PWR Operator Manual · Open the simulator

02 — Simulator User Guide

Document: PWR-SIM-01
Title: Reactor⚛️Dynamics — PWR Trainer Operation
Revision: 24

1.0 Purpose

Provide step-by-step instructions to launch the simulator, navigate the human-machine interface (HMI), select plant modes and missions, and use trainer tools without modifying plant state incorrectly.

2.0 Starting the simulator

2.1 Requirements

• Modern desktop browser (desktop is the design target; mobile is not supported).
• No installation, server, or WebAssembly required for normal use.

2.2 Launch

1. From the home page, open the PWR control room — or open the offline download, a single HTML file that runs with no internet connection.
2. Confirm the board fills the plant area with its vital-parameter tiles across the top, and that the right column shows the Instructor, the tool tabs, and the System Scanner.
3. The Main Menu opens on every load. If it is closed, press Main Menu in the tools row; the plant is the Pressurized Water Reactor.

2.3 First actions (recommended)

3.0 Board layout (PWR)

The PWR uses a single full-plant synoptic board as the sole control surface — one stage carrying the plant mimic, its control cards, and the vital-parameter tiles. **There is no view switcher and no separate gauge strip**: the tiles are part of the board. The legacy multi-view plant display with its own gauge strip applies to RBMK/BWR only.

┌─ PWR BOARD (one stage) ─────────────────────────────────────┐┌ Sim clock / Play / Speed ─┐
│ [Power][Tavg][Subcool][Pressure][PZR Lvl][SG Lvl]  ← tiles  ││ 📖 Manual  ? Help         │
│                                                             │├ Instructor ───────────────┤
│              PLANT MIMIC + CONTROL CARDS                    ││ commentary / gates        │
│   (rod control, PZR, CVCS, ECCS/RHR/AFW, SG feed,           │├ Tools ────────────────────┤
│    steam dump, turbine-generator, condenser cooling …)      ││ Operate  Inject Failure   │
│                                                             ││ Graph  Physics  Settings  │
├──────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┤├ System Scanner ───────────┤
│ Strip chart (trends)         │ Alarm panel                  ││ hover = name; click = full │
└──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┘└───────────────────────────┘

3.1 Vital-parameter tiles

Six tiles across the top of the board. Each shows the reading, a short trend trace, and the seven protection regions behind it — trip · alarm · acceptable · NORMAL · acceptable · alarm · trip — drawn from the plant's live protection tables, so a retune moves the tile with it. Always instrument readings, never truth (HR1).

Units follow Settings → Units (§7.6): US customary (psi / °F) or SI (MPa / °C), tiles and strip chart together.

3.2 Board cards (control homes)

The cards are laid out around the mimic. Nothing on the board is tabbed — every card is visible at once, which is the point of a single-stage board.

PORV, block valve, RCPs, MSIV and the safety valves live on the mimic itself rather than on a card — click the component. 03_CONTROLS_AND_INDICATIONS.md is the per-control reference.

3.3 Right column

3.4 System Scanner — the inspection surface

The Scanner answers "what is this?" in two tiers, and it covers the whole board: every card, control, component and indication, plus the shell chrome, the vital-parameter tiles and the active alarm tiles.

Expanded entries carry a 📖 Manual link that opens the on-screen Operator's Manual **at the exact section documenting that item** — the fastest route from "what is this knob" to the procedure that uses it. The collapsed/expanded choice is remembered between sessions.

Alarm-tile detail is generated from the plant's own protection table, so it states the real setpoint in your selected units and cannot drift from a retune.

NOTE: hovering does not ring or highlight the element. The only glows on the board are the Instructor's (blue) and the walkthrough's step preview (green) — both of which point at something you did not choose to look at.

4.0 Sim controls and keyboard shortcuts

4.1 Time control

CAUTION: High speed during approach to criticality or load rejection can leave you behind the plant. Use 1×–10× for startups and transients until proficient.

