World's Only GLASS Nuclear Reactor!

This is a

nuclear

reactor

and it is made of

glass

. All of the components you see here can be found in any number of power plants across the planet. What makes this one special is that it does not produce energy, but is a simulator. It is the

only

one of its kind. model in the

world

a functional scale model number 1110 that engineers can train on and see through it and soon due to politics in Germany it will also disappear last year a specialist in Germany emailed me a few months later I was on a plane to Essen in Germany with the urgent task of seeing the

world

's last working

glass

nuclear

reactor

simulator, which is located just a few miles from the city center at the KSG GFS Simulator Center, a beautiful campus where scientists and engineers come together to teach, learn and train in cutting-edge technology. state-of-the-art power plant simulators, both nuclear and fossil fuel, used to be the National Training Center for the nuclear industry in Germany, but as we come, times have changed when it comes to nuclear energy, dear viewer, I'm sorry to say that most media outlets like The Simpsons have lied to you, it's not like nuclear engineers and operators are simply waiting at their desks with donuts to fumble and clumsy their way through the next potentially catastrophic situation, no, those engineers rely on their training and that training comes from simulations, you see.

Decades ago, it became common policy for every nuclear reactor in the world to have a proper simulation to operate with to train their engineers on an individual replica and we're not just talking about instantiating valves and readouts in silicon, no, We are talking about reality. Nuclear reactors at scale without all that annoying nuclear material. I'm here in Essen, Germany, today to show you the world's

only

functional scale nuclear reactor simulator that is made of glass. You can see through it. Let's admire it and explain it. today because by the end of the year this multi-million dollar wrist device will be heading to the scrap heap, but we'll get to that in a moment, once inside you can see that the facility is serious about power production.

The exposed beams show you the engineering of the building. The miniatures show the actual size of the power plants that the engineers here will simulate. I wish my engineering school looked like this before we got to the glass model. Our first stop was a 1-to-1 functional replica of a nuclear power plant control room complete with all the color-coded diagrams and controls you'd find in a place that was actually producing power. You can see how good this simulator really is when you compare it to the inside of a real nuclear power plant, even with completely accurate sequencing. and, as we discovered in Dresden, Illinois, our hosts in Germany were big old nerds and knew I'd probably want to simulate a nuclear emergency if I could.

Do you want me to present correctly? Okay, seeing how quickly the security systems activate. The control rods and dropping outputs really show how even during an emergency it can seem pretty easy to handle in a modern nuclear plant and yes, yes, it was fun. From the control room we made our way through more architecturally interesting hallways to the home of the 1110 scale glass nuclear reactor Simulator the multi-million dollar model has everything a nuclear reactor does minus the fuel of course , all the pumps, all the valves, all the heat exchange tubes so that an engineer in training or a legislator wants to know more You can literally see everything that happens when spicy rocks make Steam.

Glass has pros and cons. The benefit, of course, is that you can watch the model while it is running and see what changes are activated as switches are flipped and buttons are pressed in the control room. The downside is that glass is much more fragile than the metal and concrete behemoths that are literally 900% larger than the real thing. However, glass is worth it when you want to demystify the most powerful energy generation process we have. the path towards ESS in Germany because I feel that if people have a problem with nuclear energy, apart from nuclear waste or a possible misinformed disaster, it has something to do with the perceived complexity of everything that happens, if you can't understand it, how can you do it? control it, but with the help of this simulator behind me, I think you will be pleasantly surprised to know how simple everything really is;

You might even feel a little disappointed and that's a good thing, how does a pressurized water reactor like the one simulated behind work? I actually work on a pressurized water reactor or pwr, it starts with the reactor itself, carefully placed fuel rods, we heat the water in the vessel to a superheated temperature, superheated because the vessel is pressurized, p and pwr, which prevents water from turning into steam during regular boiling. temperature more heat means more heat transfer from the reactor the hot water kept under pressure by the pressurizer moves towards these so-called YouTubes they are called that because this video is on YouTube no, they are called that because they are shaped like you Engineers really don't have cool names: hot water from the reactor moves through U-tubes, as heat moves along its gradient to the cooler water around those tubes, water which is in a completely separate loop to avoid any cross contamination.

The heat transfer brings the water separated in the U-tube to its boiling point and the steam generated comes out of this entire system and will be the main engine for the plant's turbines that generate electricity. That's it, that's nuclear energy. It's just boiling water with extra steps. Yes. There are a lot of valves and pumps and uncreative names for things, but as you can see thanks to the simulator glass, what I think many people imagine as a dangerous black box goes without incident, which is good when you feed more of a million homes, not only A glass model like this is of utmost importance when it comes to showing potential engineers what happens when a nuclear reactor works well.

You can also show everyone what happens when a nuclear reactor fails. For example, this glass model behind me can show you exactly. What happened during 3M Island. Our expert hosts adjusted all the settings to simulate the disaster. First, a valve malfunction caused pumps in the secondary feedwater system to shut down. The water separated around the U tubes which cools the water circulating through the core, the reactor stops immediately. as planned, dropping control rods into the core, however a relief valve in the reactor coolant pressurizer does not close false instrument readings improperly closed valves steam bubbles and human error would eventually cause a boil in the reactor and therefore a drop in the water level in the reactor despite a high level is shown in the pressurizer without water cooling the uranium fuel rods.

