Minecraft players are no strangers to making odd and complex creations in the sandbox game. Previously, we've seen all sorts, like one player who made a redstone PC so they could play Minecraft in Minecraft or when someone else created a word processor in the crafting game.
Over the last decade or so, I've learned never to underestimate a Minecraft player, which is why when I saw that a group of players had managed to recreate a nuclear reactor in a custom server and then subsequently blow it up, I wasn't actually too surprised.
"A minor radiological incident occurred on the Minecraft server," one player on the server tweets. This is also accompanied by a detailed hand-drawn map laying out where the radiological fallout (referred to as a "Giant fucking cloud of airborne radioactive materials") has landed on the server, which is pretty much everywhere.
To give some more context to this tragic disaster, the reactor was from Mekanism, a mod on Curseforge that provides players with "a suite of low, mid, and high tier machinery to elevate your archaic home and inefficient resource processing to the 21st century," according to its description. This gives you access to hydrogen-powered jetpacks, a robot friend, and, crucially, a fission reactor that "uses advanced [inertial] confinement technology (compressing and heating a small amount of fission fuel) to harness the power of the sun to run advanced machinery." You know, it's just basic theoretical physics in Minecraft.
Apparently, all was going well with the reactor, so well, in fact, that one of the members, who also happens to be a nuclear reactor safety inspector, handed out a certificate to the person operating the reactor to confirm that it was safe. Shortly after this the reactor exploded, sending the server into chaos.
A minor radiological incident occurred on the Minecraft server pic.twitter.com/qp16d7kTdQJuly 12, 2024
"I wanted to troll my friend Buka with a lot of administrative bullshit since he was advancing in the tech tree and wanted to make a nuclear reactor," a member of the server and the nuclear reactor safety inspector who goes by rohrxd told me. "There was a post a while ago about someone placing signs on a fireplace in Minecraft for violating Osha standards, and I was inspired by it since I am familiar with the nuclear code of federal regulations."
While the challenge and inspection may have been a bit of fun, rohrxd admits that its destruction was not the intention at all: "I put a house full of villagers next to the reactor to discourage blowing it up. [But] I snuck a fish in the reactor, which stopped the multiblock structure from completing, which had [Buka] confused for a bit," which probably didn't help things.
Rohrxd also told me that the fallout from the meltdown had some far-reaching effects. "That area that blew up is just permanently irradiated, and you'll die very fast if you enter it." Although the reactor was apparently made 4000 blocks west of spawn, which helped containment a bit, "that area is inhabitable now."
Luckily, unlike a real nuclear disaster, it looks like the server won't be permanently scarred. "The situation is under control," another player tweets while pointing out that the time to decay is 6 hours and 29 minutes. But it looks like the dream of running a working fission reactor in Minecraft has come to an end, as rohrxd tells me that activities on the server have since stopped: "Buka did not end up making another reactor and went with wind and solar instead." Honestly, this sounds like a pretty good idea, considering recent events.