WARP lets go by itself. The moment the plant moves fast — a reactor trip, a new equipment failure, a first alarm on a quiet board, power moving faster than 2 %/s or pressure faster than 40 psi/s (0.276 MPa/s), or the loop asked for more sub-steps than it can give — WARP drops to 60× and a toast names the reason. The two WARP buttons stay dark for as long as the condition stands, and light again the moment it lifts — there is no timer. Asking for WARP while it is unavailable lands you at 60× with the same toast. A mission's own fast-forward never uses WARP.

The plant can hold the clock. Where the plant needs you and cannot let you skip past — today the accumulator arming window on a heatup, from the 665 psi (4.585 MPa) cover gas until the accumulator valve is open — the clock drops to 1× and every speed button above it is refused, with the reason in the scanner bar under the board. Opening the valve releases it. This hold ignores the fast-forward dropout setting, because the point of it is that the window cannot be recovered once passed.

A walkthrough drives the speed control for you. While a walkthrough is running, each step sets the clock to the rate that step should be played at: the rung named on its ⏩ wait line for a long wait, a slower rate where the step names its own — the four steps of the approach to criticality and the pull into Mode 1 run at 10× or 5× against the wait line's rule of thumb, because a rod step has to land while you can still read the rate — and 1× for everything else. It also comes back down to 1× the moment the step's check-off criterion is met, so a fast-forward cannot run the plant past the thing the next step is about. When it raises the clock for a long wait, the line under the speed buttons says so — Speeding up to N× — nothing to do for a while. You keep the bar: any rung you press stands for the rest of that step, and the walkthrough takes the clock again at the next one. The step's own rung stays marked on the strip throughout, and pulses only while the plant is not on it.

Fast-forward dropout. Acceleration snaps back to 1× when something arrives that you have to look at: a reactor trip, a new equipment failure, or the **first alarm on an otherwise quiet board**. A toast names the reason. Alarms that follow while the board is already lit do not drop the clock — inside a casualty those are the consequences you are already working, and stopping for each one would make fast-forward useless exactly when a long evolution (cooldown, boration, decay-heat wait) needs it. Standing alarms therefore suppress alarm dropouts for as long as they stand; a trip or a new failure still gets through. Turn the whole behavior off at Settings → Fast-forward dropout.

4.2 Keyboard (global)

4.3 Destructive control arming

SCRAM is the one control on the PWR board that arms. It is a two-press CONFIRM with a 3 s arm window: the first press reads CONFIRM, a second press inside the window trips the reactor, and letting the window expire disarms it with no action taken.

After the trip the same button becomes the RPS reset — it reads PRESS TO RESET, or names what is blocking the reset when the plant is not ready (see 03 §3.5.1). The reset is refused until the rods are seated.

NOTE: every other control on the board acts on a single press, including ones with real consequences — MSIV Close, PORV Block Valve Isolate, and taking the generator Off (the planned offline). Read the control before you click it; there is no second-chance prompt. Save first (§11.0) if you are experimenting.

The wider two-press convention belongs to the classic control-bar panels the RBMK and BWR still use, where breaker-open, PORV block close, ADS and SLC all arm. The PWR board replaced that bar, and only SCRAM carried the idiom across.

5.0 Main Menu

Entry: Main Menu, in the tools row beside Settings. The menu also opens on every load, with the plant paused until you close it or start something.

5.1 Selection order

1. Continue — shown only when this browser holds an autosave; picks up where you left off.
2. Category — Lessons (short guided sessions with the Instructor), Walkthroughs (a

guided startup and shutdown) or Free Play. Clicking one moves the list to a narrow left column and shows that category's choices beside it; click another to switch.

3. The choice inside it — for Lessons, the full-power opener (about 5 minutes); for

Walkthroughs, a part of the Startup or Shutdown (Startup Part 1 to Part 3, each with its starting and ending Mode; the next one to do is tagged NEXT); for Free Play, the starting condition and Start Free Play.

