History Main / ArtisticLicenseNuclearPhysics

* ''[[JamesBond 007]]: TheWorldIsNotEnough'': The BigBad gets hold of the plutonium sphere from a bomb, forms it into a rod, and tries to insert it into the reactor of a submarine and cause a meltdown. Among the reasons this would never work: weapons-grade plutonium is ''less'' radioactive than reactor-grade plutonium. The reason you don't use reactor-grade Pu in a bomb is that the nuclear reaction will blow it to pieces part of the way through the detonation process, and you'll only get a small explosion.
** Not to mention that Bond and the BigBad handle the plutonium bar with their bare hands. A rod of Pu that size would weigh at least 50 pounds, which is big enough to be a critical mass. It would be exceptionally hot to the touch, and also would be emitting lots of neutron radiation.
** The fact that Bond ''straddles'' the rod briefly may be a kind of LampshadeHanging on why, in spite of his proclivities, James Bond never gets any Father's Day cards.
** The reactor of the movie's 1967-vintage nuclear sub had fuel assemblies (that plutonium rod) which could be manually inserted and removed. That's not how a Russian sub reactor is designed (though it is closer to certain heavy water power reactors.) To refuel the sub, they first need to shut down the reactor ''for 90 days'' so the fuel is not too hot from a radioactive and thermal standpoint. Then they cut open part of the sub's outside hull to remove the fuel assemblies. Big job, needed once every 5 to 10 years. The bullet stuck in the BigBad's brain would have killed him by then and the audience would be quite bored.

* JohnWoo's ''[[Film/BrokenArrow1996 Broken Arrow]]'' - Averted and fulfilled in the same film. After the (deliberately engineered) crash of a Stealth bomber carrying nuclear missiles, it is correctly stated that the warheads cannot be detonated by burning jet fuel; however, later in the film, a running gun battle between the thieves trying to steal the missiles and the heroes trying to drive them to safety is interrupted with a teeth-gritted warning from Vic Deakins (John Travolta), the evil mastermind: "Would you ''mind'' not shooting at the ''thermonuclear weapons.''"
** This is a completely justified warning, due to TruthInTelevision. In the explosives and weapons industry there is something called Insensitive Munitions certification. "Burning in jet fuel" and "bullet impact" are very different tests and can have drastically different results. While it is still true that setting off the nuclear part of the weapon is unlikely, nuclear weapons operate by means of high explosives assembling the nuclear material. Should the high explosives be detonated accidentally, it would not cause a nuclear explosion, but would spray plutonium around (in this case, all over John Travolta).
*** You say that like it's a bad thing.
*** And he was trying to steal the weapons. Damaging them even in a non-catastrophic way would ruin his entire plan.
* ''TheSpyWhoLovedMe''. The "Impulse Conducter Circuit," which can detonate a nuclear warhead while it's being disassembled. Nuclear bombs are specifically designed so they ''can't'' go off accidentally like that. Also, as noted above missile warheads are designed to only go off after undergoing the G stress of flight.
** An exception being the British Green Grass design that possibly could have accidentally gone off through a number of means.

* In the SoBadItsGood movie ''TheCore'', the good guys suddenly realize they need to up the yield of a nuke by 20% if they want to save the world. How do they accomplish this? By taking a plutonium bar from the CoolStarship's power generator and ''placing it right next to the bomb''.
** [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosted_fission_weapon That could actually work.]] Wait, no, it couldn't. Nuclear fuel needs to be compressed so that a fast enough chain reaction happens to explode. Placing the plutonium right next to the bomb will simply result in the plutonium being blown away and hardly suffering any fission whatsoever
*** It should be noted that plutonium needs to be compressed to achieve a nuclear explosion but not uranium (hence why uranium is used in the auxiliary stages of nuclear weapons). Still, stacking anything "nuclear" next to a bomb will not improve the bomb's yield.
*** You could get a bunch of plutonium or uranium to undergo some fission by placing them next to a source of fast neutrons such as a thermonuclear bomb. Unfortunately for the movie, that bomb would need to have no U238 casing of its own, which itself absorbs neutrons and undergoes fission to boost the yield of the bomb. And the fissile material would need to be completely naked without the graphite shield it was no doubt put it since they can carry it without it heating up or any neutrons escaping to bother them. And it is highly unlikely that it would boost the yield by 20%, since it is not wrapped around the bomb as a casing. So the movie still fails.

