ZX81 Goes Nuclear – Game for Controlling a Nuclear Power Plant [video] | Hacker News Reader

ZX81 Goes Nuclear – Game for Controlling a Nuclear Power Plant [video]

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I used to know a chap who liked to tell about how he took one of the worst support calls ever.

He worked for a company that did industrial control systems and he was in the office by himself one weekend and the phone kept ringing - apparently they had strict instructions not to answer the phone but he did it anyway.

On the other end of the line was an irate operator at the Hunsterson nuclear power plant who said something like "I'm standing on top of Reactor B and all your systems have gone down and we can't see what the f*ck is going on and what are you going to do to fix it".

Apparently there was a standard support line but the operator had decided to pick on the name of the company displayed somewhere in the software and look them up in the phone book (this was about 1990) and shout at someone.

It turned out to be nothing to do with the systems this chaps employer was responsible for - they just got the call because their name was visible!

It's Hunterston in case anyone wants to read-up - just down the road from me and sadly the AGR is now being de-fuelled as it heads for the big pile in the sky .... such a feature on the local coastline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunterston_B_nuclear_power_sta...

Recommended reading on AGR plants - a blog entry by Charlie Stross about Torness, the other AGR plant in Scotland:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-l...

Loved that thanks - my dad worked there for a year as a pipe fitter. Brings a lot of it to life!

Daniel Stenberg (curl) knows the feeling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12949114

One of my first field service calls was similar - show up at a vessel in a godforsaken port way outside civilization, after a curt greeting from the C/E I head for our deck machinery to get to work, only to be told in no uncertain terms I am an effing greenhorn idiot - THOSE are not the winches with a problem, THOSE OVER THERE ARE.

I have a look at them, find they are not delivered by my then employer, and tell the chief as much.

"The fck do I care who made that piece of crap, you going to fix it or not?"

Turned out we had some electrical cabinets with our logo prominently displayed installed onto a bulkhead near the offending units. C/E had simply seen those, assumed they were the ones controlling the malfunctioning equipment, and had me flown halfway around the globe to fix them.

Luckily it was a rather simple problem to figure out, so I got it going again and somewhat snarkily stamped the service log with my employer's stamp.

As soon as it all worked again, the chief was all smiles and got me thoroughly sloshed on some liquor of dubious origins.

Good times.

Heh and I think you voided the support contract for those winches you fixed to boot.

That was kind of what I hoped for, yes. (We did get a rather confused call from the manufacturer a couple of years later, they had spotted my stamp and were curious, but not hostile in any way.

If nothing else, they were probably grateful it hadn't been one of them working his way to Rabaul. It is hardly a world metropolis.

I've been wanting to get a modern web based reactor simulator going for years. I have noodled on it a bit but not made much progress beyond a bad-UI core neutronic simulator. It just hasn't bubbled to the top of my stack yet. Someday.

https://github.com/whatisnuclear/simulator

I wanted to resurrect SIMULA-C, a PWR simulator made by Ralph Reuhl in the early noughties. Its source code was also available at that time, but it was impermeable for a semi-young mind with minimal understanding of (but lots of appreciation for) nuclear power plants.

This article mentions the software at the very end: http://www.nucleartourist.com/operation/operation.htm

When I saw his simulation on the display it reminded me of a nuke plant simulator I had on the Atari way back in the day. I believe it's this one here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scram_(video_game) which had its source code released here: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/source-code/index.html

His small smile near the end where he says 'in this simulation we can turn off all the safety features'.

Brilliant video and software.

I remember using something very similar on a BBC Micro. I don't think it was so detailed (but it did have colours!).

I think the printer connector is a bit loose -- let me push it in firmly!

Oh no!

Loved the comment about using extra blu-tack to reduce ram wobble, classic hack.

I'm impressed about how sharp the video output of the ZX-81 is here. Original is so wobbly and fuzzy. I suppose he is using some video output converter. That character set, bring back some good childhood memories of learning BASIC with 1Kb of RAM.

You can get a composite output board for the ZX81 eg https://www.ebay.ca/itm/124844441452 which makes it a lot clearer

Cute simulation and good commentary. Obviously nobody would seriously consider using non-redundant commercial hardware like this in an environment with great risk to humanity and the environment. I do recall being amused when (in 1982) I learned that NASA had begun using Tandy Radio Shack Color Computers for telemetry displays. I think Tandy missed out on a marketing (or at least an advertising) opportunity. It could be that they never found out about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer

Be cool to see the source - I assume he wrote it in assembler?

Quoting one comment of the author:

> I wrote the model in Go first and once that was working I converted it to C which very straight forward. Once in C I used Z88DK as the compiler, this comes with tools to create a zx81 application. The IDE was VSCode running on a Mac with a few scripts to build and launch the Clock Signal ZX81 Emulator for testing before creating a tzxduino file. I think I detailed it on https://glasstty.com .

> I use the same environment for writing nascom stuff. Its more straight forward than it sounds.

[I wrote a comment about my half-remembered experiences writing C code for Z80 back in the 1980s, and how compilers didn't do very well, but deleted it because these links summarise the situation much better. In particular it looks like Z88DK solves the problems I was having (if only it existed back then ...)]

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6095/why-...

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/4924

Hi, glad you like the vid etc. and thanks for the nice comments. Unfortunately I don't think I can share the code due one small, albeit essential, bit that I think may have interlectual property attached to it (I never did find out for sure). Think of it as a constant that keeps the model running except its not a constant.

I am not a nuclear physicist but out son is (he designs reactor cores), he helped me to understand some of the maths. The ZX81 code does model the various interactions in tempreture, radioactivity etc. and remarkably, once the code snippet mentioned above was added the model moves quickly to criticality and returns again after a rod change etc. I couldn't quite believe it really. However, once this was achieved in go (golang), I just ported it to C and used Z88DK to target a ZX81.

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