As a nuclear engineer, it's hard to use these kinds of intro tools without shouting things at your monitor. For this, it was the omission of xenon when discussing simulating reactor transients.

I get that it's meant to be overly simplified, and it's a neat idea that is probably helpful for communicating some key concepts.

then give us better tools! :) Most of the sims require (at least?) registration with the IAEA: https://www.iaea.org/topics/nuclear-power-reactors/nuclear-r... (I want that Micro-Physics Nuclear Reactor Simulator)

Then there's this https://dalton-nrs.manchester.ac.uk/ but it's down for "maintenance" (a web site - can you imagine?!)

I found this interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59hVaIjxMIM but people say it does no longer work on recent Windows version. Also I don't like to install random binaries from Mega or similar.

In the end a realistic reactor simulation would probably to complicated for the layman, anyway.

try Nucleares (on Steam), it's a heavily gamified one but does cover various important aspects, including Xenon poisoning. You can find some play videos on YouTube.

Xenon-135's huge neutron absorption cross-section and its buildup/decay dynamics create the "xenon poisoning" effect that makes power changes tricky and can even prevent reactor restart after shutdown - a critical aspect of real reactor operation.

FWIW, Xenon was discussed, but it didn't go into enough detail about why Xenon matters and how it can create transients.

i thought it went in to sufficient depth

There's also PCTRAN from Micro-simulation Technology: http://www.microsimtech.com/pctran/

You must provide an email adderss to download their simulators.

I haven't tried PCTRAN on Windows 11, but they definitley work on Windows 7 through 10.

> This webpage was reloaded because it was using significant memory

I like how my browser melts down before the reactor can.

I had a lot of fun playing this as a kid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scram_(video_game)

Not great, not terrible

Reminds me of http://www.gamtech.com/oakflat.aspx loved blowing triggering SCRAM as a kid

Fun, and I learned something!

However, it crashed after a few mins with an alert popup saying "WebGL context lost, please reload the page"