History Main / InstantCooldown

* Ever wondered why many nuclear power stations are built near the coast or some other large body of water? It's so that the core can be cooled with the local water source and not have to have water pumped in, and eliminates or reduces the need for massive cooling towers. However, it's also convenient because in an emergency, they can open the sluice gates and use all those millions of gallons of water as a heat-sink. This isn't very good for the environment because unlike during normal operation, the water enters the primary coolant loop instead of going through a heat exchanger, i.e. ''directly interacting with the core'', but it's better than going full China Syndrome.

** A more [[InvertedTrope "instant warmup"]] example occurs in ''VideoGame/MetroidDread'', where parts of ZDR have become frozen over at one point in the story, which Samus cannot go through without taking huge damage. She must acquire the Gravity Suit to withstand the cold, and then fix the power plant in ZDR to restore the natural heat in the frozen areas. The frozen areas instantly resume their normal appearances when Samus goes through them again with no signs of being chilled to bounty hunter-killing temperatures.

* Averted in ''Film/{{Alien}}'' After the Nostromo's reactors are intentionally set to overheat by shutting down the cooling systems, the ship's computer repeatedly warns throughout a ten-minute countdown that after five minutes the process is irreversible. [[spoiler:And it's telling the truth. Ripley turns the cooling units back on just a few seconds too late and the reactors detonate five minutes later.]]

* Played straight in ''VideoGame/MetroidFusion'', after Samus reactivates the Main Boiler cooling unit, everything returns instantly back to normal.

* ''[[Film/EscapeToWitchMountain Return from Witch Mountain]]'' has '''exactly''' this scenario - the reactor is in the red zone (and the scientists have been saying for a while that it's almost at the point of no return); Tia mentally tries to fix the coolant system in a struggle with Tony (the needle wavers back and forth within the last quarter of the red zone), then Tia wins and the needle retreats into orange, yellow...(about 3 seconds of screen time) and the camera cuts away. It's not shown again but it's clear that things are back to normal (and even pulling up parts of the reactor room and crashing them together so that they explode doesn't disturb the reactor subsequently).

* Ever wondered why many nuclear power stations are built near the coast or some other large body of water? It's so that in an emergency, they can open the sluice gates and use all those millions of gallons of water as a heat-sink. This isn't very good for the environment because the water enters the primary coolant loop, i.e. ''directly interacting with the core'', but it's better than going full China Syndrome.

* If only it worked like that in real-world nuclear reactors. Even after shut-down, nuclear fuel still releases [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat decay heat]] due to short-lived radioisotopes left over from the original chain reaction decaying, releasing radioactivity and ''heat''. This heat must be removed or else it will cause a meltdown. In fact, about half of a nuclear reactor's safety features are just there to allow decay heat to be vented away. Decay heat piling up after a cooling system failure was the main cause of the Three Mile Island accident and the Fukushima disaster.

* ''Film/TheChinaSyndrome'' averts this trope. The crisis at the Ventana Nuclear Plant *begins* after the rector shuts down. A faulty gauge leads the operators to believe the containment vessel is flooded so they open multiple relief valves to dump the coolant, resulting in an immediate OhCrap when they realize too late that the water level is critically low, and they're about to incur a TitleDrop when the still-hot core is exposed.

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* Played straight and justified in SF thriller ''Film/{{Sunshine}}'', which has a ship's computer that runs so fast it needs to be kept in a very, very cool coolant bath. The villain [[spoiler: retracts the modules from the tank and jams the shifting mechanisms in order to destroy it.]] One of the heroes manages to [[spoiler:restore some of the modules, which brings them back on line, but not enough.]]

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Wait, everything is 100% fixed? That can't be right, rewind a second. There's steam flying everywhere, pressure meters are off the scale! Look, you can even see the glass cracking! What do you mean, the reactor is perfectly fine?

* In the second episode of the new Doctor Who, "The End of the Earth", the space station instantly cools off after The Doctor throws the emergency switch. The glass even self repairs after being hit with the Earth's sun going nova.

** Justified in that the station was designed to withstand a nova, via powerful shields. The glass (which was secondary protection for the station, not primary) was a special kind of futuristic glass (this episodes takes place in the year 5 billion after all) that the station was able to repair via some sort of nanotechnology, which was unable to function because the station's shields were deliberately taken offline by a saboteur. When the Doctor reactivated the shields, they then protected the station from the nova, and the glass was able to repair itself.

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