The Brow

When I was going through nuc school in the late 80's, a fairly detailed nuclear power plant simulation called Chernobyl came out for the C-64. Despite the name, it was actually a simulation of a pressurized water reactor (Chernobyl was a BWR) which was obviously modeled on TMI-2. The instructions were practically non-existent, and the interface was primitive to say the least. Still, I enthusiastically bought a copy, with an eye to trying out all this great new stuff I was learning about in nuc school.

But, after several frustrating hours, all I could do was cycle some valves. The box art promised all sorts of “thrilling” plant evolutions and casualties to tackle, but I couldn’t get the freaking plant out of hot standby no matter what I did. This was long before the internet or even same-day customer support, so instead I turned to the Brow.

That was our section advisor, an odd looking ET chief who had one big eyebrow running across his forehead, just like Animal on the Muppets. We called him the Brow not just because of the prominence of this feature, but also due to his distracting habit of waxing it with his own snot while he was talking to us. I was willing to overlook this for the simple reason that he didn’t immediately put me on mando-35 (as later section advisors did) if I tubed the occasional exam.

I mentioned the problems I was having with the simulator, and the Brow agreed to have a look at it for me. While I’m sure the last thing he wanted to do was stand watch while he was on shore duty (something I understand a lot more now that I’ve had his job a few times myself) he probably wanted to know if there was any educational value in it for us kids. After all, most of us had C-64s, and what better way to reinforce a lesson on reactor kinetics than to try it out for yourself?

He ended up keeping the game so long I almost forgot about it. Right before he turned us over to another section advisor (the one we called Zipper, because his fly was almost always unzipped. He had weight issues… or maybe he just didn’t care anymore), the Brow gave me the game back with a set of hand-written “operating instructions” that was thicker than a phone book. Apparently, both he and some of the other instructors had been playing around with it for weeks, and got it to do pretty much everything the box promised.

By then we were headed to the “dark side” of the school, however, and time off quickly evaporated. His instructions worked perfectly, but the game was actually pretty boring once you got the plant up and steaming… just like real life. Maybe that’s why there’s never been an updated version for PCs. Still, if flight simulators have some value for guys in the pilot pipeline, I wonder if it might be useful for nuc school students to have a generic plant simulator to play with, while it’s all still new and exciting.