Discussion Main / ArtisticLicenseNuclearPhysics

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Natter in the trope description., started by OmegaKross on Jun 30th 2011 at 12:44:59 PM

Should that one Powerpuff Girls episode get a mention for the "instant radiation mutation" variation of this trope? You know, the one where some guy working in a nuclear plant accidentally spills some glowing green stuff, wipes it up with his napkin, then promptly uses it to wipe his face causing spontaneous tentacle growth and so on? Then a fly lands on it and mutates into a bigger fly, lands in a pot of glue, then the glue-eating kid eats both the fly and some glue and turns into a giant glue monster? Man, typing that all out really emphasizes the ridiculousness of this particular example, even by kiddy cartoon standards.

Removed the following Natter from The Iron Giant example in the Films - Animation folder.

• If the Iron Giant had been a bit more familiar with Earthling technology, he might have realized that it would be possible to cripple the missile from a safe distance with a long-range weapon like a laser — instead of ramming into the missile head-first in a self-sacrificing kamikaze attack. But, obviously, that would've been emotionally anticlimactic.
  • It's not explicit, but it is strongly implied he doesn't have conscious control of his weapon systems (like his laser), so the above solution wouldn't be viable.

I'd just like to point out that "the rods promptly blew the fuck up. It was not actually a nuclear blast, it just threw radioactive shit everywhere." is way informal even for this wiki, but as it's the most succintly efficient way of explaining Chernobyl that I've ever read, I feel compelled to leave it in place.

I was looking at Wikipedia's entry on Nuclear Meltdowns. The first line on the page is this:

"Nuclear meltdown is an informal term for a severe nuclear reactor accident that results in core damage from overheating. The term is not officially defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. However, it has been defined to mean the accidental melting of the core of a nuclear reactor, and is in common usage a reference to the core's either complete or partial collapse."

Evidently, a pretty loose term. To that end, I have a question about nuclear meltdowns occurring in fission vs. fusion reactors. Right now, the article says that meltdowns are exclusive to fission reactors, presumably because fission reactors possess a danger of "runaway" reactions and fusion reactors require precisely controlled conditions to operate at all.

So meltdowns wouldn't happen to a fusion reactor by accident. But what if someone was deliberately attempting to cause a meltdown to damage or disable the reactor as in the Mass Effect 2 example? If that someone had access to the computer and equipment controlling the reactor, it seems plausible to me that they could damage it by overheating, which seems to qualify as a meltdown according to Wikipedia. I know very little about the design of modern fusion reactors (much less whatever designs they use in science fiction) but the Fusion Power article mentions lithium being used as a coolant, so I assume excess heat is a real concern.

• Space 1999. Nuclear waste stored on the Moon undergoes a chain reaction and detonates. The explosion is strong enough to throw the whole Moon out of the solar system, at a sizeable fraction of light speed. Real spacecraft take decades to get to the edge of the solar system, but in this show, the Moon supposedly got there in weeks.
  • Actually, despite the ridiculousness of nuclear waste sending the moon out at a significant percent of c, real spacecraft don't travel anywhere near any significant portion of c. Voyager 1, the fastest spacecraft (which received a large speed boost from Saturn), will still take 14,000 years to travel one light year. Having never seen the work in question, this troper guesses that 'sizeable fraction of light speed' would be well over 1% of c (taking a mere century to travel one LY), which is significantly faster than Voyager 1.

I'm somewhat confused by the "1 light year" references. Is the edge of the solar system really that far?

• HG Wells's novel The World Set Free (1914) features what may be the first ever appearance of atomic explosives anywhere, but considering that it was written at the tail-end of the Victorian Era, the physics are quite dodgy. Extrapolating from the idea of radioactive decay as something with a tremendous amount of energy releasing it over a long period of time, Wells' nukes work by somehow speeding up this process. Instead of releasing all of its nuclear energy in an instantaneous, massive explosion, the bomb speeds up radioactive decay to the point where you have a huge fireball that hangs around for several days before dying down.
  • Wells based his story on a paper by Dr. Frederick Soddy (1877-1956), who was an early pioneer in nuclear physics and collaborated with Dr. Ernest Rutherford in first defining the nature of nuclear reactions. Interestingly enough, Wells (who unlike Dr. Soddy, was not a physicist by trade) was describing a variant of the Bethe solar phoenix reaction, which won Dr. Hans Bethe (1906-2005) a Nobel Prize in physics when he defined it and its role in stellar reactions and the formation of stars- in the late 1950s. Bombs working on a similar principle, but even more powerful, known as "Hellburners", appeared in several of H. Beam Piper's Terro-Human Future History stories, notably Space Viking (1964).

I can't tell if the second half is contradicting it or expanding.

• Resident Evil 2. The Umbrella Corporation uses a 5 kiloton tactical nuclear warhead on Raccoon City to destroy the zombie infestation, as well as all evidence that they were responsible for it. They plan to claim that the explosion was a meltdown at a nuclear power plant, ignoring the fact that nuclear plants can't explode like a nuclear bomb (#1).
  • Actually, despite what the end of RE 2/RE 3 makes it look like, the later Outbreak series established that there were multiple bombs/missiles used to destroy Raccoon City, and that they were definitely not nuclear.
  • Umbrella did no such thing. The U.S. government bombed Raccoon City as a measure of last resort, and the president resigned out of shame for having ordered it. And how much sense would it make for Umbrella to be sending in UBCS and USS to kill witnesses and assassinate rogue employees if they themselves planned to bomb the city to dust anyway?

Yeaaaahh. I've played some Resident Evil (albeit not 2 or 3), and even I'm baffled.

• The 2009 Astro Boy movie includes a line which states that the blue energy sphere is "more powerful" than nuclear energy. Sorry, professor, You Fail Physics Forever. No energy is more or less powerful than any other energy. This is like saying a pound of steel weighs more than a pound of feathers. A watt is a watt is a watt. If he had specified the energy source having more watts or greater voltage than a comparable source, it might have actually meant something.
  • Actually, that might not necessarily be true. 1 watt = 1 joule per second. To have n watts of power means to be able to output n joules of energy in 1 second (or 1 joules of energy in 1/n seconds). So, while it might be a rather contrived example, it could be referring to the blue energy sphere as being able to transfer more energy per potential energy stored than equivalent nuclear energy. Why this would be a ''good'' thing, considering that one of the major problems of nuclear energy (aside from the radiation thing) is making sure that it ''doesn't'' transfer all of its vast amounts of energy at once, is anyone's guess.
  • Or it may simply refer to energy density and the statement is merely a layman's allegory for the benefit of the less educated masses. It's like saying antimatter energy is stronger than nuclear energy which is wrong in technical terms but generally speaking it's the easiest way to explain to people that you get more energy per mass of antimatter than you do from the same mass of nuclear material.

Uhh, what?