Once the plant has run, every Start (and Reset) asks before it replaces the plant you have: a line reads This restarts the plant. Your current plant will be lost. with **Restart plant and Cancel** beside it. Nothing happens until you press one.

5.2 Free Play vs training

Campaign missions and Scenarios are not offered in the Main Menu.

5.3 Initial conditions (PWR Free Play) and plant MODES

The cold end is Mode 5, Cold Shutdown. Take the plant up with PWR-T20, or run PWR-T21 down from power; both run end to end. These five states are the whole list — there is no Mode 4, Hot Shutdown start; you pass through Mode 4 on the way.

6.0 Display modes (Learning vs Realistic)

These are set by the CONTENT, not by you. There is no display-mode selector: the Settings tab holds units, fast-forward dropout and About, and nothing else. A scenario declares the mode it needs, and the TMI-2 module is the reason the mechanism exists — Parts 1 and 3 run Realistic, so the board and the trend both keep the deception, and Part 2 switches to Learning so the reveal can show you the physics underneath. Free Play always runs Learning.

Automatic protection and the alarms read the instruments in both modes (HR1). The mode changes what is drawn; it never changes what the plant decides.

WARNING: in Realistic mode the PORV indicator can lie with no dual Actual column and no relief animation — exactly as at TMI-2. The tailpipe temperature is your only honest tell. Run the TMI-2 module (campaign Act V, missions 27–29) to practise it — see 08_ACCIDENT_TMI.md. You cannot reach that board state from Free Play.

7.0 Tools tabs

The side panel's tabs are Instructor and Indications, plus Inject Failure in Free Play only — it is hidden while a walkthrough, lesson or mission runs. Settings, Help and Feedback sit in the top bar. Plant automation is not a tab — it lives on the board (§7.3).

7.1 Operate

• The plant and its starting condition are chosen in the Main Menu (§5.0).
• Reset — return to the selected initial condition.
• Features — optional plant features for the current session.
• Save / Load — write or restore a plant state as JSON.

7.2 Inject Failure

Free Play only. The tab is hidden during walkthroughs, lessons and missions.

• Browse injectable failures by category (coolant, power, safety, reactivity, instrument); each

carries a one-line description.

• Inject / clear failures for drills.
• Severity sliders where provided (SGTR leak rate, LOCA size, rod runaway rate, etc.).
• Armed / Fired. Some failures wait for a plant event before they act — a PORV that sticks

on its next lift, a failure to scram, a turbine trip that fails to trip the reactor, continuous rod withdrawal, a degraded injection or auxiliary-feed failure. Injected, they read Armed — … until the event comes, then Fired — …. This line is the instructor's console: it reads the plant itself, so it can show a valve stuck open while a failed position light on the board still reads CLOSED. The Instructor tab's debrief does not — it tells you only what the board shows.

See 07 for the response procedure for each failure.

7.3 Plant automation (board AUTO controls — not a tab)

Per-channel AUTO / MAN controllers that read instruments and issue plant commands. They live on the board's control cards (there is no separate tab): STEAM GEN FEED → AUTO (three-element SG level), BORON → ON (target ppm), STEAM DUMP → AUTO, CHARGING → AUTO. Rod control has no automatic channel on this plant, and since Rev 17 there is no button for one either (03 §14.3).

Rules:

• Engaging captures current reading as setpoint (editable).
• Manual operator action on that control typically forces MAN.
• Failed sensors fool automation (HR1).
• Rod/power channels drop out on scram where configured.

7.4 Graph

Strip / multi-parameter trends for post-event review and slow transients (xenon, boron). Pick which parameters plot under Plot parameters.

What the trend traces depends on the display mode the content set (§6.0). In Learning it plots the true physics — sensor noise is not a lesson, and a clean trace is what makes a slow trend readable. In Realistic it plots the instruments, so a failed or drifting sensor shows up on the trend exactly as it does on the gauge, and must be caught by cross-checking diverse indications (see PWR-E20/E21/E22 in 07_ABNORMAL_EMERGENCY.md). Alarms and automatic protection read the instruments in both modes (HR1) — the mode changes what is drawn, never what the plant decides.

