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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics
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Both nuclear weapons and peaceful nuclear technology are enormously technical in nature. 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: Ideas that look good on paper: |
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The backstory of Adventure Time involves an ostensible nuclear apocalypse whose long-term effects in the world's subsequent recovery have eventually amounted to what is for all intents and purposes a whimsical (and in some places literal) Sugar Bowl. It could actually be described as a similar, yet vastly more cartoonish, case to that of the Fallout series in terms of fantastical mutations and other evolutionary effects. This is justified by the fact that the Mushroom War also explicitly involved weaponized sorcery, but still. | |
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The Metroid Prime Trilogy games feature Phazon, a Toxic Phlebotinum substance so ridiculously radioactive that it can kill someone wearing a sealed, armored spacesuit in less than a minute. It's apparently also stable. It's apparently also organic, biological, and sentient making it's "radiation" more like some kind of unique bioenergy field people can siphon off. Given that it's actually the material component of a hyperdimensional intelligent entity whose main body is a planet, there might be more to it. | |
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In Worm, Khonsu, the fourth Endbringer uses a field of accelerated time to set off nuclear weapons. | |
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Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team averts this interestingly. Nuclear weapons are banned by a treaty, however all mobile suits have nuclear reactors. A General in the Federation keeps sending in mobile suits to a mountain stronghold in the hope that it will get damaged just right to trigger a meltdown and take out the base. The mobile suits in question use Minovsky ultracompact fusion reactors, which should not be melting down but if hit with a beam weapon can explode with great force. The Federation General in question apparently overlooked the relative rarity of beam weapons on Zeon mobile suits. | |
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In K-19: The Widowmaker, after the K-19's reactor suffer a coolant leak, the reactor officer, which just graduated from the academy, explains that the pressure will continue to build up until it reaches critical, at which point he explains he has no idea what's going to happen, but speculates that a nuclear explosion would happen with the melt down and "cook off" the nuclear warheads they're carrying. Not only he should know what happens in this case, but he also should know that what's he describes is just plain impossible. |
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. takes place in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (after more goes wrong and it gets even worse than it is in real life). Radiation is a common hazard, but it acts nothing like actual radiation. Being dosed with radiation acts like a "poison" status effect, draining health until you rid yourself of the radiation. Which you can do either with "anti-rad" medicine or by drinking vodka. And then, of course, there are all the irradiated mutants living in the Zone, most of which seem to have Psychic Powers of some variation... | |
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"The Mayors": Sermak and Bort discuss the accident in the Thessalekian Temple power plant from two months ago. In the original story, it exploded and took out five city blocks with it. The updated story only describes radiation leaks contaminating the city. It had been caused by someone deliberately tampering with the controls. Concern about nuclear power plants exploding like a nuclear bomb was common in The '40s. | |
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In The Swarm (1978), a horde of killer bees gets into a nuclear power plant. This somehow causes the plant to go critical and go up in a gigantic explosion (within seconds!). Without killing the bees. | |
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Early beta Starbound had uranium and plutonium as minable resources, which were green and pink respectively and safe to handle, but removed them before the full release. The megamod Frackin' Universe puts them back in, along with neptunium and thorium, and several fictional substances like irradium and ultronium. While the solid versions of these are also safe to handle, immersing yourself in liquid irradium is a very, very bad idea, as you will die in seconds without protection. | |
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The death of Locke in the Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) 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. | |
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Dan Jurgen's Thor #51 has Thor magically contain the explosive blast from a nuclear missile strike, with no hint of any radiation escaping into the atmosphere. In Asgard, a nuclear bomb detonates in Thor #66-67: Thor survives without carrying around radiation, and Asgard does not stay a nuclear wasteland. | |
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Steve Jackson's Munchkin started life as a card game, but has also had a set of Core books printed exporting things from the card game into a Dungeons & Dragons setting. One of these is the Plutonium Dragon, which halves in size every 15,000 years (leading to... interesting questions regarding breeding, as it gets smaller, not larger, as it ages) and has a special rule called Meltdown. If you kill it, then, depending on its age, it might possibly obliterate everything within a 5-mile radius. | |
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Testament features a "harmless flash." If you are close enough to see the flash in such a way, you're likely being burned up in it. Nuclear flashes are not just harmless pretty or scary light — they are intense heat. That said, the scarier thing about Testament is the implication that it wasn't close at all (e.g. no damage, no immediate fires)... and still was that bright. | |
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An example involving HEMPs happens in Highschool of the Dead. A noticeable example of that in play: as cell phones are smaller, they should not be able to blow up as easily as the cell phones involved in a phone conversation between Shizuka and Rika did. | |
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Then there's the Treehouse of Horror episode "The Homega Man", where a Neutron Bomb hits Springfield and turns everyone who wasn't killed (or protected by lead based paint) into mutants instantly. Not to mention, not only those reduced to skeletons had their clothes still somewhat intact but the buildings of town seem to have foundationally survived as well. | |
