simulator, I can offer an insider’s take on what a real accident would be like:

    The novel “Rad Decision” culminates in an event very similar to the Japanese tragedy. (Same reactor type, same initial problem – a station blackout with scram.) The author has worked in the US nuclear industry for 25 years. The book is an excellent source of perspective for the lay person — as I’ve been hearing from readers. The novel is free online at the moment at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com . (No adverts, nobody makes money off this site.) Reader reviews are in the homepage comments – there have been a lot, and they’ve been uniformly positive.

    One of the interesting things about modern nuclear power in the US is that few really understand how it works day to day — including most scientists and journalists who are commenting to the media on the topic. Unfortunately, Rad Decision’s media presence consists of this little-known website.

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