The vertical scale auto-ranges to round numbers and is then held: it re-scales only when a trace leaves the band, so a line does not change shape once it has been drawn. A trace brightens when its parameter is in an alarm band. Chart units follow Settings → Units, the same selection the board tiles use.

7.5 Physics

The true plant state, behind the instruments. Everything on this tab is what the simulator is actually computing — no lag, no noise, and a failed sensor does not change a single figure on it. It is an engineering display, not a second board: nothing here alarms, nothing here is what protection reads, and a real control room has none of it.

Rows are chosen for what the board cannot show — quantities with no instrument at all, or none wired to a readout — and are ordered along the energy path. Five groups:

Three of those repay a second look:

• Fission power is not total core heat. The first is the chain reaction alone; the second

adds the decay tail. At steady power they are the same number, which is why one gauge is enough on a real board — but a scram drops fission through the floor while the core is still making about 7 % of rated. The plant is cooled against the second figure, never the first.

• The loop pressure split. There is no per-node pressure gauge on this plant; the single

primary-pressure instrument reads the hot-leg/pressurizer datum. The cold leg runs highest (pump discharge — the ECCS and letdown datum) and the pump suction lowest, and at power the spread is about 80 psi (0.55 MPa) end to end. It is why the pump suction flashes and cavitates before anything on the board says so.

• Values marked in colour are states that should read exactly zero on a healthy plant —

voiding, RCP cavitation, leak flow — or that have crossed a threshold the engine itself uses (clad temperature against the fuel-damage limit; subcooling against saturation). This is not an alarm system. The alarm panel is the alarm system.

Use it after a transient, not during one. Operating from the true values instead of the instruments teaches the wrong habit and skips the lesson the sensor-failure drills exist for (PWR-E20/E21/E22 in 07_ABNORMAL_EMERGENCY.md). Reading it afterwards to find out why the plant did what it did is the point.

Units follow Settings → Units (§7.6). RBMK and BWR have no physics panel authored yet.

7.6 Settings

• Units — US customary or SI, applied to the board tiles, the setpoint boxes, the readouts

and the strip chart together.

• Fast-forward dropout — on / off (§4.1).
• About — Disclaimer, License, and Changelog (in-app; works offline in the portable build).

There is no display-mode, terminology or physics-overlay selector here — see §6.0.

8.0 Alarms and Instructor

8.1 Alarm panel

• Alarms stack when active; color/priority coded (critical / warning / caution / status).
• Point at an alarm for the Scanner account of it — including the real setpoint, read

from the plant's protection table in your selected units (§3.4). Pointing does not highlight anything on the board.

• Click a tile to acknowledge that alarm; A acknowledges all.
• Status-class tiles arrive already acknowledged — they report a lineup, not a demand for action. See 06_ALARM_RESPONSE.md §2.0.

Philosophy: Alarms read instruments. A stuck sensor can hide a real condition or create a false one.

8.2 Instructor panel

During missions:

• Read the commentary. The plant vocabulary is authored in two registers — Learning

(plain language) and Industry (real plant terminology) — but the shipped board runs Learning throughout: there is no register selector, and the industry labels sit in the data against a future option. Alarm tiles are the visible case; 06_ALARM_RESPONSE.md carries both names for every card.

• Follow gates — some actions blocked until the lesson allows them.
• Procedure walkthroughs show step index and acceptance met/not met.
• Level complete offers continue / retry / rewind when provided.

NOTE: Rewind restores a checkpoint; use it after a failed recovery or softlock.

In Free Play the Instructor does not direct you, but after a reactor trip or an **injected failure it writes a debrief** in the Instructor tab, read off the instruments and alarms: what the board says happened (the trip and its recorded cause, the first alarms), the automatic actions with their times, five key readings and which way they are going, and whether the plant has held steady or is still changing. A toast points you at it. Retry rewinds the plant to the last checkpoint before the event — for a failure you injected or a trip you made by hand, that is the instant before it; Dismiss closes the debrief.

