Minecraft players are no strangers to creating strange and intricate creations in sandbox games. There have been players who have built Redstone PCs to play Minecraft in Minecraft before, players who have built word processors in craft games, and so on. [Over the past decade or so, I have learned not to underestimate Minecraft players. That's why I wasn't actually that surprised when I saw a group of players successfully recreate a nuclear reactor on a custom server and then blow it up.

“Minor radiation incident on Minecraft server,” tweeted one of the server's players. The tweet was accompanied by a detailed hand-drawn map showing where the radioactive fallout (referred to as “a huge cloud of radioactive material in the air”) had landed on the server.

To give a little more background on this tragic disaster, the reactor is from Mekanism, a Curseforge mod that, according to its description, provides players with “a set of low, medium and high tier machinery to elevate their quaint homes and inefficient resource handling into the 21st century. Hydrogen-powered jetpacks, robotic friends, and, crucially, a fission reactor that “harnesses the power of the sun using advanced [inertial] confinement technology (compressing and heating small amounts of fission fuel) to power sophisticated machinery.” So it's just basic theoretical physics in Minecraft.

Apparently, all was well with the reactor, so well, in fact, that one of the members was also the reactor's safety inspector and handed a certificate to the person operating the reactor to confirm that it was safe. Shortly after this, the reactor exploded, wreaking havoc on the servers.

“My friend Buka was working on a tech tree and wanted to build a reactor, so I thought I'd troll him with some admin crap. A while back, someone posted that someone had put a sign on a Minecraft fireplace that violated Osha standards, and I was inspired by that because I'm familiar with the Nuclear Code of Federal Regulations.”

While the challenge and inspection may have been a bit of fun, rohrxd admits that the destruction was not at all intended: “I put a house full of villagers next to the reactor to discourage them from blowing up the reactor. [But] they snuck fish into the reactor, so the multi-block structure was not complete, and [Buka] got a little confused.”

Rohrxd also told us that the fallout from the meltdown had widespread effects. He said, “The area where the explosion occurred is permanently radioactive, so if you go in there, you'll be dead in a heartbeat. The reactor was apparently built 4,000 blocks west of Spawn, which helped a bit with containment, but “that area is uninhabitable now.”

The reactor was built in the same area as the one where the explosion occurred.

Fortunately, unlike an actual nuclear disaster, the servers do not appear to be permanently damaged. Another player tweeted that “the situation is under control,” noting that the time to collapse is “6 hours and 29 minutes. But the dream of running a Minecraft-powered fission reactor seems to have come to an end: “Buka ended up not building a reactor and went with wind and solar power. Frankly, given recent events, this seems like a pretty good idea.