When Simulators Went Atomic

These days the simulator genre seems to have found its way into all sorts of everyday activities such as cooking, farming, trucking and car maintenance.  Well...what could possibly be more mundane than running an commercial power plant?  Not a whole lot, but what if it were a pressurized water reactor generating electricity through the splitting of the atom?

Released in 1980 for the Atari 400/800 on tape cassette, SCRAM is (as the tagline states) "A Nuclear Power Plant Simulation."  The premise of the game is you, the player, are the operator of a fission power facility.  The goal is to generate as many megawatts of electricity as possible before having to shutdown.  The challenge comes in the form of earthquakes that damage important components, jamming valves or breaking pumps.  The player has a finite number of workers at their disposal who can repair the damage, but once sent out they cannot be used again.  The difficulty can be adjusted by changing the "Risk" factor.  Basically a numerical value that can be set anywhere from zero to nine.  Zero means no earthquakes will happen while nine causes the tectonic plates to start breakdancing.  Overall, the simulation accurately models an actual nuclear power plant in terms of layout and design with some concessions being made for the sake of simplicity.  Also, unlike real power plants there aren't any automatic safety mechanisms...because what would be the fun in that?  Anyway...let's move onto a little word trivia, shall we?

The word "scram," from which the name of the game is derived, actually just serves as another way of saying an emergency shutdown triggered manually by the power plant operator.  Alternatively, if an automatic safety system is responsible for an emergency shutdown then it's called a "trip".  For the longest time many people believed (and perhaps some still do) that the word "scram" is actually an acronym for "Safety Control Rods Activation Mechanism" or "Safety Control Rod Axe Man"...or even "Start Cutting Right Away, Man!"  The latter two being a reference to the guy whose job it was to severe a rope that held the control rods out of the core in the first nuclear reactor ever built, Chicago Pile-1.  In fact it did not work that way, and the word "scram" means just that...as in "get out here!"  I guess at some point nuclear reactor designers concluded that should the situation became so dire as to necessitate someone pressing an emergency shutdown button, said individual should make a run for it immediately after doing so.

Speaking of meltdowns, SCRAM was made as a direct response to the Three Mile Island incident.  Unlike the film "China Syndrome," that came out shortly before the accident (and had no basis in reality), SCRAM was an attempt to educated the general public on how nuclear reactors actually worked.  The temperature and pressure accurately reflect the real thing, as does the underlying mathematical equations used to calculate heat exchange, criticality and so on.  One might be tempted to say the game is pro-nuclear, if not for the fact that SCRAM can only end one of two ways: thermal nuclear meltdown or cold shutdown.  Either way the reactor is no longer producing power, a rather sorry state to conclude things on.  Perhaps SCRAM deserves a spiritual sequel wherein the player must decommission the reactor and gather up any misplaced radioactive waste...sort of like Viscera Cleanup Detail except more educational.