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:
- Action Girl: Mary Wolford, who shows in the climax that she's not just a theoretical expert but brave and good at field work under pressure.
- All for Nothing: 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 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 Heroic BSoD and Downer Ending.
- The Atoner: 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.
- Badass Native: 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.
- Badass Boast: Just before daredevil metallurgist Dan Mason enters the live reactor core in a protective suit, he tries to downplay the risks to Slayer, who's sure it's a death sentence:"Besides, how can I pass up an opportunity like this? The only human to walk right into a live nuclear super furnace? Not even Evel could follow an act like that."
- Big Damn Heroes: The entire reactor complex has become a giant magnet, in the vicinity of which no engine can run, making evacuation by any powered vehicle literally impossible. Cue the arrival of the local yacht squadron, proceeding under sail.
- Bring My Brown Pants: 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.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- 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 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.
- George Slayer. His friend Dan Mason tried to get him into hang gliding and George knows everything about it on paper, but his acrophobia means that his first experience aloft was not a happy one. At least it means he's done it when push comes to shove in the finale and it becomes his only means of escape...
- 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, 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.
- Later Nichols, chief designer, who appears at times to be having a nervous breakdown but whose take on the evolving situation is actually correct. Slayer, who's concerned for Nichols's sanity, is relieved when Nichols starts asking him questions which demonstrate that he's still got a hold on the situation and is looking to an equally skilled peer to validate his reasoning.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: The higher-ups at General Power are keen to save face and blame sabotage for all the problems the reactor is having.
- Deadly Bath: 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.
- Deadly Upgrade: Trapped in the reactor core, his protective suit failing and death a certainty, 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, at least for a while.
- Did They or Didn't They?: 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 Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex.
- Disaster Dominoes: It starts with 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?
- Dying Moment of Awesome: See Deadly Upgrade above. Also the Jolly Roger Man, who sacrifices himself to help Slayer and Wolford escape the reactor just before the end.
- Going Critical: 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).
- Going Down with the Ship:
- Simon Lombardy, first metaphorically when he hangs his company out to dry and then literally when everything goes to hell inside the dome. Wolford even lampshades the latter in-universe.
- Mayor Mathieu, when she publicly comes clean about the reactor being a terrible idea all along, knowing it's going to trash her career.
- Hates Everyone Equally: 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 having given his life to save others.
- Hollywood Magnetism: 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.
- Magical Native American: 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 that's not how things work out... and Slayer doesn't take it well.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Dan Mason urges his girlfriend to fly out of New Orleans to be safe from the reactor if things go to shit. The ferromagnetic effect from eddies in the reactor's liquid sodium coolant crashes her plane with no survivors, and she actually dies first.
- Oh, Crap!: 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 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? 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 wets himself.
- An explosion in town is incorrectly put down to a bomb, and nobody's listening to Slayer's hypothesis until the cynical bomb disposal expert who goes into the crater with him has a near-death experience which makes him realize that Slayer's right.
- Just before the end, Wolford makes her way to the Dome only to find that the outer blast door is not only closed but too hot to touch. That tells her everything she needs to know about what's happened to everyone inside.
- Reasonable Authority Figure:
- Simon Lombardy, site project director. Despite disagreeing with Slayer's theory regarding the reactor, he hires him in order to prevent the design team from becoming an echo chamber. When he realizes that all is very much not well, he goes public with the whole story and agrees to do a complete emergency shutdown of the Super Reactor, even if this would permanently ruin both the reactor and his career.
- Dorothy Mathieu, Mayor of New Orleans and the one ultimately responsible for having the reactor built in her city. Smart and well-informed, she refuses to be part of a cover-up or to shift the blame, and backs Lombardy to the hilt.
- Secret Identity: In a twist, the Jolly Roger Man, the mentally retarded menial laborer on the reactor island, is revealed to be 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 George Slayer's secret ally in case shit goes down and Slayer needs muscle.
- Secret Underground Passage: Put there in the event that something godawful happened, so that an investigative team could get in After the End to ascertain what had gone wrong. Slayer and Wolford use it to get into the subfloor where the military's plutonium is packaged and rig up their bomb.
- Trauma Button: George Slayer's trauma button is fear of heights. This is because 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.
- Vasquez Always Dies: 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, Mary Wolford comes out of it no worse for wear than her male compatriot.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: 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.