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House: In the episode "House vs. God", the team investigates the sudden shrinkage of a woman's tumor. Foreman hypothesizes that it's radiation exposure, stating that "there are about a dozen appliances in every home that give off radiation" and Chase checks out her home with a radiation detector. It crackles merrily around every electrical device, and Chase complains about it to House: The idea of random radiation exposure suddenly shrinking a tumor without causing any other symptoms is ridiculous. While it's true that everything electrical gives off radiation, it's radio-frequency EM radiation and not ionizing radiation, which is the kind a Geiger counter picks up (or would have any chance of affecting cancer). The only electrical devices in a home that produce any ionizing radiation are smoke detectors (which contain a tiny amount of mostly alpha-emitting americium-241) and CRT displays (that produce soft Bremsstrahlung x-rays from electrons hitting the phosphor). Even assuming they were defective and even with the probe jammed up right next to one of those two, Chase would have a hard time hearing anything above background. |
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Jack Ryan: In The Sum of All Fears, the workings of the nuclear device were intentionally altered by the author in an attempt to limit the usefulness towards making Real Life nuclear weapons, as noted in the afterword. In his earlier novel (but not the film) The Hunt for Red October, a Soviet submarine racing to intercept the Red October suffers a catastrophic reactor accident. In a realistic aversion, the reactor core doesn't explode, but simply melts through the reactor vessel and the ship's hull, causing it to sink. |
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The plot of the Intelligence (2014) episode "The Grey Hat", involving the use of a computer worm to set off a meltdown at a nuclear power plant, would require Failsafe Failure of every single safety system in the plant. Including manually lowering the control rods to shut the reactor down. | |
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Justice League #3 (1987) features the "cooling tower = reactor building" misconception. | |
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The Simpsons: Let's start with the 90-gallon drums full of green, glowy nuclear waste and work our way out from there... Considering every episode opens with Homer taking off his radiation suit in the middle of a supposedly radioactive environment, getting a radioactive isotope of some sort jammed in his shirt, then casually tossing said piece of radioactive material out on the street, its safe to say that realism is not high on the list of priorities for the writers. When Sideshow Bob tries to destroy Springfield with an expired nuclear bomb, we're treated to a tiny mushroom cloud smaller than the bomb itself. Then there's the Treehouse of Horror episode "The Homega Man", where a Neutron Bomb hits Springfield and turns everyone who wasn't killed (or protected by lead based paint) into mutants instantly. Not to mention, not only those reduced to skeletons had their clothes still somewhat intact but the buildings of town seem to have foundationally survived as well. In the Treehouse of Horror episode "The Ned Zone", Homer blows up the power plant by simply pressing a button — implying that the plant has a self-destruct mechanism. The explosion did show a little bit more realism than "The Homega Man" in Ned's future vision that became true despite Ned's efforts by showing what would be left of Springfield after a nuclear explosion, nothing more than a newly formed crater (though, no shockwave, fallout or nearby fires were created from the explosion). Homer also managed to cause a meltdown in a nuclear testing site that contained no nuclear material at all And on at least two occasions, Homer has actually eaten radioactive material — the aforementioned waste as a punishment from Mr. Burns and the plutonium he attempted to use as fertilizer in "E-I-E-I-(annoyed grunt)" — and survived, with no ill effects. In one episode, Mr. Burns erects a sign that describes the state of the power plant outside the sign. Homer accurately jokes to his coworkers that if there really is a meltdown, there won't be enough power in the system to power the sign to give out the 'Meltdown in progress: Evacuate' message. Nobody mentions that if there really is a critical meltdown, it would likely be too late for evacuation to do any good to anyone close enough to read the sign even if there was power. The plant has been repeatedly shown to produce not only nuclear waste, but also noxious smog. The only gas that normally comes out of nuclear power plants is steam. Of course, that assumes a well-running, up-to-code power plant, which the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant is far from being. |
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The World Is Not Enough: Renard 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. Bond and Renard 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. To be fair, Renard is both immune to pain and suicidal, so the fact that the rods should be scalding hot and emitting lethal levels of radiation might actually be excusable in his case. Bond has no such excuse, though. 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 Big Bad's brain would have killed him by then and the audience would be quite bored. |
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) manages to get nuclear explosives right. One of the turtles manages to keep the nuclear part of an implosion bomb from activating... but the conventional explosion still goes off, to little more than a decent blast — it's actually explained that this will not result in a full-scale nuclear detonation. It's not specifically identified as an implosion bomb, but that's the type this could actually happen with. | |
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Back to the Future features a minuscule plutonium powered fission reactor that barely alters the shape of the famous DeLorean time machine, has a 1.21 Gigawatt output (greater than many full-sized nuclear power stations), and expends a fuel rod in an instant. The epilogue and sequels show Doc retrofitted a futuristic appliance — the "Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor" — that looks like a coffee grinder and runs on household waste. | |
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Fission equals Fusion: Cold Fusion Reactors (in itself impossible under current physics understanding) in Generals and Zero Hour have Control Rods like Fission Plants. Heightening them (which costs money) enhances the power output by 100% (300% for Superweapon General). At least these reactors don't explode, unlike their Chinese fission counterparts. | |
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NCIS: Los Angeles: One two-parter involving Soviet sleeper agents armed with nuclear weapons made the fission/fusion mistake by describing the weapons used as gun-type fusion bombs. The gun design consists of a small piece of uranium fired at the large piece to create the critical mass necessary for a runaway fission reaction, which the show described correctly. However, Eric calls it a fusion bomb, which (short version) uses a fission device to compress a core of heavy hydrogen to induce fusion. | |
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Wonder Woman Vol 1: Atomia's introduction has a few examples, for instance Diana wearing a containment suit to gather Atomia's shrunk down highly radioactive lab but then she takes it off and she and the Holldiay Girls interact with it and are even imprisoned in it without any ill effects. | |
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An episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers — the one with the equally hilarious stand-in for Hitler — when a nuclear weapon detonates with a mushroom cloud in space. | |
