With apologies to MetaFilter for blatantly ripping off their Friday Flash Fun idea, we offer up AE4RV's Nuclear Plant Operator game. Enjoy!
You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap
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Ingenious summary of how people see nuclear power plants. The fact that maxing out the plant is rather normal, and that a meltdown is only possible after a horrible accident, is somewhat missed. :/
This program is especially guilty of this.
Other interesting details:
-The plant is a 20MWe PWR
-The GUI has 18 annunciator lights, including the comical "Power Output Low" and "Meltdown".
-The GUI outputs four properties that characterize the plant state: Reactor Temperature, Steam Generator Temperature, Cooling Tower Temperature, and Reactor Power, all on analog scales with handy green, yellow and red bands so the operator knows whether the number is OK.
-The operator has control of the Control Rod Positions, Primary Coolant Flow, Secondary Coolant Flow, and Emergency Coolant Flow, all adjustable from 0-100% rated flow.
-The operator can only adjust these variables once per game-day, after which the plant conditions are updated. All transients literally take "days".
I'm a bit curious which equations the simulation is using, but no such information is provided by the website or demo.
Also did anyone else notice the reactor coolant flow diagram? The coolant seems to around the core (down the downcomer, below the core, and back up the downcomer) rather than through it.