8.3 Walkthroughs and their prerequisite banner

A walkthrough is a live, self-checking procedure run against the plant. Start one from the Main Menu → Walkthroughs, which lists the operating cycle as Startup Part 1–3 and *Shutdown Part 1–3*; its Start button loads the procedure's own starting condition first. Lessons start the same way, from Main Menu → Lessons. A running walkthrough is drawn in the Instructor tab one step at a time, headed Step X of N, with the step's details open. Steps check themselves off the instruments while you operate; nothing is reset by starting one and no command is ever blocked. Every step waits for Continue, which is dark until the instruments say the step is done and lights when they do; **Rewind step** takes the plant and the walkthrough back to the start of the previous step (the chart's Rewind is off while a walkthrough runs).

Procedures also carry machine-checked prerequisites. From the moment a walkthrough starts, the Instructor grades each one against the live plant — reading the same indications you do — and if any does not match, the walkthrough shows a caution banner listing each failed item with what the procedure expects and what the plant actually reads (for example: boron at the estimated critical condition, ≈ 683 ppm — reads 857). The Instructor adds one comment pointing you at it.

• The banner warns; it never blocks. Every control still works and steps still check

off. What it tells you is that the plant is not where the procedure assumes, so steps may not verify until you put it there — the classic case is starting the reactor startup after a pump-heat heatup without first diluting to the estimated critical boron (PWR-N02 step 15).

• It is an ENTRY statement, and it does not come back. The verdicts are taken once, as

the walkthrough opens, and the banner then stands until the run starts moving. Preconditions ask whether it was sensible to open this walkthrough; re-asserting them against a plant the walkthrough is deliberately changing would make the procedure complain about its own progress — a Mode 5 → Mode 3 heatup crosses out of every one of its own entry conditions by design.

Reading a step card

Every step card leads with its number and instruction. The card you are on adds a block underneath it:

When a step's text tells you an alarm is expected, that alarm's tile carries a small **predicted by step N** tag while the step is active. The alarm is still real — the tag tells you it is the one the procedure expected.

The wait line appears on steps that hold three plant-minutes or longer, and the walkthrough presses that rung itself (§4.1). The suggested rung is the lowest one that finishes the wait in about half a minute of real time, so three quarters of the waits stay on the full-fidelity 1× to 60× tier; the ones of about forty plant-minutes and up — the pressurization, the heatup ride, the cooldown legs, the boration — call for 600× or 3600×, which are WARP and will be refused while the plant is in a transient (§4.1). The plant-time figure is an upper bound taken from the procedure's own dwell: drive the plant harder and you will get there sooner. The rung is a request, not a rate — what your machine actually achieves is shown beside the speed buttons.

9.0 On-screen Operator’s Manual

• M or 📖 opens the integrated manual for the active plant.
• The in-app manual IS this document set. It renders the same commercial-format chapters

you are reading now — Read Me First, 01–12, and the revision history — so there is no second, thinner in-product reference to keep track of.

• The 📖 Manual link in an expanded Scanner entry (§3.4) opens it **at the relevant

section**, which is usually faster than navigating the chapter list.

10.0 Recommended first-session checklist

11.0 Save, reset, and recovery

12.0 Training campaign overview (optional path)

Campaign “Zero to Operator” (six acts, 34 missions plus one bonus) takes a novice from board familiarization through TMI and a senior operator exam. Recommended order is the campaign list; Free Play is always available. The mission-by-mission map, with the procedure each one exercises, is chapter 11.

13.0 Related documents

• 01_GENERAL_DESCRIPTION.md
• 03_CONTROLS_AND_INDICATIONS.md
• 04_NORMAL_OPERATIONS.md

These manuals are licensed CC BY 4.0 — see Legal. Training documents for an educational simulator, not licensing-basis documents for a real plant.