With their hundreds of buttons, blinking lights, and spartan, Space Age aesthetic, the control rooms of power plants in the old Soviet Union would be the perfect sets for a Flash Gordon movie directed by Stanley Kubrick–which all of the sudden I really wish existed.
The folks at the Present & Correct blog have curated a small collection of photographs of these small spaces. My favorite? The organized chaos of the control panels at the Metsamor light-water reactor nuclear power plant, which started operations in 1969 in Armenia and was still producing 40% of all of the Republic’s electricity as recently as 2015. A chilling thought, knowing that the reactor has no containment building whatsoever unlike its Western counterparts and that it was built to withstand a magnitude-7 earthquake–allegedly, this is the Soviet Union after all–on ground that is highly likely to experience a magnitude-8 quake in the coming years. I hope those cute little diner chef hats from the ’80s are lined in lead.
Both seem about as easy to use as the iPhone X.