Artistic License Nuclear Physics: Difference between revisions

** There's reason to believe the armature had been left disassembled (not unreasonable given the stage of development) and the techs were putting it back together. Due to an oversight, the reassembly directions given in the manual ("follow the disassembly instructions backwards") were ''physically impossible'', as the rod had to be pulled farther out than needed to take the armature apart. The rod was not gradated to show how far out it was, and a ruler couldn't be placed near it. Further, a conventional reactor design can have up to a hundred rods which can be entirely removed (one at a time) with no danger, while every one of the SL-1's rods was individually critical (the manual never actually said, or laid out the effects of withdrawing a specific rod to a specific range on the reaction process). The SL-1 was intended to power semisecret posts which couldn't receive regular supply shipments, and there may have been forces leading both to sketchiness in the manual and a reluctance for the engineers to request clarification. Unsurprisingly, the official investigation chose to focus blame on those whose careers could no longer be affected by it.

* For that matter, Fukushima was more of an unforeseen circumstance. The reactors itself were built virtually at the same time as the Chernobyl's one, in mid-Seventies, but to a newer design, so when the disaster struck they successfully withstood the quake and were stopped alright. They took the seashore location into account, by lowering the bluff the site was built on to utilize smaller pumps for the secondary cooling loop that pumped in seawater (To be fair, this also let the reactors sit on solid bedrock which helped their earthquake resistance). The site was designed to survive a more typical 6m tsunami, but not the monster 14m one it was hit with. Thus, the emergency generators that supplied the electricity to the cooling systems of reactors stood on the very edge of the sea and were immediately washed out when the wave came. The designers also put the main distribution point of the whole station into the basement where it was promptly inundated and taken out of service — which would bite the operators in the ass later, when it turned out that the mobile generators that were brought to help from elsewhere were incompatible with the station's systems and could be connected only through the now underwater distribution point...

 

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