** Not to mention that Bond and The BigBad handle the plutonium bar with their bare hands. A rod of Pu that size would weigh at least 50 pounds, which is big enough to be a critical mass. It would be exceptionally hot to the touch, and also would be emitting lots of neutron radiation. Canadian physicist [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin Louis Slotin]] was killed handling a much smaller critical mass of plutonium in a 1946 experimental accident; Slotin received a fatal dose in less than one second, and died of radiation sickness nine days later.
*** In all fairness, Slotin was fiddling with the berillium neutron reflectors, which reflected neutrons back onto the core, thus increasing fission. By a slip of the hand he accidentally ''completely covered'' the core by a reflector, causing it to get prompt critical. He quickly removed the cover but not before getting a fatal dose of radiation. The core itself (dubbed "Demon Core", because it was involved in two more experimental accidents, one fatal, one not) was usually handled simply by hand, with only rubber gloves for protection.

* A MST3K movie, ''Terror from the Year 5000'', has an archeologist use carbon-14 dating to determine that a ''metal'' statue came from the ''future''. And when he and another guy hold a Geiger counter over the statue, they are shocked to learn that it's incredibly radioactive. Seeing as carbon-14 is a ''radioactive isotope'', you'd think they would have noticed this earlier...

*** If contemporaneous charcoal was used instead of fossil coal, you can date the last forging of iron/steel items.
* The second ''{{Spider-Man}}'' movie features a ''extremely'' silly depiction of fusion power as an ExcusePlot for Doc Ock to get his tentacles (they're to manipulate the fusions!). Highlights include Doc Ock saying there's only 25 pounds of Tritium in the world, a deeply ridiculous open-sided reactor, and dropping an object established to be a miniature sun[[hottip:* :You can tell it's a miniature sun because it has a miniature photosphere with miniature sunspots, and the occasional miniature prominence or flare]] into a river where it, um, goes out harmlessly. Because fusion plasma does that.

* ''BackToTheFuture'' featured a minuscule weapons-grade plutonium powered fission reactor that barely altered the shaped of the famous [=DeLorean=] time machine, had a 1.21 [[strike: Jiggawatt]] Gigawatt output (greater than many full-sized nuclear power stations), and expended an entire fuel rod in an instant. Later it's apparently fitted with a fusion reactor the size of a coffee grinder that runs on household waste (!).
** Wait, weapons-grade? But didn't the Libyans steal it from a nuclear power plant?

* The 2009 ''Film/AstroBoy'' movie includes a line which states that the blue energy sphere is "more powerful" than nuclear energy. Sorry, professor, YouFailPhysicsForever. 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. [[FridgeLogic 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.

* As does ''The Amazing Spider-Man'' #329: Spider-Man (who has the powers of Captain Universe at this point) fights the Tri-Sentinel, who attacks a nuclear power plant. During their fight, the Tri-Sentinel smacks the cooling tower, to which Spidey comments: "Oh, no! He's cracked a ''containment tower''!" Keep in mind that this is Peter Parker, who has ''studied physics''. This should be basic knowledge to him.
** Not all physics is nuclear physics, and nuclear physics is not nuclear engineering. This troper knows physics students and professors who wouldn't know the difference, either.

* Combine this with YouFailBiologyForever, while playing SixDegreesOfSeparation, and you've got the death of Locke in the ''ArchieComicsSonicTheHedgehog'' story "Mobius: 25 Years Later". Let's see, why is Locke dying? Because he contracted cancer. How did he contract cancer? Because of a lifetime of absorbing Master Emerald radiation interacting badly with his altered DNA. Why is his DNA altered, ''he experimented on himself to give his then-unborn son Chaos-fueled superpowers.'' See the problem? The same genes that end up killing him through enhanced radiation sickness are now in Knuckles. Oh, and just to add further insult to this, ''Locke gave Knuckles' egg a big ol' dose of Master Emerald radiation soon after it was laid''. How Knuckles didn't hatch into a stillborn tumor baby, while his dad ended up dying from cancer, despite having the same combination of altered genes and radiation, is anyone's guess.

*** At least Dallas was safe.

** Du'arq gets hit by nuclear missiles as King of the Shinigami and survives (albeit losing his powers in the process).
* FanFic/TheLifeAfterDeathTrilogy, a post-Spiderman 2 fanfic starring Doc Ock, deals with two examples of nuclear physics. First is Dr. Octavius's infamous experimental fusion reactor, and more in line with this trope are the four plutonium batteries he uses to power the tentacles. At one point Octavius mentions that he's rigged a failsafe in them that will deliberately overload the batteries in the event of his death as a way to keep the tentacles from falling into anyone else's hands, essentially making a quartet of small nuclear bombs. Vindictive as he might be, this trope does get averted in that Octavius knows full well that nuclear reactor =/= nuclear bomb and the damage his little batteries would inflict is nowhere near the annihilation of half of Washington DC he threatens.

