Artistic License Nuclear Physics: Difference between revisions

{{Useful Notestrope}}

'''Bart:''' Now you know better.|''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]''}}

#* If a reactor does melt down or is going to melt down, the hero usually has to manually initiate a SCRAM, an emergency shutdown, sometimes going to elaborate lengths to set the SCRAM up or even having to manually insert the control rods into the reactor one at a time. This is as opposed to real life, where it's typically an automatic safety feature which engages if the reactor shifts outside a certain set of safe operating parameters and where a manual reactor SCRAM is as simple as turning a switch. A switch that usually exists in multiple redundant locations both near and far away from the reactor room, so that you can always reach at least one during an emergency. (For one example, the nuclear reactors used in US Navy submarines have almost a dozen different ways you can drop the rods with a single action, at least two of which don't even require you to be in the engine room. At least one of them is deliberately located ''halfway across the boat''.)

# 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.

*** 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.

* In the ''[[Bubblegum Crisis]]'', the final episode of ''Bubblegum Crash'' has a runnawayrunaway 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.

** To which reviewer Greg Morrow of the comic book blog "Howling Curmudgeons" [https://web.archive.org/web/20120206063519/http://www.whiterose.org/howlingcurmudgeons/archives/006974.html had this to say]:

* Averted in the first of [[Harry Turtledove]]'s ''[[Worldwar]]'' novels, when the Germans use the the [[BFGBig Freaking Gun|80-cm Dora railway artillery]] to destroy two alien ships, one of which holds the Race's nukes. The nukes' detonators go off, but no nuclear explosions occur, as the bombs are deformed by the ship exploding. However, the explosion does spread radioactive material over a large area.

* In the ''[[Foundation]]'' series, the first two stories feature nuclear stations which blow up due to bad repairs.. or just some idiot messing with the controls. This was, mind you, written in the early Forties. Later editions changed it to radiation leaks.

* In ''[[A Swiftly Tilting Planet]]'', one of the sequels to ''[[A Wrinkle in Time]]'', the following exchange takes place when talking about ''nuclear war''.

{{quote|'''Gaudior:''': "You know some of the possibilities if your planet is blown up."

'''Charles Wallace:''': "It just might throw off the balance of things, so that the sun would burst into a supernova." }}

** Keep in mind that in the Time series, stars are living beings that have been known to commit suicide or take self-sacrificial actions, and that parts of a living being can be independently sentient. It's not unreasonable, given the bizzarebizarre nature of reality in the series, to assume the loss of the only celestial body in the local area that is capable of supporting matter-life would unduly affect Sól.

* In John Ringo's ''Legacy of the Aldenata'' series, specifically in the novel ''Hell's Faire'', there is a new nuclear-like weapon. It is described as having its primary radioactive isotope scattered in the area of effect, carbon-13, as having a very fast half-life. The trouble is, carbon-13 has no half-life at all, because it is a stable isotope. (Carbon-14, on the other hand, ''is'' radioactive, if only very slightly; its half-life is on the order of five thousand years. Such a long half-life implies a very low decay rate, and consequently a complete unsuitability for use in any kind of 'dirty bomb' application.)

* In Joe Haldeman's ''[[The Forever War]]'', frequent reference is made to nuclear weapons with yields in the microton range. One microton is just one gram, or approximately three one-hundredths of an ounce -- or, in other words, since we're talking about yields in terms of TNT-equivalent, barely a firecracker's worth of bang, and that's if we're being generous. Now, in theory, it would be possible to produce a nuclear explosion out of such a tiny mass of fissile material, by increasing its density enough to drive it supercritical -- trouble is, there's no point; ''The Forever War'' is set in the future, and even today we know how to make [[wikipedia:Raufoss Mk 211|chemical-explosive rounds]] which produce quite a bit more than a firecracker's worth of bang.

* ''[[Fallout 3]]'' has a [[BFGBig Freaking Gun|Fat Man weapon]] and [[Exploding Barrels|atomic cars]] (''fusion''-powered cars!) that both go up in cute little radioactive mushroom clouds about the size of an artillery blast when they explode. However, it's justified as the Fallout series is about [[Zeerust|1950s]] ''perceptions of the general public'' of how nuclear technology works. Another notable example is the Enclave Oil Rig's nuclear reactor in ''[[Fallout 2]]'', which detonates in a massive nuclear explosion after the player causes a meltdown.

** Nothing ways [[BFGBig Freaking Gun]] like a [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfjqNPaLlXw nuclear bazooka]

** Chernobyl's scram rods system was defective by design. When inserted into the core, these rods briefly ''increased'' the reaction before shutting it down. As it turned down, that brief stage was enough.