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The Half-Life series (ironically enough!), with sickly green radioactive waste that functions as Convection, Schmonvection lava, the justification being that your H.E.V. suit protects against the ambient radiation being emitted as the built-in Geiger counter is going off. It's not until you're actually in it that it starts draining suit energy and doing damage and even then it's presumed the on-board medical system administers treatment to prevent anything permanent. The Opposing Force expansion pack has the black ops soldiers bring in a nuclear weapon. Shooting it will detonate it, resulting in a Non-Standard Game Over. |
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"Fallout" is used as a substitute for walls in the Chernobyl stage of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. | |
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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... Also, you can't use C14 dating on non-organic substances (it sometimes works on pottery because straw was used to reinforce unfired pots). C14 is built up in living organisms, then decays after the organism dies, so assuming that the statue was organic, its age would be dated from its creation regardless of time travel. Uranium dating would have avoided all these problems.note Though the error bars on uranium dating are a lot bigger than ~3000 years, so a reasonable scientist would likely just conclude that a date in the future just meant the item was made "recently"... within the last couple of million years. This is not especially useful, unless they suspect it wasn't made by humans. On top of all that, the film exaggerates the precision of carbon dating. In real life it doesn't produce a year but an approximation, normally worded as a year plus or minus some number. |
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SimCity games almost avoided this trope — if your nuclear plant melts down, the surrounding buildings are left undamaged (except for a small risk of fire), but the fallout is scattered around the surrounding area, rendering it uninhabitable. In retrospect, they probably should have put a containment dome over those reactors or something. SimCity 4 plays it dead straight though: an exploding nuclear plant creates a huge blue mushroom cloud, a massive crater and a big shockwave that can flatten half your city. | |
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MechWarrior, set in the BattleTech universe, carries over many of the boardgame's nuclear whoopsies. The fusion reactors in battlemechs have infinite range, their only limiting factor being Over Heating from firing weapons. Depending on the game, reactors can go critical when the mech is destroyed, with varying degrees of destruction; in Mechwarrior 4 all mechs explode in a small blue fireball when destroyed, while in Living Legends destroyed mechs have a 20% chance to erupt in a massive mushroom cloud that can level forests and temporarily short out electronics. However, most games do not feature these critical meltdowns and destroying the reactor simply disables the mech through power loss or ammo explosions. | |
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Discussed and averted in Under Siege when Steven Seagal's character is preparing to fire on the sub with the stolen warheads. Jordan Tate asks, "Won't the bombs detonate?"; he tells her: "It doesn't work that way; they will just sink". | |
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In The Dark Knight Rises, the Chekhov's Gun is the core of a fusion reactor designed to provide clean energy. It can be (and is) modified by a Russian scientist into a nuclear bomb with some work and direct access to the blueprints, thanks to the fact that the woman who bankrolled and helped design the reactor was working with Bane. The reactor's core will also degrade over a period of time and eventually detonate, which Bane has calculated to the second, again, thanks to the schematics he would have access to. While these are not possible with real-life nuclear reactors or theoretical cold fusion reactors, the reactor in the movie is all but outright stated to be a unique design created by Bruce Wayne and his scientists. | |
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Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen is the first science-fiction to involve several nuclear bombs, but it averts this, being surprisingly accurate and graphic. It has two third-shot accounts by witnesses of nuclear blasts. By the way, every named protagonist is killed by the same nuke. | |
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Mr. Incredible and Pals uses this for Stylistic Suck, with Lady Lightbug marking objects with "blue radioactivity" and firing strings of "radioactive silk" in combat, both of which visibly glow. None of the characters mind being in direct contact with it. | |
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In A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the following exchange takes place when talking about nuclear war. | |
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Satisfactory has nuclear power become available at its eighth tier, and uranium deposits can be found in various parts of the world. Obviously, all things uranium-related (uranium ore, uranium cells, uranium waste and more) are green and glowy. You also take damage if you stand near them without protective gear (and the damage increases drastically the more materials you pile up), though it's nothing permanent like cancer and can be fixed with healing items. On the side of realism, uranium waste CANNOT be destroyed (by throwing it in the trash or in the Awesome Sink) and will pile up and require more and more storage. It can be turned into plutonium cells (which are sinkable) but the process is extremely complex. | |
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"The Encyclopedists": Mayor Hardin requests Lord Dorwin (representative of the Galactic Empire) to explain the accident on Planet V of Gamma Andromeda from a year ago. In the original story, there was an explosion, whereas the updated story calls it a meltdown. The Imperial representative doesn't know details, pointing out how the quality of technicians and technology has gone down. Concern about nuclear power plants exploding like a nuclear bomb was common in The '40s. | |
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Space: 1999: Nuclear waste stored on the Moon undergoes a chain reaction and detonates. The explosion is strong enough to throw the whole Moon out of the solar system, at a sizeable fraction of light speed. | |
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In the Civilization series, the icon for the uranium resource looks like glowing green rocks. (This serves, however, to distinguish it from iron resources.) In some games in the series, nuclear reactors could be built in your cities for extra production, but they had a small chance to spontaneously explode (in Civ IV, with the full impact of a thermonuclear missile!). In Civ V, either realism or the fact that hardly anyone used them because of the risk led to this feature being quietly removed. | |
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The Gods Themselves: When a radio-chemist discovers a radioactive element that cannot possibly exist under the known laws of physics, it's noticed In-Universe. Further study reveals that the element comes from another universe where the laws of physics are sufficiently different that it can exist there! | |
