Artistic License Nuclear Physics: Difference between revisions

Both nuclear weapons and peaceful nuclear technology are enormously technical in nature. [[Hollywood Science|Since Hollywood never lets boring facts get in the way of an engaging yarn]], this allows some truly mind-bending violations of physics to make it by most audiences. [[Long List|They can basically be summed up like so]]:

 

# Related to [[Reliably Unreliable Guns]] and [[Stuff Blowing Up]], if something is nuclear, and something, ''anything'' happens to it, it's [[Going Critical]] and gonna blow up like an atomic bomb. It doesn't matter if it's designed not to do that, it doesn't matter if it's not fissile enough to be used for an atomic bomb, it doesn't matter if it hasn't got enough material for critical mass, [[Made of Explodium|it's gonna blow]].

#* In real life, a nuclear weapon requires precise conditions to achieve a full-scale explosion, while fictional nukes act like spheres filled with mega-nitroglycerin. Shooting or even blowing up a real-life nuclear weapon with conventional explosives is likely to ''disable'' the warhead, not set it off.

# 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]], 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.

 

# On the subject of critical mass, while both low-yield nukes and still-bulky "suitcase" nukes do exist in real life, critical mass means that there is an absolute lower limit on the size, weight, and yield of fission-based nuclear weapons.

#* On the other hand, there are some exotic transuranic elements such as curium and californium, which have much smaller critical mass. You can even make an [[Paranoia|atomic grenade]] ([[Awesome but Impractical|very awesome and very impractical]]) with these elements.

# In a variant of [[Space Is Noisy]], in a manner also frequently applied to lightning and conventional explosions, even when a nuclear explosion is accurately depicted visually (dazzling flash of light, followed by a rising mushroom cloud and shock waves racing outwards across the ground destroying everything that is not already on fire), frequently it will be heard to produce a deafening roar from the outset, long before the shock wave reaches the camera. Since the shock wave travels somewhat faster than the speed of ordinary sound, the initial flash and subsequent fiery visuals should actually be silent until the wavefront hits, save for the damage caused by the blast's radiation. For any observer sitting far enough away from the explosion to stand a chance of surviving it, this delay should be quite noticeable. Even documentaries have been known to get this wrong (e.g. [[Space Race]]).

 

# Since fusion and fission-based technology are both atomic, nuclear fusion is depicted as [[The Same but More|the same as but more than]] nuclear fission. Plutonium is usually similarly depicted in relation to Uranium.

#* The existence of fusion-assisted nuclear weaponry is simply not acknowledged. All nuclear weapons, even those in the multimegaton range, run entirely off of fission. Typically, if a "fusion bomb" is talked about, it will imply that the device is extremely futuristic.

#* Alternately, fusion may be shown as a perfect, clean energy source that generates limitless energy from minuscule amounts of water. Not so in real life. Most proposed fusion reactions generate lots of neutrons, which in turn create radioactivity aplenty. Some possible fusion reactions are aneutronic, mostly or entirely avoiding this problem, but those produce less energy and are technically more challenging to achieve, as if making a viable fusion power plant of any kind weren't hard enough.

 

# All [[Power Glows|nuclear technology and material glows]]. Most often a [[Sickly Green Glow]]. It's usually fatal or at least extremely dangerous just to be in the same room as it, regardless of whether it actually would be or not.

#* Most radioactive materials don't glow at all. Swimming pool reactors have a characteristic blue glow that's actually [[wikipedia:Cherenkov radiation|Cherenkov radiation]] -- pretty, but not caused by the radioactivity itself. Some intensely radioactive substances like actinium, cesium-137, and pure radium metal itself (in large enough quantities), actually do glow (technically, self-fluoresce) by their own radioactivity and are generally not healthy to be in the same room with. However, even those are faint enough that you can only see the glow in the dark.