History Literature / DOME

DOME is a 1979 nuclear disaster thriller by author Lawrence Huff. It addresses the question of whether there's a point at which nuclear (fission) power inherently becomes too hot to handle, and who bears the responsibility when things get out of control.

The protagonist is George Slayer, a physicist of Native American descent who has written a scientific paper on nuclear reactor safety, the conclusion of which is that General Power's brand-new Super Reactor is inherently dangerous. The story begins with numerous peripheral parts of the reactor complex going badly wrong while the sophisticated control and monitoring systems in the steel dome that houses it keep insisting that everything is fine. So begins a race against time; with Slayer and a team of trusted colleagues including city mayor Dorothy Mathieu, nuclear weapons expert Mary Wolford, extreme-sports metallurgist Dan Mason and project manager Simon Lombardy, trying to work out exactly what's going wrong and what (if anything) can be done to prevent the deaths of millions - and possibly the world.

!! DOME contains examples of:

* ActionGirl - Mary Wolford, who shows in the climax that she's not just a theoretical expert but brave and good at field work under pressure.

* AllForNothing - The city is under a thermal inversion; meaning that when the containment dome breaks, even if there's no catastrophic nuclear explosion, ten tons of escaping plutonium dust will be confined within the city limits and millions of people will die. Slayer's answer to this is to [[spoiler:blow the dome apart with a jury-rigged nuke to punch through the inversion and lift the fallout into the jet stream, where it will be dispersed away from land. It works, but when he runs the figures afterwards he concludes that the long-term death toll from fallout effects will be just about the same as if he'd done nothing.]] Cue his HeroicBSOD and DownerEnding.

* TheAtoner - Defied in-universe. Slayer wants to be this, sacrificing his life to allow the survival of the Jolly Roger Man, but the latter has his own reasons for staying behind and refuses point-blank.

%% * BadassBookworm - Slayer, Wolford, Mason.

* BadassNative - The Slayer family, who are part Native American with some relatives still on reservations. George's father worked on the Manhattan Project, rising from laborer to laboratory technician. After his death, mathematically gifted George became a physicist and was hired to work on the Super Reactor team.

* BringMyBrownPants - The reactor technicians trying to unfuck the situation and make sure it stays unfucked have just been made aware that circumstances beyond their control might undo all the good they've done so far. When said disaster finally does strike, one of the senior technicians wets himself.

* ChekhovsGun -
** Mary Wolford. We're introduced to her as an undergraduate, when she sets out to show that an A-bomb could be designed using unclassified literature, leaving only the fissile material to be obtained. This comes in handy in the climax when [[spoiler:she has to jury-rig one to blow the dome open under controlled conditions and prevent a catastrophic implosion of the reactor's plutonium core]]

* {{Cloudcuckoolander}}
** Slayer, whose misgivings about the super-reactor aren't shared by most of his colleagues. To wit, his calculations predict a catastrophic failure within the first SEVENTY HOURS of full-power operation. Fortunately, [[spoiler:even though Lombardy disagrees with him, he's prepared to give Slayer a job on the project solely in order to stop the development team from being an echo chamber.]]

* CorruptCorporateExecutive - The higher-ups at General Power are keen to save face and blame sabotage for all the problems the reactor is having.

* DeadlyBath - Shower in this case, and unusually a male victim. The hot water cistern in a hotel building has been superheated by sodium coolant from a ruptured pipe. When a character takes a shower, what comes out is horrifically superheated steam that broils him alive.

* DeadlyUpgrade - Trapped in the reactor core, his protective suit failing and death a certainty, [[spoiler:Dan Mason]] suddenly realizes what's about to happen and why, and also how little time is left to stop it. It gives him the strength for one final act of heroism that staves off disaster, [[spoiler:at least for a while]].

* DidTheyOrDidntThey: [[spoiler:Slayer and Wolford.]] The act itself isn't described, but it's so heavily hinted at that it's hard to think they didn't. If so, it counts as GladToBeAliveSex.

* DisasterDominoes - It starts with [[spoiler:a coolant leak which triggers overdrive mode in the coolant pumps in the reactor core. That triggers whirlpools in the liquid sodium, including a big one whose 'dry' centre leaves the core exposed, and abnormal magnetic phenomena that lock up the control rods. Meanwhile, the graphite cladding is soaking up all that heat which it's going to release at some unpredictable moment in the future, even after the core is shut down (the Wigner Release). After ''that'' happens, the core blows its lid and the sodium coolant begins vaporizing and recondensing in an endless cycle that transfers heat from the core to the containment vessel, which will result in the latter failing. As soon as that happens, the liquid sodium coolant surrounding what's left of the core will detonate on exposure to the air, imploding the core... oh, by the way, did we forget to mention that this particular reactor runs on ''weapons-grade plutonium'' instead of non-fissile uranium isotopes, and the resultant explosion therefore has world-ending potential?]]

