Chernobyl Reactor at Home — Part 1
This video marks the beginning of a long-term project to build a functional hardware simulator of a Chernobyl RBMK reactor control room.
Not a prop. Not a static replica. But a working panel with real buttons, indicators, switches, logging, and control logic.
This project is personal for us.
Over many years of visiting the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, we gradually realized that photographs and stories alone cannot fully convey what the control rooms once felt like when the plant was alive. This project is an attempt to preserve not only the appearance of that hardware, but also the physical experience of interacting with it.
The goal is to recreate key control hardware from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and place it on public display, so people can physically experience how reactor control systems looked, felt, and operated.
To do this correctly, we spent many hours speaking with former reactor operators and engineers, learning how the real systems worked, how they were used in practice, and how they changed after the 1986 disaster.
In this first part, we focus on recreating the most important control panel — the one used to select and move control rods, operate automatic regulators, and trigger emergency protection systems such as AZ-5 and BAZ.
Along the way, we also explain in simple terms how these systems function inside an RBMK reactor.
00:00 Intro
00:45 The story behind
03:09 What these controls do: AR, LAR, AZ-5, and others explained
07:32 Thousands of connections, miles of wires and a lot of passion
28:39 Test-run
This video shows:
– How the real control panel works
– Why post-disaster RBMK control systems became more complex
– How hundreds of original Soviet components were sourced
– Engraving and painting of original-style button caps
– Fabrication of a steel panel identical in size and layout to the original
– Thousands of solder joints and hand-made LED lamps
– Building a large controller using GPIO expanders, LED drivers, and an ESP32
– Logging of operations to a dot-matrix printer
– First functional tests of the system
This project is not about deeply simulating nuclear physics. Above all, it is about recreating the physical interface — the hardware layer — that operators used every day inside the Chernobyl reactor control room. Future parts of this series will add more devices and more operational logic.
If you are interested in Chernobyl history, RBMK reactors, nuclear engineering, electronics, industrial control systems, or complex DIY projects — this series is for you.
A big thank you to everyone who supported this project and helped make it possible. You can become a part of it:
/ thechernobylfamily
http://buymeacoffee.com/chernobylfamily
Full collection of behind-the-scenes of this project:
/ 1495148