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In the James Bond movies: The World Is Not Enough: Renard 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. Bond and Renard 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. To be fair, Renard is both immune to pain and suicidal, so the fact that the rods should be scalding hot and emitting lethal levels of radiation might actually be excusable in his case. Bond has no such excuse, though. 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 Big Bad's brain would have killed him by then and the audience would be quite bored. Tomorrow Never Dies plays the trope straight at the beginning, when the top brass is talking about some Soviet nuclear torpedoes detonating or spreading plutonium from their missile strike. Averted, however, with regards to the climax’s missile launch, which is a non-nuclear cruise missile. |
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Superman: The Animated Series: The Batman/Superman episode "World's Finest": When the Joker leaves Superman and Batman trapped in one of Luthor's laboratories (with a chunk of green kryptonite slowly killing Superman), Batman begins looking for ways to escape. He finds a container of hydrochloric acid. Batman notes that while it will take a week for the acid to eat through the wall of the room they're in, it will destroy the kryptonite almost immediately. When the kryptonite dissolves, it doesn't release a burst of kryptonic radiation in typical cartoon-style, the resulting goo no longer contains enough radiation to hurt Superman sufficiently, and there is no longer enough radiation in the environment to prevent Superman from escaping. That is an incredibly short half-life. | |
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A minor one: in Marvel Comics' The Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos at one point mentions having a "thermal nuclear device," rather than a thermo-nuclear device. | |
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Spider-Man 2 features an extremely silly depiction of fusion power so that Doctor Octopus's tentacles can take control of his body (they're to manipulate the fusion at a safe distance). 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 sunnote it's clearly a sun as it has a photosphere with sunspots and the occasional flare into a river where it, um, goes out harmlessly. Because fusion plasma does that. The typical fusion reactor has the plasma in a vacuum to prevent heat loss and to keep the assembly from being vaporized. Ock's design doesn't, which would have killed everybody in the room, even if it had been functioning perfectly. The tentacles would have been melted, if not vaporized, on contact with the plasma (Ock Hand Waves this by mentioning that they're heatproof). Prior to being quenched by the river, the miniature sun is shown acting as a tremendously powerful magnet, pulling in girders of the building it is contained in and instantly consuming them in its plasma. However, iron requires rather than produces energy by fusion. In contrast, water, being composed of light elements, is more likely to fuel a fusion process, and since it was solid as it entered the miniature sun, it would have cooled the system and reduced the fusion reaction rate. So something that would have instantly snuffed out the miniature sun is depicted as making it more powerful, while something that would have made it more powerful makes it fizzle. Quenching in the river is also ridiculous — as anyone who has passed a nuclear cooling tower knows that quenching that kind of fire should have caused a tremendous amount of dangerously hot steam. The energy can't just "go away". The amount of tritium claimed isn't too silly, although the number given is a little low. As of the late 1990s, the USA had only produced a total of 225 kg of tritium since its nuclear program began, and with a half-life of only 12 years, most of that no longer exists. In the cleanup following the Fukishima disaster, release of large amounts of tritium into the environment was a worry - the site was estimated to contain less than 2.5 grams in total, which was still considered a lot. |
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At the end of The Simpsons Hit & Run, you get to cart around nuclear waste. While the barrels will explode if you ram something hard enough... you don't get damaged (well, any more than normal). Yet somehow it's supposed to bring down alien technology. | |
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∀ Gundam also features nuclear warheads of the grenade-like variety, but this is justifiable for a few reasons. One, they're at least 2,000 years old, so even if they weren't designed to be triggered by impact, the control mechanisms simply aren't going to be reliable anymore. Two, everyone treats them like grenades because they have no idea what a nuke actually is or how it works; nukes are a weapon out of very bad ancient history, so it's natural to be terrified of them even before five of them blow up Gavane Gooney. | |
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The Wolverine: Yashida stares directly into the flash of an atomic bomb and suffers no ill-effects. He should have been burned severely or at the very least blinded on the spot, which would have made it a lot harder to run for the well. His survival of the following explosion and radiation is somewhat more plausible, due to distance and detonation factors (an air-burst detonation leaves relatively little fallout), but still rather unlikely given he waited until the blast had practically caught up to them. At the same time, his survival at all is not completely out of the bounds of credibility: There are confirmed survivors of the Hiroshima bombing who were within the main blast epicenter zone, one of whom was only 170 meters away from the detonation point at the time of the explosion (the man was, however, inside a reinforced basement). | |
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Vorkosigan Saga: The books do fall into the "radioactivity glows" fallacy, as it's stated on more than one occasion that the city of Vorkosigan Vashnoi glowed for several decades after the Cetagandans nuked it. Joked about in the by a mention of neutron hand grenades, which should only be used by people with very strong throwing arms. They never actually appear on the page, probably because nobody's figured out how to set one off without being caught in the blast radius.note Of course, they could still be useful to a suicide bomber. |
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One episode of Spider-Man: The Animated Series had criminals steal a chunk of newly discovered highly potent radioactive isotope. Spider-Man recovers it, runs some tests on it, and after what he learns doesn't mind the criminals taking it back. Turns out the isotope has such an extremely brief half-life that in just a couple of days it has decayed to a solid chunk of ordinary lead. It goes completely ignored that such a high rate of decay should mean it is giving off enough radiation to be a death sentence to anyone handling it without protection and also giving off noticeable heat. | |