The heat of decay damaged the rods, causing the release of radioactive material. This was just 3 Mile Island and you can see it all before your very eyes, while the glass tubes and containers do show it. The most important phenomena within a PWR is not all there is to do the simulator as a real nuclear reactor needs a lot of plumbing which cannot be done with the transparent material here in the basement of the facility is where all the water and steam that moves on top is condensed and recirculated and you can do it all remotely via a computer temperature of something in the 80s Celsius and the mixture after 12 will have a temperature of about 80 to 85 degrees Celsius , even the steam also 85 degrees, yes, after having Throttle Down and then this 80° steam will meet 22° water, the treasure, the treasure indicators, of course, the only thing we are not simulating today with this simulator nuclear reactor is the nuclear part, you don't really need footage. in this simulated reactor behind me to get the same physics and thermodynamics that you would see in a real pressurized water reactor, instead behind me you have metal rods that are electrically heated and does the same things with the same systems if that glow blue was actually Cherenov radiation like you would get in a normal nuclear reactor. um, I wouldn't be dead right away, although slowly, with a lot of pain, you realize how critical a glass model like this can be when you look at a typical reading I see in the control room of a nuclear power plant, nothing Behind me it looks very dramatic, right?

But then you look inside the glass model and there is nothing calm. It is in what Adam Savage calls physicalizing the concept where education actually occurs by linking this to what is. Within the glass model, you really begin to understand the use of spicy rocks to, in the end, make Steam. It can be a bit complicated, in some very rare cases, it is dangerous, but this is all in the service of thermodynamics and the Almighty and knowable heat exchange. take some rocks that can heat each other, you heat water which heats water which turns into steam, that steam spins turbines and then that somehow generates electricity and runs through some wires, that's not my department and then eventually, charge your phone or allow you to watch this video whatever you do in your free time, materializing the concept, training until decisions are automatic is something that you can only do with a simulator and that can be of vital importance in a nuclear power plant , as our host test engineer Yen here in Essen explains. well explained, here in Essen we manage and operate simulators for all the nuclear power plants in Germany, or we used to because they were closed for a few months.

Now I'm working as a test engineer, so that means... I'm building and testing simulators for different clients. I make sure that the physics we program matches the physical behavior of the real plant. Complex technical things can happen to you in a very short period of time and you have to make decisions, that's the same for every power plant, you have a big risk of ruining a lot of your equipment and investments very quickly. When you don't have a simulator, things can come up that require you to make decisions in minutes and you can't really do that.

You don't have time to think everything through, you're either trained or you probably won't find a good solution in the time you have. It's a bit like a great computer game the first time. You go into the Nightmare difficulty level, you enter something and you find yourself losing, but you learn the mechanics and then you watch a Starcraft tournament and you see that people are doing things that yes, that maybe you could think of, but that you couldn't achieve. quickly, yes, the feel, yes, the intuition, the strategies that they have, maybe you have an idea of ​​how to employ that, but you couldn't click that quickly, you couldn't see what your opponent is doing. quick, I'm a gamer so I can go record with confidence to say I'm a gamer and that's one of the things that attracted me here and that's what the simulator does for trainees, it can bring them all. kind of situations that are difficult to handle in real time or say: I have no idea what's going on, hit the freeze button and explain if the glass model seems relatively simple.

Nuclear power in Germany is not explained in yen nor the future of simulators like these Fukushima was 2011, by the way, we had just finished building this simulator control room at that time and then there were a bunch of power plants that we closed almost immediately because they were the oldest and we considered them unsafe and then there was A schedule was made for the gradual elimination of the other plants that extended over a 12E period. There are no nuclear power plants left in Germany, so what will happen to all these simulators? They are going to be dismantled parts that still serve other power plants in Germany.

In other countries it will probably be sold and the rest will simply be thrown away. The same fate for the glass model. What will happen to that well. We are hopeful that an interested buyer will be found and the asking price will probably be symbolic. Euro and uh, but someone would have to come and carefully deconstruct it and reconstruct it on site, but unless someone willing to do that is found, the glass model will be smashed as well. Is there anything you can or would like to say about having the reactors? It is basically no longer used here in Germany.

Oh, that's a difficult topic in Germany. The phasing out of nuclear power and reactors that are no longer used. It has always been controversial to have nuclear energy in Germany. I think it's safe to say at least my perception. in the news is that there have been some question marks about whether it was awise decision, but that's after the thought has been popping up a lot in 2024 after the last reactors were shut down, um yeah, other than that, I'd like to hide it. no personal opinion on the matter, unfortunately it now seems inevitable that at the end of the year the only working glass model of a nuclear reactor in the world will end up on a scrap heap.

For our part, I'm at least glad that today we were able to immortalize this incredible piece of scientific communication and engineering, the glass model will also be destroyed at the time I record this video. Yen and his colleagues have been doing everything they can to move the model right now; an interested university or museum may want it. Unfortunately, this incredible piece of engineering for display or demo in the junkyard still seems like the most likely outcome, but the effort has been made, there's also a real chance that interested parties will watch this video, so if you're that impressed like me if you learned.

As much as I showed them in the comments, I don't know, I consider it a possible contribution to nuclear history. Hopefully, as you get to see the inside of this incredible piece of technology, you are impressed by the nuclear reactors and the technology that surrounds them. It's much less threatening than many think until next time