* In ''[[TheMatrix Animatrix]]'', the scenes that explain how the machine city went to war with humanity has a part that involves humans nuking the shit out of their city. And the narrator says that it doesn't work because the machines "aren't affected by radiation." Ouch. Apparently nukes in TheFuture have no blastwave, and robots of TheFuture are immune to heat and the ElectroMagneticPulse that comes from a nuclear blast.
** Considering they use EMP as their main weapon against the machines in the movies, it makes even less sense.
** Radiation itself ''does'' affect electronics. Heavy particles like neutrons cause damage to materials either through breaking chemical bonds, transmuting elements, or by physically altering the molecular structure of the material. Electronics that operate in space use larger transistor than earth bound electronics for that very reason (damage from radiation is less likely to cause the transistor to fail). Furthermore, sufficiently energetic radiation that hits a digital memory element can cause it to change state even without damaging its structure (an example of a "soft error", more specifically called a ''single event upset''), causing malfunctions in digital systems that lack appropriate redundancy.

* The picture is from a Machinima of Peter Chimera's ''{{Half-Life}}'' fanfic ''[[FanFic/QuarterLifeHalfwayToDestruction Quarter-Life: Halfway to Destruction]]''. It's notable in that it does not have the usual errors, but makes up new ones. Examples:

* HalfLife2: "Warning... Hazardous... radiation levels... detected..."
** ''Might'' be justified seen as though you're walking into an alien super-reactor that drains energy from vacuum (or something along those lines), so there might be gamma rays in there. It's kind of funny, because Half-Life 2 (HL1 less so) sometimes gets the quantum physics details right, but stumbles when it comes to more "common" science (like lakes of life-threatening radioactive goo).
*** Could be handwaved as a byproduct of portal storms or something from Xen.
**** Or maybe the HEV suit protects against area radiation but isn't as effective when the user is directly in contact with the substance in question.

* ''[[{{Fallout}} Fallout 3]]'' has a [[{{BFG}} Fat Man weapon]] and [[ExplodingBarrels atomic cars]] (''fusion''-powered cars!) that both go up in cute little radioactive mushroom clouds about the size of an artillery blast when they explode. You could say it's justified as this game is about 1950's ''perceptions of the general public'' of how nuclear technology works, but ''Fallout 1'' and ''2'' treated nuclear physics with more respect than ''Fallout 3'' does.

* Deconstructed in, ''{{Watchmen}}''. The BigBad uses this trope to convince an ignorant public that Dr. Manhattan is a walking radioactive cancer-machine.

** An isotope being so volatile that it doesn't have a half-life, but a quarter-life.
*** Volatile means how easily it will evaporate, and wouldn't something with a comparable quarter life be ''less'' radioactive?
**** The 'quarter-life' of a radioactive material would be the time taken for the radioactivity of a material to drop to a quarter of its original value; this would be precisely twice the half-life of a material. It does not describe ''how'' radioactive a material is, just how quickly it decays.

** And finally, the isotope completely harmless if it just goes into the ocean.

* In the second episode of ''CodeLyoko'', XANA's plot of the week is to cause a nuclear power plant to explode with a surge of electricity. Most power grids are, well, wired as a ''[[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin grid]]'', meaning it's impossible to cause a precision surge of electricity as the episode implies. Not to mention that the nuclear reactor itself is just a heat source for a heat engine, so even if the wires didn't melt, the actual result would be that the turbines at the plant would be trashed and the reactor would go through a precautionary auto-SCRAM.

*** Volatile means how easily it will evaporate, and wouldn't something with a comparable quarter life be]] ''less'' radioactive?

* The ''GammaWorld'' TabletopRPG adventure "The Legion of Gold". If damaged, a fusion reactor will detonate like an H-bomb.

* In the pilot miniseries of the new ''BattlestarGalactica'', there is a mushroom cloud, implied to be a large nuclear strike, less than one mile from where Boomer and Helo are fixing the Raptor. The two are not only alive, but also suffering no ill effects, nor is there any visible damage to the landscape near the mushroom cloud.

