A pre-digital nuclear power plant control panel would look quite daunting, with countless dials, buttons, and switches, all perfectly understandable to a trained operator, but to the average person, it would look as random as Star Trek’s original Enterprise bridge. This results in Partial reconstruction of RBMK reactor control by [Chornobyl Family] YouTube offers a fun way to familiarize yourself with one of the most important elements of this type of reactor control.

The sections to be constructed here will concern the control rods of RBMK’s reactors, their automatic controls and emergency systems such as AZ-5 and BAZ. The goal is not to simply have a glossy display that can be mounted on a wall, but to have it function like a real control panel and be used to demonstrate the underlying control system. The creators spent a lot of time talking with the operators of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which was in operation until the early 2000s, to make the experience as accurate as possible.

The actual RBMK reactor is not controlled by a panel, but operates like the real thing with ESP32-powered logic and also uses a dot-matrix printer to provide a log of commands. Not only is this a very cool simulator, but it’s only the first element of a larger recreation of the RBMK control room, with more videos to follow in this series.

In this video: Accident at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Unit 4This makes RBMK significantly more secure, at the cost of a more complex control panel.