* DyingMomentOfAwesome - see Deadly Upgrade above. Also the Jolly Roger Man, who [[spoiler: sacrifices himself to help Slayer and Wolford escape the reactor just before the end.]]

* ForWantOfANail - Inverted. The fact that nobody realizes what's going on until it's too late to avert disaster ultimately results from the ''presence'' of a nail - or in this case a staple, which short-circuited a monitor system that had critically important functions and prevented the disaster cascade mentioned above from being recognized until it was far too late.

* GoingCritical - An interesting example, in which the writer justifies atomic bomb levels of disaster by having the reactor use ''weapons-grade plutonium'' as the fuel, as opposed to the far safer Uranium-238 (which for all the issues associated with a meltdown, cannot self-sustain a bomb-style detonation).

* HatesEveryoneEqually - Dan Mason. His no-fucks-given approach means he's the only one able to get Slayer to open up about his true motivations and his past. Slayer later considers the irony of such a man [[spoiler:having given his life to save others.]]

%% * HighPoweredCareerWoman - Dorothy Mathieu, Mayor of New Orleans; and Mary Wolford, atomic weapons expert who can MacGyver an atomic bomb out of the wreckage of a failing nuclear reactor.

* HollywoodMagnetism - Trouble with the coolant pumps and the available quantities of liquid sodium coolant has caused vortices to develop in the latter, turning the reactor core into a giant electromagnet that disrupts all engines and electrical equipment for miles around. Among other things, this has locked up the gears in the motors that drive the moderator rods, meaning that the reactor cannot be shut down by normal means.

%% * IDidWhatIHadToDo - Lombardy after sending [[spoiler:Dan Mason]] on his one-way mission.

* MagicalNativeAmerican - Averted by protagonist George Slayer, who is a talented and trained scientist and tackles the problems facing him with his professional knowledge. His internal moral struggle is another matter, and skirts around the edges of this trope. His uncle, unimpressed with the white man's doings, charged him to be a voice of reason and moderation in the scientific world, but [[spoiler:that's not how things work out... and Slayer doesn't take it well.]]

%% * MissionControl - The glass office inside the dome.

* NiceJobBreakingItHero - Dan Mason urges his girlfriend to fly out of New Orleans to be safe from the reactor if things go to shit. [[spoiler:The ferromagnetic effect from eddies in the reactor's liquid sodium coolant crashes her plane with no survivors, and she actually dies first.]]

* OhCrap - It wouldn't be a nuclear power disaster novel without these moments, and Huff delivers them in spades.
** Slayer, who'd predicted failure in the first three days, realizing that [[spoiler:a full-power test has already been running for some time without his knowledge.]]
** High among them is the one that chief designer Nichols has when he realizes that the core should have melted down several times over but didn't, so where did all the heat go? [[spoiler: Into the graphite cladding, not normally seen in fast breeder reactors but used here because reasons. The issue is that a curious property of graphite means that said heat could unpredictably be dumped back into the core ''at any moment'', resulting in the undoing of everything that had been done up to that point.]]
** The entire reactor staff when the possibility described in spoilers immediately above becomes a reality. One of them even [[BringMyBrownPants wets himself.]]

* ReasonableAuthorityFigure -

* SecretIdentity - In a twist, the Jolly Roger Man, the mentally-retarded menial laborer on the reactor island, is revealed to be [[spoiler:project director Simon Lombardy's younger brother, who he keeps close to him out of brotherly love and duty of care.]] Lombardy has sworn him not to reveal this. He has also sworn him to be [[spoiler:George Slayer's]] secret ally in case shit goes down and [[spoiler:Slayer]] needs muscle.

* SecretUndergroundPassage - Put there in the event that something godawful happened, so that an investigative team could get in AfterTheEnd to ascertain what had gone wrong. Slayer and Wolford use it to [[spoiler:get into the subfloor where the military's plutonium is packaged and rig up their bomb.]]

* TraumaButton - George Slayer's trauma button is fear of heights. [[TroubledBackstoryFlashback This is because]] [[spoiler:his father, stricken by guilt for his involvement in the Manhattan Project, killed himself by jumping out of a tall building and almost took George with him.]] This does NOT help Slayer at all in the finale, where his only escape from the reactor island is by means of a hang glider.

* VasquezAlwaysDies - Averted. Despite breaking into a nuclear reactor that's already gone haywire and is about to get worse, building a nuclear bomb out of scrounged materials and needing to escape in nothing more powerful than a hang glider, [[spoiler:Mary Wolford]] comes out of it no worse for wear than her male compatriot.

* WoobieDestroyerOfWorlds - Slayer's perception of himself at the end. Like his father before him, he has blood on his hands as a result of partaking in nuclear energy and he is deeply distressed by it.