To Every Movie with Nuclear Physics as a Plot Point

[crowtr0bot]

This is after seeing The Dark Knight Rises, but it's prevalent in way too much fiction, and may have indirectly stymied the progress of nuclear energy development in the real world (along with real world events like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, of course).

Comments

[pathology_doc]

God, yes, this.

It takes a LOT to make a nuclear reactor recapitulate Hiroshima or Bikini Atoll. On a slightly related note, I once read a novel called Dome, the author of which (Lawrence Huff) posited a HUGE plutonium-driven fast-breeder fission reactor which pushed all the limits and basically threw the concept of fail-safe into the dirt. Everything was set up for the thing to be an accident waiting to happen, to the tune of obliterating Louisiana and nudging the Earth out of its orbit.

(ETA by which I mean the author described a reactor which seemed to have been constructed in such a way as to almost ensure that a core meltdown would yield a critical mass of plutonium. This was a design that WOULD go boom.)

Oddly enough, the book was pro-nuclear (or at least not anti-nuclear) - the heroes are left thinking "Let's not ever build another like this", but don't go so far as to say "Let's ditch nuclear." Off the top of my head, I'm reasonably sure it postdates Three Mile Island (just), but I know for sure (because of when I read it)