*** Almost everyone involved in Chernobyl is to to blame to some extent -- it was a combination of gross mal-operation as well as major design flaws.

**** This was all compounded by Soviet political doctrine, which had classified much information the party had deemed a 'State secret.' None of operating staff knew that the control rods were graphite tipped.

***** They knew — after all that was their job description. They simply [[Too Dumb to Live|didn't understand the implications]].

*** The story in a nutshell: the reactor was due to stop for a maintenance and this was considered a good opportunity to test if cheap-and-dirty diesel and regular water pumps work when specialized bells-and-whistles SAOR ('''s'''ystem for '''a'''utomatic '''r'''eactor '''c'''ooling) fail. The experiment was planned, everyone prepared, but a different reactor in the same plant suffered some troubles and there was not enough power in the energy system during the day. So the experiment was delayed and was to be conducted not by the experienced people from the day shift but by a night shift of "young specialists". At first they made a mistake and and dropped the reactor from 1600 MWt to almost zero (instead of the 700-1000 MWt planned). They did not shut down the reactor at that point as they should have; instead, they removed nearly all control rods to increase power and stabilized the reactor at ~200 MWt, leaving about 6-8 control rods in the active zone (not just a safety violation but a crime). And then they continued with the experiment, disabling one of the main generators ''and'' the SAOR (not just a crime but a suicide attempt). To take the SAOR offline, they also had to disable several auxiliary safety devices designed specifically to halt reaction in case of a LOCA (Loss Of Cooling Accident), in other words prevent the exact accident that happened. As expected, water stopped circulating in the reactor and heat started to rise while the diesel pumps slowly started up. Suddenly realizing that the reactor was again gaining power at a rapid rate, the staff pulled the SCRAM. The lower part of the control rods was made from graphite to decrease latency when operated properly, but pulling them back into the active zone briefly resulted in increased reactivity of the reactor. Guess what happened when two hundred rods were dropped into an already overheating unstable reactor?

**** Non-technical summary: A reactor that was designed and built with disgustingly obsolete safety measures was then operated entirely ass-backwards from everything known about safe reactor procedure by [[Too Dumb to Live|inexperienced personnel]] who had also deliberately hotwired around every single one of the automatic safety systems designed to prevent people from doing what they were doing. In order for Chernobyl to occur, '''literally every single possible thing''' that could go wrong had to go wrong, in each and every step from laying out the original blueprints to the final button push. In other words, not remotely likely to happen ever again, especially since nobody else designs and builds reactors according to the Chernobyl specs any longer and the RMBK type reactors still in operation are being operated by people who know exactly how the Chernobyl crew fucked up and will never ever go remotely near that type of stupid shit again. Seriously, the incident report on that disaster was passed out to pretty much every reactor operation crew in the world. (Try reading it sometime if you find a copy. If you can understand the technicalese, you'll simultaneously be laughing and crying.)

*** The fact that the Chernobyl disaster is physically impossible with modern reactors doesn't stop today's opponents of nuclear power from citing Chernobyl in their reasoning. It's the equivalent of [[Godwin's Law]] in nuclear power debating circles.

**** Three Mile Island gets a lot of this too. In that one the safeties actually worked. Despite a partial core meltdown occurring, the total amount of radiation exposure to anyone outside the plant was less than what you'd pick up from a chest X-ray.

*** You'll get some supposedly genuine documentaries about Chernobyl throwing out ridiculous numbers either for the sake of drama or some vague anti-nuclear message. Example 1: Saying the thermal explosion that could have occurred if the melted reactor material had come in contact with the water under the core would have be equivalent to a multi-megaton detonation. Not unless a cubic kilometer of water somehow magically flashed to steam. Example 2: Saying radiation in the town nearby was 10,000 roentgens per hour!. This is the equivalent of sitting in the heap of slag that formed under the reactor's cooling units, ''right after'' the reactor had melted down.

*** Most people assume that because of the Zone of Alienation surrounding Chernobyl, any kind of nuclear accident will make nearby areas uninhabitable for centuries. However, the real reason the Chernobyl site is blocked off is because pieces of the reactor core were scattered around the country side and then buried in a hurry after during the cleanup. Much of the area around Chernobyl is livable though, as radiation levels have fallen dramatically over the years, as evidenced by the recent appearance of native wildlife to the region. The real danger is the unknown burial sites for the core parts, which could release a lot of radiation if disturbed. The biggest long term ecological concern for the area is about radioactive isotopes that have settled on the bottom of a nearby lake, which while harmless now, could make the water deadly if a dam broke.

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