History Main / GoingCritical

* ''Series/AftermathPopulationZero'': Because the presently active nuclear power plants across the globe are no longer being manned after humanity's disappearance, it's only a matter of time before they go into nuclear meltdown. Whole regions are turned into death zones for decades to come for any animals trying to survive.

** Something like this trope is invoked with Gauss weaponry. The ammo is just an inert metal slug, but the capacitors that power the gun's electromagnets are prone to catastrophic explosion if they get hit.

* In ''Film/{{Godzilla 2014}}'', the male Muto played a major role in the Janjira disaster. [[spoiler:A possible subversion in this case, because the story of the Janjira reactor going critical was all part of the coverup to hide their existence.]]

* The malfunction in the spaceship's fusion reactor in ''Film/{{Passengers2016}}'' is treated like a malfunction in a nuclear fission reactor. More likely it would just completely shut the thing down rather than go out of control as depicted.

->''"Last night UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}} nuclear power plant [[MetaphoricallyTrue fulfilled]] the Five Year Plan for heat energy generation in four microseconds."''

* The music video of the song "Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" by the band Ultravox features a nuclear power plant accident which should result in an explosion according to some warning signs. The explosion is implied to even hit a house which is in a rather large distance to the power plant. (And killing the family of the plant worker which is the protagonist of the video.)

* In an issue of Franchise/TheDCU comic book miniseries ''ComicBook/IdentityCrisis'', [[spoiler:ComicBook/{{Firestorm|DCComics}}]] is skewered by a sword, and is told to fly off for the safety of others as "everybody knows what happens if you puncture a reactor". If they meant that a containment breach causes a potentially deadly radiation leak, this would've been forgivable.

* ''Film/TheSwarm'' had a bunch of killer bees turn a nuclear power plant into a nuclear bomb in less than a minute, somehow.

* In both RealLife and ''Series/{{Chernobyl}},'' the insertion of the reactor's graphite-tipped control rods into an already-critical reactor caused it to go ''super''critical for a breif instant (graphite is a neutron ''accelerator''), melting the coolant system and causing the coolant (water) to spill onto the hell-hot fuel rods, resulting in a blast of superheated steam that ripped the roof off of the reactor vessel (bad), allowing oxygen to rush into the reactor (filled with fuel and graphite that's about the temperature of Satan's asshole), which caused an even bigger explosion a few seconds later that destroyed the roof of the building (very bad) and caused a graphite fire pushing radioactive crap into the atmosphere (catastrophically bad). And because the reactor fuel is still [[{{Hellfire}} insanely hot and undergoing fission events]] it can't be put out with [[GreekFire water]] like a normal fire. Nuclear scientist Legasov is, however, concerned that if the mixture of melting fuel, powdered boron (meant to poison[[labelnote:*]]yes, that's the technical term[[/labelnote]] the reaction), and sand (meant to smother the flames) hits the coolant reservoir, the resultant explosion will be about 2-4 megatons (read: million tons of TNT), which is more in line with this trope. A good-sized glob of this "lava" (known as corium) would cause another steam explosion that would sure as hell make things worse, but it wouldn't go up like a nuke [[DiabolusExMachina unless all of it was dropped into the reservoir at once (and then in a wide pattern that would maximize flash-heating).]] Sub-trope of ScaryScienceWords.