The very first nuclear plant simulator I ever played with was a primitive text-based program, running on a DEC 11/780. To win the game you had to average a certain number of MWh over each turn (days). It seemed easy, just turn it on and let it run, but there was a catch. The game simulated normal fatigue, meaning that the longer it ran, the more likely something would go wrong. Also, the higher power you ran, the faster things would fatigue. The game required you to shut the reactor down for maintenance periodically. The longer you ran it, the longer the maintenance cycle. Success involved balancing uptime and power generation with required maintenance downtime.
As an aside, I learned about how nuclear reactors generate power when I was pretty young, so I was surprised to learn, just this past year, that there were people who didn't know that nuclear reactors just heat up water to make steam, same as any other power plant. There's people out there who (quite reasonably, IMNSHO) have a model of nuclear reactors directly generating electricity from the reaction.
I didn't understand how nuclear reactors work until I was in grad school and even then I was aghast. You'd think if we could split an atom, we'd have a better way to make electricity than to make steam to turn a turbine. Of course, there are RTGs, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device
It's an incentives problem. Nearly all of the world's power is generated by spinning a turbine with steam, so, we have a direct, actionable, incentive to make that process as efficient as possible, and we have indeed done this and continue to do this. Modern steam turbines are wildly efficient.
That doesn't mean that they are the only thing that can be efficient, just that they're the current best option, and, any other option is going to have to show immense promise in order to get the funding to catch up to where we are now with steam.
The only thing on my radar that bypasses steam entirely is what Helion Energy is doing up in washington with their experimental fusion devices. The basic idea being that you're using a pulsed fusion reaction and intentionally not containing it, instead using the energy produced to push back on the magnetic containment and generate power. No idea if it'll work out to be viable, but it at least makes sense on paper.
You're correct. The design of nuclear reactors was intended from the beginning to replace steam generation, with the goal of not needed to redesign the entire generating plant and take advantage of the known tech as much as was reasonable. There were ideas around for just replacing existing coal/gas/whatever with reactors, to get the most value out of the capital expended on the plant. There are still studies around retrofitting retired coal generation with nuclear reactors.
Just like steam tractors were designed to replace horses.
Which is a fascinating factoid really, because the farm tooling was designed to run at a certain speed (maybe not intentionally, but, over time, that's the design criteria regardless), so the tractors were designed to run about as fast as a horse so all existing tooling could be retained.
It wasn't until much later that tooling was redesigned to work faster.
Might it have been Oakflat Nuclear Power Plant Simulator[1] you're thinking of? I'm not aware of a version that ran on the DEC but it might very well have existed and it sounds quite similar. I can certainly credit it for developing my unhealthy fascination with nuclear power. Also perhaps my unhealthy tendency to push buttons and see what happens!
I never realized this was the one I had on both C64 and DOS! When I played C64 I was too young (4-5yo) to actually play it. And the DOS version came on one of those disks comprised of half freeware games, half bootleg games. (Back when you could still buy those at legit retailers). Anyway that's germane because I seem to remember that once the reactor powered up it would immediately meltdown. I realized at the time - I think this was the developer's copy protection. Which struck me as much more entertaining and clever than just not working if it was a bootleg copy.
As an aside, I learned about how nuclear reactors generate power when I was pretty young, so I was surprised to learn, just this past year, that there were people who didn't know that nuclear reactors just heat up water to make steam, same as any other power plant. There's people out there who (quite reasonably, IMNSHO) have a model of nuclear reactors directly generating electricity from the reaction.