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Hostile Waters (based on a real life incident involving the Soviet sub K-219) features a Soviet submarine which is leaking seawater into one of the missile tubes. The chief engineer informs the Captain that enough seawater mixed with the rocket fuel will cause an explosion and that the warheads will detonate. While an explosion (which did occur in real life) would be catastrophic, there is no chance that the warheads will go nuclear. In real life, the submarine was brought to a nuclear safe condition (as a result of the nuclear reactor not shutting down properly) at the cost of a sailor's life, but the explosion itself caused the submarine and its nuclear complement to sink to a depth of about 18,000 feet. | |
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Ironically, the trope is later played straight at the beginning of Terminator Genisys. A nuke goes off over San Francisco as just a flash of light and a pressure wave. No sign of a thermal pulse or anything catching fire until the wave hits. One character even stares directly at the explosion without a hint of pain in his eyes. The streets also conveniently empty themselves of people when the blast wave hits. | |
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Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami keeps returning to this one. A nuclear bomb is no more powerful than a small pipe bomb ("the nuclear bom went off like a bom") — the worst of the damage is a scratch in Light's dad's car — but covers the area in "radiactiv" (which fatally irradiates "Yotsuba" but leaves everyone else unharmed). Later, nuclear missiles are used as pens, and later than that, putting "nuclears" in a normal explosion makes it magic, letting it chase our 'hero'. | |
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Very nicely averted in Hammer and Sickle when, in the next to last mission, the main character says something like "When we find the nuke, just shoot it, or throw grenades at it." When the other characters complain that it's going to blow, he tells them getting a nuke to go off is a very difficult process, and that it's very unlikely that the bad guys ship it around armed and ready to go off. You get a nice dose of radiation poisoning that quite quickly drains your hit points though. | |
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Tales of Suspense #49: At a nuclear bomb test at Stark's nuclear weapons plant, "A highly-refined nuclear explosion takes place, dangerously close to Iron Man and the Angel!!" Luckily, Iron Man is protected by his "heavily-insulated flexible metal costume", which allows him to "withstand the tremendous shock of the explosion without suffering any lasting ill effects." But Angel, "wearing no such protective clothing, receives the brunt of the radioactivity"; suddenly, the radiation turns the Angel's personality to evil! | |
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In Pacific Rim, the Gipsy Danger's nuclear reactor is repurposed as a nuclear bomb to destroy the portal, complete with huge explosion. Usually, that can't happen. It's all but stated, however, that the reactor was deliberately tuned to be used for a nuclear self-destruct, since setting it off can be done fairly easily from the cockpit. The power source for a robot — or Humongous Mecha — has absolutely no relationship to whether it's analog or digital. Raleigh connects the two for no reason. However, with the later model nuclear Jaegers, it's likely that the electronic systems would be hardened against radiation. Gipsy Danger's "nuclear reactor" is not a nuclear reactor but something referred to as a "Nuclear Vortex Turbine" that has all the functionality of a fission rocket hooked up to a turbine and generator. As we all know a rocket is just a slowed down and directed explosion, so it not to much of a stretch for it to be suddenly less controlled. This would also explain numerous other functions of the chest piece such as a deceleration rocket or a short range wave motion gun. |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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For All Time: In this Crapsack World where, among other things, the Nuclear Weapons Taboo never existed, plenty of countries have their own nuclear stockpiles and toss them around like snowballs. A united communist Korea, however, takes the cake when it successfully completes a bomb called the Glorious People's Revolutionary Hammer in 1970, which has a yield of 250,000 megatons or 250 gigatons. This is virtually impossible to achieve from a logistical and engineering perspective. In OTL the largest nuclear device ever built was Tsar Bomba, which had a maximum theoretical yield of 100 megatons but was detonated with a yield of 50 megatons. If every nuke ever constructed were detonated at once, it would only yield about 4.8 gigatons. Even Edward Teller's theoretical Backyard Bomb, which would be powerful enough to destroy entire countries, would only reach 10 gigatons. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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The Glow is a location in Fallout that's still deadly radioactive almost a hundred years after it took a direct hit from a bomb. The external approach to Vault 87 in Fallout 3 is even deadlier, with levels peaking at 3617 rads per second near the entrance. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Ghouls are people who somehow survived exposure to a massive dose of radiation, like that of a strategic nuclear weapon, and become immune to the damaging effects of radiation. Instead, high radiation levels cause them to regenerate. On the other hand, they end up looking like zombies and some suffer mental degradation and become feral. The transformation usually occurs gradually after exposure to large amounts of background radiation over time, though a sudden massive dose can induce the transformation far faster (Moira Brown in Fallout 3 if you detonate the bomb in Megaton and the NCR soldiers at Searchlight in Fallout: New Vegas). Fallout 4 introduces two ghouls who induced the condition in themselves through radiation experiments and a vaguely-described serum respectively. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3, or all things, actually manages to get a few facts right: the ∀ Gundam has a union SP attack where it pulls a nuclear charge out of its chest and pitches it at the ground in front of it, creating a bright flash, a shockwave, and a sharp drop in the health bar of anything caught in the blast (Friendly Fireproof notwithstanding). If an opposing Ace Pilot blocks the charge in flight... it squibs and drops to the ground harmlessly, like real-world nukes will if they aren't exposed to the G-forces of a complete flight path. | |
