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Artistic License Nuclear Physics: Difference between revisions
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#** Most commercial reactors are cooled and moderated by water; a loss of coolant would risk fuel melting, but the reactor would go subcritical from the loss of coolant.
#* This comes from the Hollywood idea of reactors as bombs-in-waiting. When a nuclear bomb "goes critical", it's actually going Prompt-Critical which is why it explodes, thus when a reactor goes critical, [[Made of Explodium|it becomes a bomb and explodes]].
# The reactor core is inside the cooling tower. Because most people associate "nuclear power plants" with those giant hyperboloid structures as seen on [[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]], it's an easy mistake to assume that they ''are'' the plant and contain the reactor. In reality, the reactor is typically located in a separate block-shaped building (which ideally serves as a containment), and the towers are just the enormous radiators that contain and manage the cooling water. There are other types of power plants (such as coal plants) that have cooling towers which look just like the ones commonly associated with nuclear plants, whereas there are nuclear plants that don't ''have'' cooling towers. Notably, both the wrecked Chernobyl and Fukushima plants don't have them (Chernobyl has an unfinished cooling tower intended for unfinished additional reactors): Chernobyl used cooling ponds instead of towers, and Fukushima was cooled by the whole Sea of Japan. Since the cooling towers are ''open'' on the top, placing the reactor inside would ''expose it to the open air'', which would obviously be a bad idea.
'''Idea 2: Nuke-grenade- HO!'''
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* Amazingly enough, ''[[Mobile Suit Gundam]]'' averted this: a nuke is launched in one episode, and is then sliced apart by the eponymous Gundams beam saber. Slicing the nuke ''does not'' cause it to explode, but fall to pieces harmlessly. How averted this is is debatable, as Amuro is shown he has to slice the missile apart in a certain way to keep it from exploding. Draw your own conclusions.
** Sadly, later series are more inaccurate. Both ''[[Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory]]'' and ''[[Chars Counterattack]]'' also prominently featured nukes... which did not behave much like actual nukes would (most horribly: the Physalis Gundam's nuclear bazooka looks like it fires some sort of ''beam'' rather than a projectile).
*** The GP-02's atomic bazooka doesn't seem to be a conventional nuclear missile launcher, as instead of a missile flying out of the shaft, an intense beam of energy emerges. This suggests that the bazooka is actually a [https://web.archive.org/web/20120520161314/http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#Nukes_In_Space~Nuclear_Shaped_Charges casaba howitzer], a directed energy weapon that utilizes a nuclear-shaped charge to generate a high-energy gamma ray laser and is essentially a hypothetical real-life [[Wave Motion Gun]]. However, they still fail in that in order to make a casaba howitzer that small without blowing up the GP-02 in the process, it would have to be made of a material much MUCH stronger than anything currently known to man, and since mobile suits of all makes and models are getting torn apart by simple energy and kinetic weapons, this probably isn't the case.
** ''[[Gundam Seed]]'' has ZAFT remove nukes from the equation of war with the N-Jammer, a device that completely cancels nuclear reactions in its radius... somehow. Then N-Jammer Canceller technology is discovered and they go back to launching nukes. ZAFT's [[Gundam Seed Destiny|next countermeasure]] is the Neutron Stampeder, which somehow prematurely detonates the warheads before they're launched.
* In ''[[Bubblegum Crisis]]'', the final episode of ''Bubblegum Crash'' has a runaway robotic tunnel digging machine, uh, digging a tunnel though an active fusion reactor. The secondary police characters were alternating between ranting against and calmly accepting the imminent vaporizing of Mega-Tokyo. To be fair, it was digging very fast, almost a foot per minute.
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== Literature ==
* Averted in the first of [[Harry Turtledove]]'s ''[[Worldwar]]'' novels, when the Germans use the the [[
* Averted in [[The Dark Tower]], at least a little. When Eddie Dean sees the creatures in the Waste Lands and exclaims that a nuclear war took place here, Blaine corrects him and states that it was something far worse.
* [[Roald Dahl]]'s 1948 novel ''[[Sometimes Never: A Fable for Supermen]]'' is the first science-fiction to involve several nuclear bombs. But it averts this, being surprisingly accurate and graphic. It has two third-shot accounts by witnesses of nuclear blasts. By the way, every named protagonist is killed by the same nuke.
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** In [[All There in the Manual|the backstory]], they had [[Superior Firepower|much, much bigger nukes]]. With which they sterilized a ''planet''. Once they realized they could actually, y'know, do that, even the Confederates weren't big enough idiots to keep 'em around. The "nukes" in-game would likely just be big friggin' conventional bombs, called nukes because [[Rule of Cool|it sounds badass]]. (Low damage is more a matter of game balance.)
** 'Course, ''[[StarCraft]]'' is just full of these [[Units Not to Scale|inconsistencies]], due to [[Gameplay and Story Segregation]]. The mushroom cloud is due to [[Rule of Cool]] and [[The Coconut Effect]].
* ''[[Fallout 3]]'' has a [[
** It is worth mentioning, however, that man-portable weapons capable of firing nuclear projectiles were produced and a nuclear car was at least considered and designed (Ford Nucleon). ''Fallout'' also shows the the world as the people in Atomic Age seen it complete with deliberate use of [[Science Marches On]].
** ''[[Fallout 1]]'' has The Glow, a permanently radioactive area due to a reactor getting hit by a missile. The game and its sequel also have some extremely powerful chems - Radaway siphons away radiation in your body harmlessly (although it's implied that the process is complex and unpleasant, rather like performing an improvised dialysis) while Rad-X bolsters your natural resistance in an improbable and unexplained way. Take two and you can walk around in The Glow with no harm at all!
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* ''[[SimCity]]'' games almost avoided this trope -- if your nuclear plant melts down, the surrounding buildings are left undamaged (except for a small risk of fire), but fallout is scattered around the surrounding area, rendering it uninhabitable. In retrospect, they probably should have put a ''containment dome'' over those reactors or something. ''Sim City 4'' plays it dead straight though: an exploding nuclear plant creates a huge blue mushroom cloud, a massive crater and a big shockwave that can flatten half your city.
* The nuclear missile in ''[[Shadow Warrior]]''.
** Nothing ways [[
* The "World's Smallest Nuclear Bomb" in ''[[MDK]]'', complete with miniature mushroom cloud (about 6' high) and, showing some attention to detail, a ground shock wave.
* The ''[[Command & Conquer]]'' series has many of these:
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[[Category:Hollywood Science]]
[[Category:Atomic Hate]]
[[Category:Artistic License
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
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