RBMK Simulator

A simulator app for the chornobyl RBMK reactor. This aims to be a successor for the Simgenics rxmodel simulator from about 30 years ago but with a lot more detailed systems and a more accurate representation of the chernobyl plant.

This is work in progress. Please do NOT expect a working product.

The app aims to be usable in real time on average to low end computers. It does not require high performance hardware.

For details on the usage and some rudimentary documentation, refer to the project page.

Installation and Usage

Download latest: RbmkSimulator-SNAPSHOT.jar

Using this link downloads the latest automated build (also found in Releases as github-ci-snapshot). It always points to the current development state and will be replaced automatically each time I change something. You might find a new file there from time to time.

Save files are NOT compatible with newer versions.

<details> <summary>This is a Java application. Expand this section (just click here) if you want to read more about this and don't know what to do with a .jar file.</summary>

You need a Java Runtime (at least v17.0.17) to run a .jar file. A jar file is an archive file that can contain something for java to run.

To check if you already have java installed and configured on your system, type

java -version

in Command Line or Terminal. It will return which version is installed or an error if there is no java available. In this case you have to download this by yourself.

Any recent OpenJDK has a Runtime included, you can go for Eclipse Adoptium or the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK or any other of those. Just do not use the Oracle/Sun Java JRE you will find at java.com as this is the old Version 8. If you're a Linux user, you should not have any issues getting a java runtime for your distribution.

To run the Simulator, simply run the. jar with the Java Runtime. You could open a terminal and run

  java -jar RbmkSimulator-SNAPSHOT.jar

Running in Terminal allows you to see additional log output (which is not needed for operating the plant).

Why this? Why not a simple .exe file? It is not uncommon to need some kind of Runtime to run a program, you might also know .NET or Visual Studio Runtime which are needed for some programs also. Java is a bit different but has the huge advantage that it works on multiple plattforms with almost the same behavior. While it had a bad reputation for end users due to some security issues and a really bad installer behaviour (who the hell installs Toolbars), it is nowadays used a lot for backend server side apps and one of the most popular programming languages. It gained some reputation with Minecraft at non programmer end users in the last years.

</details>

Getting involved

Please make yourself familiar with the rather unusual Code of Conduct first and read the Contributing guidelines.

There is a list of missing features and known problems in the Issue section, everything that is listed here is going to be fixed and implemented.

No Z supporters wanted.

Licencing and usage

I decided to publish this simulator with GPLv3 so this thing is free software. As I've also put in lots of thoughts on how to represent the plant with the GUI, I do want to keep the authorship and control over it. You can use and redistribute this software as you like, there are only some limitations if you would like to modify and publish the software again.

To make it possible to share the developed technology, large parts of the code in other repositories are published with MIT licence so you're free to reuse those parts for whatever you like without such limitations.

Modeling engine

The simulation is based on the PhxNetMod project which implements the theory of having similar linear ordinary differential equations in electronics, mechanics, hydraulics and thermal systems. The methods of network analysis can therefore be applied to other domains. The PhxNetMod core, along with other dependencies, are available as separate projects.