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Quarter-Life: Halfway To Destruction, being a Troll Fic, does not have the usual errors but instead makes up new ones. Examples: An isotope being so "vollatile" [sic] that it doesn't have a half-life, but a "quarter-life". 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. Furthermore, volatility has nothing to do with radioactivity. Said isotope "hit[ting] quarter-life" causing a meltdown, which makes the room "slowly become vaporize," causing a scientist to be "blowed to smitheroons." And finally, the isotope "goes off harmless" when plunged into the ocean. |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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In the Bubblegum Crisis, the final episode has a runaway 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. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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In Aliens, the colony's nuclear fusion reactor has been damaged. This means that it's going to go off like Tsar Bomba in a matter of hours. However, it's mostly averted in the first movie — when the Nostromo's engines overload, the blast appears as a large circle of light in space. Of course it’s then immediately playing another trope straight by having a shockwave hit the shuttle. A shockwave. In a vacuum. Complete with sound. |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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The third, fusion-powered version of Starman for DC Comics fought a phasing opponent who used a Cadmium dagger (cadmium being used to dampen nuclear reactions in fission reactors sometimes) in an attempt to neutralize Starman's powers because 'well you're powered by nuclear energy!'. Which got him a 'you're an idiot!' moment from Starman as he rightly points out that his being transformed into a solar-powered being like the sun meant he ran on fusion and not fission reactions. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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The Fallout franchise is built around Fifties-era mad science tropes, so the universe's nuclear physics and nuclear-powered devices don't match the real world. Fission-powered cars were commercially available before the Great War because a lack of oil meant that gasoline-powered cars were no longer economically viable. Their rusted wrecks still dot the wastelands and too much damage can cause them to explode, complete with cute little mushroom clouds. The M42 "Fat Man" tactical nuclear catapult is the unholy spawn of a PIAT and a Davey Crockett, a man-portable nuclear artillery platform that pneumatically launches a warhead about the size of an American football. Like the cars, the warhead gives off a mushroom cloud when it explodes. Ghouls are people who somehow survived exposure to a massive dose of radiation, like that of a strategic nuclear weapon, and become immune to the damaging effects of radiation. Instead, high radiation levels cause them to regenerate. On the other hand, they end up looking like zombies and some suffer mental degradation and become feral. The transformation usually occurs gradually after exposure to large amounts of background radiation over time, though a sudden massive dose can induce the transformation far faster (Moira Brown in Fallout 3 if you detonate the bomb in Megaton and the NCR soldiers at Searchlight in Fallout: New Vegas). Fallout 4 introduces two ghouls who induced the condition in themselves through radiation experiments and a vaguely-described serum respectively. Brahmin are a strain of mutant two-headed cow that are a viable species unto themselves instead of horrific monstrosities that die moments after birth, that have replaced cows. Radstags from Fallout 4 are similar, being two-headed deer with a pair of vestigial arms sticking out of its chest. The Glow is a location in Fallout that's still deadly radioactive almost a hundred years after it took a direct hit from a bomb. The external approach to Vault 87 in Fallout 3 is even deadlier, with levels peaking at 3617 rads per second near the entrance. In Fallout 4, the residents of Vault 111 descends to the Vault just as a nuclear explosion goes off in the distance. Realistically, they all should have received at least major burns over much of their bodies from the thermal pulse. Fallout 4 also has a pocket nuclear sub with one remaining missile in a hidden submarine base. You can launch the missile which farts around the concrete ceiling of the base for a few seconds (If you read your quest log at this point, your character has apparently written in it "I just set off a nuclear bomb! Why am I still reading this?!") and will explode, killing everyone in the base in a white flash, but not even knocking the outside door over. If you've run out of the area, as soon as you zone out of the door you are perfectly safe, not even radiation escapes. |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Mobile Suit Gundam SEED has ZAFT remove nukes from the equation of war with the N-Jammer, a device that completely cancels nuclear fission reactions in its radius... somehow. Then N-Jammer Canceller technology is discovered and they go back to launching nukes (as well as using nuclear power as an energy source). ZAFT's next countermeasure is the Neutron Stampeder, which somehow prematurely detonates the warheads before they're launched. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Life After Death Trilogy 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. | |
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In the Gargoyles episode "Walkabout", the nano-robotics Matrix gets loose as the Avalon Travellers show up. When Dr. Reynard mentions that they (Gargoyles and humans) have to stop the ever-expanding Matrix before it reaches the nuclear reactor, she points to... the cooling towers. Then the Matrix is talked into stopping before it gets its slimy tendrils into the reactor by... engulfing the cooling towers. At this point, it had covered/absorbed every bit of the research complex except the towers. Yep. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War features a mission where the player squadron must fly cover over an isolated location where a group of students and intellectuals is trying to dismantle a nuclear weapon so it can never be used. The dismantling is being done by a physics grad student, being the most qualified person available. This event is treated as a very delicate operation, something in which any wrong move might inadvertently set off the warhead, giving everyone in the area a scare when they think it is starting up. Rule of Drama aside, they could probably have just torn the thing to pieces with spanners, crowbars, and industrial saws without worry since it takes a lot of deliberate effort to get something like that to arm, let alone detonate. Partly justified as the player is in a canyon trying to keep the enemy forces AWAY from the group dismantling the nuke in question (which they can't even see to begin with), while most of the people working on the thing have likely never even seen a nuke let alone taken one apart. If the resistance had someone who knew a thing or two about nuclear weapons on the scene, the mission would've been over within a couple of minutes of the players squadron arriving on the scene. |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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The Gundam franchise has been using nukes since its beginning, so this trope has been played with a number of times: Amazingly enough, Mobile Suit Gundam averted this: a nuke is launched in one episode, and is then sliced apart by the eponymous Gundam's beam saber. Slicing the nuke does not cause it to explode, but fall to pieces harmlessly, though he does have to cut it a certain way to avoid detonation. Sadly, later series are more inaccurate. Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory prominently featured a nuclear weapon as a central part of the plot... which did not behave much like an actual nuke would, with the biggest mistake being the GP-02 Physalis Gundam's atomic bazooka firing some sort of energy beam rather than a projectile. It has been suggested that the bazooka is actually a casaba howitzer, a directed energy weapon that utilizes a nuclear-shaped charge to generate a high-energy gamma ray laser and is essentially a hypothetical real-life Wave-Motion Gun. However, they still fail in that in order to make a casaba howitzer that small without blowing up the GP-02 in the process, it would have to be made of a material much, much stronger than anything currently known to man, and since mobile suits of all makes and models are getting torn apart by simple energy and kinetic weapons, this probably isn't the case. Or it could be that the "energy beam" is just an animation gimmick to make it easier to see, like how rail guns shoot "yellow beams" or the "Cannons" on the guncannon and guntank shoot glowing bolts of energy. Mobile Suit Gundam SEED has ZAFT remove nukes from the equation of war with the N-Jammer, a device that completely cancels nuclear fission reactions in its radius... somehow. Then N-Jammer Canceller technology is discovered and they go back to launching nukes (as well as using nuclear power as an energy source). ZAFT's next countermeasure is the Neutron Stampeder, which somehow prematurely detonates the warheads before they're launched. ∀ Gundam also features nuclear warheads of the grenade-like variety, but this is justifiable for a few reasons. One, they're at least 2,000 years old, so even if they weren't designed to be triggered by impact, the control mechanisms simply aren't going to be reliable anymore. Two, everyone treats them like grenades because they have no idea what a nuke actually is or how it works; nukes are a weapon out of very bad ancient history, so it's natural to be terrified of them even before five of them blow up Gavane Gooney. Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team averts this interestingly. Nuclear weapons are banned by a treaty, however all mobile suits have nuclear reactors. A General in the Federation keeps sending in mobile suits to a mountain stronghold in the hope that it will get damaged just right to trigger a meltdown and take out the base. The mobile suits in question use Minovsky ultracompact fusion reactors, which should not be melting down but if hit with a beam weapon can explode with great force. The Federation General in question apparently overlooked the relative rarity of beam weapons on Zeon mobile suits. After War Gundam X is guilty of Idea 1. Defunct nuclear reactors are valuable but highly dangerous targets for scavengers... because apparently some idiot(s) left them all running, and if you pull out too many components(or simply damage the cooling tower bad enough) they will explode like bombs. A fight between mobile suits during a raid results in a second sunrise. |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Sadly, later series are more inaccurate. Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory prominently featured a nuclear weapon as a central part of the plot... which did not behave much like an actual nuke would, with the biggest mistake being the GP-02 Physalis Gundam's atomic bazooka firing some sort of energy beam rather than a projectile. It has been suggested that the bazooka is actually a casaba howitzer, a directed energy weapon that utilizes a nuclear-shaped charge to generate a high-energy gamma ray laser and is essentially a hypothetical real-life Wave-Motion Gun. However, they still fail in that in order to make a casaba howitzer that small without blowing up the GP-02 in the process, it would have to be made of a material much, much stronger than anything currently known to man, and since mobile suits of all makes and models are getting torn apart by simple energy and kinetic weapons, this probably isn't the case. Or it could be that the "energy beam" is just an animation gimmick to make it easier to see, like how rail guns shoot "yellow beams" or the "Cannons" on the guncannon and guntank shoot glowing bolts of energy. |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Lost surprisingly got things mostly right — the plutonium fission primary is removed from a 1950s-era hydrogen bomb by an Iraqi military officer with electronics experience, using the notes of a nuclear physicist, both from 2004. The main misrepresentation is to have the primary be a small gun-type bomb rather than the larger implosion primaries used in fusion bombs of that period; so that characters can carry it around in a backpack. However, given all the time travel, who knows when that bomb design actually came from. Going Critical is averted specifically by having it rigged to explode on impact, with the implication that it would not normally. This fails until it is banged on repeatedly, leading to the implication that there was some rigged switch that had failed to trigger correctly. The hydrogen bomb is called Jughead, after a real 1954 American fusion bomb test, and depicted with design aspects of the 1950s American Mark 16 and Mark 21 bombs. |
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Superman storyline "Brainiac Rebirth": Brainiac's body is disintegrated into molecules, which look like a stream of multicolored marbles and are visible to the human eye. | |
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BattleTech mostly averts these, but flirts with 1 and 3 a little. To wit: BattleMechs and many other vehicles are powered by fusion engines. By the core game rules, damaging those enough will simply cause them to shut down, disabling the unit. So far, so good. However, because some BattleTech fiction, notably novels by Michael Stackpole, featured breached 'Mech reactors spontaneously and dramatically exploding every so often (in fact, "Stackpoling" became fan-speak for exploding reactors), an optional rule allowing for this to happen if desired also exists based strictly on the Rule of Cool (its lack of realism is explicitly noted). A fluff piece in the Tech Manual sourcebook explains away the BattleMech reactor explosions as the effects of air hitting the inside of a very hot reactor vessel combined with ammunition and other volatile components detonating as well. Another in-universe fusion reactor explosion is also shown to be the result of a roof collapse dropping tons of snow upon the reactor's liquid sodium cooling system. The narrator noted the reactor was almost an innocent bystander. |
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In The Forever War, frequent reference is made to nuclear weapons with yields in the microton range. One microton is just one gram, or approximately three one-hundredths of an ounce — or, in other words, since we're talking about yields in terms of TNT-equivalent, barely a firecracker's worth of bang, and that's if we're being generous. In theory, it would be possible to produce a nuclear explosion out of such a tiny mass of fissile material, by increasing its density enough to drive it supercritical — trouble is, there's no point; The Forever War is set in the future, and today we know how to make chemical-explosive rounds which produce quite a bit more than a firecracker's worth of bang. | |
