Lancaster University launches UK’s first nuclear fission and fusion simulator

Lancaster University has unveiled a control-room simulator that is meant to feel as close as possible to the real thing, while keeping students safely away from live reactor equipment. The Lancaster University Nuclear Operations Simulator was backed by a £2 million Office for Students grant and was designed to move trainees between fission and fusion operating environments, from pressurised water reactors and small modular reactors to tokamak fusion plants.

The room itself is built for immersion. Lancaster said it uses a wraparound screen on three sides, reconfigurable software and furniture that can be rearranged to match different control-room layouts. Software contributions came from GSE Solutions, Westinghouse, Norway’s Institute for Energy Technology and Tokamak Energy, which installed its SOPHIA program, originally developed to predict, simulate and validate experiments on its ST40 fusion machine. The result is a training space where students can run scenarios, repeat them and learn from mistakes without risking expensive hardware or operator error.

That flexibility is what makes the simulator stand out. On the fission side, Lancaster can reconfigure it to mirror the working environment of a pressurised water reactor or a small modular reactor, giving students a taste of the disciplined monitoring and decision-making that define today’s power plants. On the fusion side, the same room can be switched into a tokamak setting, with the operator experience shaped around the control demands of an experimental fusion machine. In both cases, the simulator can record student interactions, allowing instructors to review how decisions were made and where judgement needs sharpening.

The Office for Students identified the project as the Lancaster University Flexible and Immersive Nuclear Simulator for Future Skills Development, or LUNar, as part of an £88.5 million capital-funding round across England. Lancaster said the launch builds on 25 years of nuclear research, with expertise spanning fission and fusion fuel cycles, nuclear medicine, nuclear safeguards and security, and nuclear engineering systems shaped by its location near Sellafield Ltd and Springfields Fuels Ltd. The university also said the simulator will be ready for teaching from the next academic year, giving the next intake of students a place to practise before they ever step into a live plant.

The timing matters. The Nuclear Industry Association says the UK nuclear power sector workforce grew 35% between 2021 and 2024 to 87,000 workers, but the skills pipeline still has to keep pace with new build, operations, decommissioning, research and defence work. Lancaster’s simulator is built for that gap, turning one room into the nearest thing many students will get to working both a fission and a fusion control desk before the real call comes.