# And on the subject of Criticality, any time some thing goes wrong in a nuclear facility, terrified screams of "It's {{going Critical}}" will fill the air, or the villain's plan will be to make the reactor go Critical. "Critical" means that the reaction is self sustaining and that the reaction is proceeding at a constant level -- in other words, a critical reactor is one that is operating at a steady constant power level. ''One more time, "Critical" reaction is the normal operating condition of a nuclear reactor.'' Super-Critical, while not used despite sounding definitely bad, simply means that the reaction is steadily gaining power, or simply, someone getting powered by the reactor turned on a light and so the reactor went temporarily super-critical to increase its energy output for the new drain. Finally, there ''IS'' a condition that would (almost) elicit the reactions of a Hollywood type critical reactor. It's called Prompt Critical, and if a reactor has had this happen, there'd be no running around trying to prevent it or saying it happened; by the time any readings showed this happening, it would already be too late, and either the automatic safety systems would have kicked in and shut down the reactor, or the reactor pile would be an actual pile of slag.

** This comes from the Hollywood idea of reactors as bombs-in-waiting. When a nuclear bomb goes critical, it explodes, thus when a reactor goes critical, [[MadeOfExplodium it becomes a bomb and explodes]].

* ''BeastWars'' introduces an interesting property of the Transformers' energy source Energon, mainly that the radiation its raw form releases shorts out Transformers at high levels, but is ''completely harmless to organic life'' at ''any'' level.

[[quoteright:308:[[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOvglodUIcA http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Quarter_life_(small).jpg]]]]
[[caption-width-right:308:[[FanFic/QuarterLifeHalfwayToDestruction WARNING: ISATOPE MAY BLOW TO SMITHEROONS]]]]

** It's perfectly possible to walk around in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone without dropping dead in seconds or growing a third arm. In the entire 30-kilometer Zone dangerous radiation is limited to two "hot spots" with a total area of 2000 square meters, and 'dangerous' means 'a picnic in this place might result in some radiation poisoning'. The Zones become an accidental nature reserve. Not everything is roses, though: animals in the area have approximately half their normal lifespan, and birth defects are common.

# Walking hand in hand with YouFailBiologyForever, instant, [[CursedWithAwesome horr]][[BlessedWithSuck ible]], in-generation [[ILoveNuclearPower mutations caused by exposure to radiation]]. Actually, living organisms simply do not work that way. For starters, where radiation is supposed to "alter" (e.g. damage) DNA/RNA, it would have to introduce pretty much the same very specific change in billions, per body cell count, of ''random'' events hitting that DNA. Then, as a functioning body actually has far more regulating systems active, it should somehow alter all of them ''in precisely the same manner'', so we do not get an old, boring RealLife set of radiation symptoms like body systems fighting in an attempt to fix each other. And not the least, the amount of radiation doing all that should somehow fail at destroying/damaging every other body chemical but DNA (rendering the whole organism, inoperable) or simply frying the subject in the process.

# Walking hand in hand with YouFailBiologyForever, instant, [[CursedWithAwesome horr]][[BlessedWithSuck ible]], in-generation [[ILoveNuclearPower mutations caused by exposure to radiation]]. Actually, living organisms simply do not work that way. For starters, where radiation is supposed to "alter" (e.g. damage) DNA/RNA, it would have to introduce pretty much the same very specific change in billions, per body cell count, of ''random'' events hitting that DNA. Then, as a functioning body actually has far more regulating systems active, it should somehow alter all them ''in precisely the same manner'', so we do not get an old, boring RealLife set of radiation symptoms like body systems fighting in an attempt to fix each other. And not the least, the amount of radiation doing all that should somehow fail at destroying/damaging every other body chemical but DNA (rendering the whole organism, inoperable) or simply frying the subject in the process.

** Another source of this idea is probably the "uranium glass", a colored glass very popular in the early 20'th century. Its actual color and transparency varies from straw to grass-green, and from slightly dusty to completely opaque, but it invariably glows a solid yellow-green under the UV light.

** It's perfectly possible to walk around in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone without dropping dead in seconds or growing a third arm. In the entire 30-kilometer Zone dangerous radiation is limited to two "hot spots" with a total area of 2000 square meters, and 'dangerous' means 'a picnic in this place might result in some radiation poisoning'. The Zone's become an accidental nature reserve. Not everything is roses, though: animals in the area have approximately half their normal lifespan, and birth defects are common.

*** In addition, the conditions for Chernobyl accident were caused by 'scientists' performing experiments during the night shift, were an inexperienced crew, basically only capable of following directions from a manual, were not aware of, or able to properly react to, the conditions before it was too late to save the reactor. what happened was the scientists removed all the control rods, causing the reactor to heat up. when it got WAY too hot, they tried to fix it by fully inserting all the control rods. the rods promptly blew the f**k up. it was not actually a nuclear blast, it just threw radioactive shit everywhere.

