Artistic License Nuclear Physics: Difference between revisions

#* 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.)

#* Occasionally, a story tries to justify the above trope by noting 'normally we'd just turn the SCRAM switch, but the damage to the system makes that impossible so (insert elaborate heroic jury-rigging here)'. In real life, the SCRAM systems on modern reactors are designed so that they require 100% system uptime to actively ''prevent'' the SCRAM from happening -- if the reactor breaks, the very act of that breaking will automatically SCRAM the pile. Usually this is accomplished by having the rod mechanisms constantly pushing against a spring, or being held up by an electromagnet. If power to the safety systems is interrupted even for a moment, the mechanism stops resisting and the reactor shuts down.

#* Assuming that a reactor SCRAM / shutdown means the absolute end of a casualty. A reactor "shutdown" simply stops fission; the radioactive decay of fission products inside the reactor still produces a significant amount of heat -- enough in the case of Three Mile Island (which was SCRAMmed very early in the timeline of the casualty) to damage the core and release radioactive material into the environment. The reactors in Fukushima were shut down upon the initial earthquake and still produced enough decay heat days later to cause full meltdown and hydrogen explosions. Even worse, at Chernobyl, the SCRAM signal aggravated the casualty (inside baseball: the control rod followers were made of neutron-transparent zircaloy, and replaced neutron-absorbing water in the control rod channels, causing a temporary spike in fission events before the even-more-neutron-absorbing boron control rod body was in place, driving the reactor over the edge into prompt criticality).

#* In fiction, a reactor melting down is always a Chernobyl-level catastrophe regardless of design. Most of the consequences of the Chernobyl meltdown were a direct result of the plant being built without a containment building, a structure that surrounds the reactor itself and is intended to reduce any consequences of a leakage or meltdown. These work rather well: in the third-worst reactor disaster, on Three Mile Island, the containment building duly contained the steam and other bad effects of the meltdown. No pyrotechnics; in fact, the radiation released from Three Mile Island was less than the radiation coming from your computer monitor.

== Fan Works ==

** An isotope being so "vollatile" [sic] that it doesn't have a half-life, but a "quarter-life".

*** The "quarter-life" of a radioactive material would be the time taken for the radioactivity of a material to drop to a quarter of its original value; this would be precisely twice the half-life of a material.

* The ''[[Gamma World]]'' [[Tabletop RPG]] adventure "The Legion of Gold". If damaged, a fusion reactor will detonate like an H-bomb.

* Averted in ''[[Paranoia]]'''s "The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues". An old (pre-[[After the End|Whoops]]) nuclear reactor will eventually melt down, not explode. Lots of other stuff in ''Paranoia'' explodes just fine, though, not infrequently in nuclear fashion. They even have nuclear hand grenades, with a blast radius ''way'' bigger than the range you can throw them.

* Any implausibilities about nuclear weapons and radiation in ''[[Deadlands]]: Hell on Earth'' can be easily explained away with one phrase: "[[A Wizard Did It|supernatural nuclear reactions]]." Yes, radiation ''does'' glow green, but that might only be because [[Clap Your Hands If You Believe|everyone expects it to]]. Yes, there ''are'' rules governing the detonation of a "[[Neutron Bomb|G-Ray Bomb]]," but [[Chunky Salsa Rule|only one]] governing conventional nukes.

* ''[[BattleTech]]'' mostly averts these, but flirts with 1 and 3 a little. To wit: BattleMechs and many other vehicles are powered by fusion engines. By the core game rules, damaging those enough will simply cause them to shut down, disabling the unit. So far, so good. However, because some BattleTech ''fiction'', notably novels by Michael Stackpole, featured breached 'Mech reactors spontaneously and dramatically exploding every so often (in fact, "Stackpoling" became fan-speak for exploding reactors). An optional rule allowing for this to happen if desired also exists based strictly on the [[Rule of Cool]] (its lack of realism is explicitly noted).

== Video Games ==

* The ''[[Half-Life]]'' series (ironically enough!), with [[Sickly Green Glow|sickly green]] radioactive waste that functions as [[Convection, Schmonvection]] lava.

** Oh, and if you click enough on a neutral critter, it [[Easter Egg|explodes with the same mushroom cloud]]...

** 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.)

* ''[[Fallout 3]]'' has a [[BFG|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.

** 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]].

* In the ''[[Civilization]]'' series, the icon for the Uranium resource looks like glowing green rocks.

* In ''[[Ratchet and Clank]]'', ''every'' explosive is nuclear, and produces a mushroom cloud, even though the blasts are about the size of a fairly weak firecracker. [[Rule of Funny]] and/or [[Rule of Cool]] are definitely in effect here.

* The nuclear missile in ''[[Shadow Warrior]]''.

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