# And on the subject of Criticality, any time some thing goes wrong in a nuclear facility, terrified screams of "It's {{going Critical}}" will fill the air, or the villain's plan will be to make the reactor go Critical. "Critical" means that the reaction is self sustaining and that the reaction is proceeding at a constant level -- in other words, a critical reactor is one that is operating at a steady constant power level. ''One more time, "Critical" reaction is the normal operating condition of a nuclear reactor.'' Super-Critical, while not used despite sounding definitely bad, simply means that the reaction is steadily gaining power, or simply, someone getting powered by the reactor turned on a light and so the reactor went temporarily super-critical to increase its energy output for the new drain. Finally, there ''IS'' a condition that would (almost) elicit the reactions of a Hollywood type critical reactor. It's called Prompt Critical, and if a reactor has had this happen, there'd be no running around trying to prevent it or saying it happened; by the time any readings showed this happening, it would already be too late, and either the automatic safety systems would have kicked in and shut down the reactor, or the reactor pile would be an actual pile of slag.
** Due to the abovementioned misconception of "critical mass", it's Hollywood-assumed that any minor wrong could send a nuclear reaction to prompt-critical. This is not practically the case, because, as we should more accurately speak of "critical density", most nuclear reactors are designed to stay below that at any time, including loss-of-coolant situations.
** This comes from the Hollywood idea of reactors as bombs-in-waiting. When a nuclear bomb goes critical, it explodes, thus when a reactor goes critical, [[MadeOfExplodium it becomes a bomb and explodes]].

[[folder: Idea 3: Fission/Fusion Confusion]]

# The reactor core is inside the cooling tower. Because most people associate "nuclear power plants" with those giant hyperboloid structures as seen on TheSimpsons, it's an easy mistake to assume that they ''are'' the plant and contain the reactor. In reality, the reactor is typically located in a separate block-shaped building (which ideally serves as a containment), and the towers are just the enormous radiators that contain and manage the cooling water. There are other types of power plants (such as coal plants) that have cooling towers which look just like the ones commonly associated with nuclear plants, whereas there are nuclear plants that don't ''have'' cooling towers. Notably, both the wrecked Chernobyl and Fukushima plants don't have them (Chernobyl has an unfinished cooling tower intended for unfinished additional reactors): Chernobyl used cooling ponds instead of towers, and Fukushima was cooled by the whole Sea of Japan. Since the cooling towers are ''open'' on the top, placing the reactor inside would ''expose it to the open air'', which would obviously be a bad idea.

Both nuclear weapons and peaceful nuclear technology are enormously technical in nature. [[HollywoodScience Since Hollywood never lets boring facts get in the way of an engaging yarn]], this allows some truly mind-bending violations of physics to make it by most audiences. They can basically be summed up like so:

# Since All Nuclear Explosions Are TheDeadliestMushroom, a nuke will ''always'' make a mushroom cloud no matter how small it is, [[ExplosionsInSpace even in vacuum]]. This is sometimes played for humor. Similarly, mushroom clouds are ''only'' created by nuclear weapons, rather than ''any'' [[EverythingMakesAMushroom sufficiently large explosion]].
** Typically, the size and duration of the fireball and mushroom cloud will also have no real relation to how powerful the weapon is supposed to be.
** Also, a nuclear explosion in a visual medium will often produce a series of vertical lines of smoke. These are copied from nuclear tests, but are not actually anything to do with the explosion; they're trails from rockets fired to give a visible indication of the shockwave.

# In a variant of {{Space is Noisy}}, in a manner also frequently applied to lightning and conventional explosions, even when a nuclear explosion is accurately depicted visually (dazzling flash of light, followed by a rising mushroom cloud and shock waves racing outwards across the ground destroying everything that is not already on fire), frequently it will be heard to produce a deafening roar from the outset, long before the shock wave reaches the camera. Since the shock wave travels somewhat faster than the speed of ordinary sound, the initial flash and subsequent fiery visuals should actually be silent until the wavefront hits, save for the damage caused by the blast's radiation. For any observer sitting far enough away from the explosion to stand a chance of surviving it, this delay should be quite noticeable. Even documentaries have been known to get this wrong (e.g. {{Space Race}}).

* In the [[BubblegumCrisis Bubblegum Crisis]] sequel "Bubblegum Crash," the final episode has a runnaway robotic tunnel digging machine, uh, digging a tunnel though an active fusion reactor. The secondary police characters were alternating between ranting against and calmly accepting the imminent vaporizing of Mega-Tokyo. To be fair, it was digging very fast, almost a foot per minute.

*** [[StopHavingFunGuys Volatile means how easily it will evaporate, and wouldn't something with a comparable quarter life be]] ''[[StopHavingFunGuys less]]'' [[StopHavingFunGuys radioactive?]]

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