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Foundation Series: "The Encyclopedists": In-Universe, Salvor Hardin makes a (deliberate) mistake in asking an ambassador from a nearby system if his planet has any plutonium (praseodymium in the original story) available for trade, since the reactors on Terminus could use more. When the ambassador brushes the question aside, it tips Hardin off that the ambassador's world has lost atomic power, since otherwise, the man would know that atomic power plants haven't used plutonium in millennia. Since they defeated one of the other local kingdoms, it stands to reason that none of the local galactic powers have access to nuclear power anymore. "The Encyclopedists": Mayor Hardin requests Lord Dorwin (representative of the Galactic Empire) to explain the accident on Planet V of Gamma Andromeda from a year ago. In the original story, there was an explosion, whereas the updated story calls it a meltdown. The Imperial representative doesn't know details, pointing out how the quality of technicians and technology has gone down. Concern about nuclear power plants exploding like a nuclear bomb was common in The '40s. "The Mayors": Sermak and Bort discuss the accident in the Thessalekian Temple power plant from two months ago. In the original story, it exploded and took out five city blocks with it. The updated story only describes radiation leaks contaminating the city. It had been caused by someone deliberately tampering with the controls. Concern about nuclear power plants exploding like a nuclear bomb was common in The '40s. |
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For the first Red Alert, its somewhat true - however that is only for multiplayer, where a nuclear weapon hit the square targeted, then two squares out in a ring around the target. In short, some units standing next to a nuclear explosion could take no damage at all. In Singleplayer, if a nuke is fired, it does not only cause the white flash, but vaporize everything in the blast radius. Tiberian Dawn was similar, in that a missile launched from the Temple would obliterate anything. | |
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In Babylon A.D., a radiation-shielded train passes over a bridge built across a massive crater blasted by a nuclear power plant. While a cool scene, apart from the "reactors blow up" fallacy, it also raises the question of the difficulties of building a bridge in such a highly-radioactive area (plus the expense of creating shielded trains) versus just building a detour. | |
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The Command & Conquer series has many of these: Exploding Nuclear reactors or weapons: One of the Soviet missions in Command & Conquer: Red Alert takes place in a nuclear power plant that the Allies have sabotaged. Your technicians must activate the cooling systems on the reactor before the core melts down. However, if you fail, the game shows a video of an exploding atomic bomb, which is not the same thing at all. In Red Alert: The Aftermath and Red Alert 2 the Demolition Truck produces a nuclear explosion when destroyed. While they may have designed it to do this you think they would wait to arm it until they got it away from their own base. In Red Alert 2 destroying the Soviet nuclear reactor causes a large explosion. The Command & Conquer: Generals series includes the Chinese, with nuclear superweapons, a smaller war-head siege weapon, and a forest of nuclear power plants that can be (you guessed it) set off in a chain reaction of tiny atomic explosions. If the players purchase the nuclear tank upgrade to make their tanks move faster their tanks will explode if destroyed. Honorable mention: in Red Alert 3, the Soviet Super reactor will cause a massive explosion when destroyed, which can destroy most units if they're too close - despite nukes canonically not having been invented yet. (What do the plants run on? "Chemicals.") Funnier still, it sports a nuclear symbol and a small chamber from which Cherenkov radiation leaks. In the Chinese campaign in Generals the GLA uses a Chinese nuclear missile as a standstill bomb. Weak Nukes In a few games in the series (notably the first Red Alert), nuclear missiles could barely destroy a tent when dropped right on it. Later games (and Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn) had much more powerful nukes (Nod's nuke in Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars can punch a pretty good hole in a base). Speaking of C&C3, it features a Nod mission where the player must steal several nuclear warheads with a pretty pathetic force guarding them. If the player attacks the trucks the warheads detonate into a mushroom cloud. Hilariously, it doesn't even seem that the trucks themselves carry the active nukes; should one be killed, the game automatically drops a nuclear missile on it. What. For the first Red Alert, its somewhat true - however that is only for multiplayer, where a nuclear weapon hit the square targeted, then two squares out in a ring around the target. In short, some units standing next to a nuclear explosion could take no damage at all. In Singleplayer, if a nuke is fired, it does not only cause the white flash, but vaporize everything in the blast radius. Tiberian Dawn was similar, in that a missile launched from the Temple would obliterate anything. The Apocalypse tank in Red Alert 2 can be upgraded with experience to fire nuclear ammunition, causing small mushroom clouds about the size of a tank but not necessarily killing anything in the vicinity. Infantry are notorious for surviving direct hits from tank shells. This is about as realistic as Tesla bombs dropped from the veteran Kirov airship that produces an electrical explosion. Oh wait, this is Red Alert we are talking about here, the universe where reality takes a backseat to coolness. Fission equals Fusion: Cold Fusion Reactors (in itself impossible under current physics understanding) in Generals and Zero Hour have Control Rods like Fission Plants. Heightening them (which costs money) enhances the power output by 100% (300% for Superweapon General). At least these reactors don't explode, unlike their Chinese fission counterparts. |
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The Thunderbirds episode "The Mighty Atom": a nuclear reactor goes critical and explodes, rather than overheating and melting down. Said reactor also continues to function unless the seawater intake is destroyed (?) and requires the control rods to be inserted by hand in an irradiated room directly adjacent to the reactor vessel. And they apparently only have one radiation suit, so this can only be done one rod at a time. Really, it's no wonder The Hood decided to sabotage that reactor in particular. |
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The nuclear missile in Shadow Warrior. Nothing says BFG like a nuclear bazooka. | |
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CSI: Miami: The episode "Dead Woman Walking" takes numerous liberties. The only thing they get right is the use of real-life spectrometry tools instead of a Magical Computer, and an aversion of Sickly Green Glow with a character even pointing out that "it's not like [the radioactive material] glows or anything". But the rest is cringe-worthy. The "radiation is lava" trope is taken literally with an iodine-131-contaminated corpse burning up from radiation exposure. Dangerous amounts of radioactive materials are shown kept in plastic syringes - that offer no protection - without any shielding in a simple fridge, which is a screaming example of No OSHA Compliance. The decay product of I-131 is stated to be another isotope of iodine. That is wrong, since it turns to xenon (β− decay to Xe-131). After just 2 days the lethally radiotoxic juice is somehow entirely non-radioactive. In real life, the half-life for I-131 is approximately 8 days. So if the juice only two days earlier was so "hot" it could kill, then it would still make radiation meters screech a mere quarter half-life later. Following from the point above, they use chemical means to investigate the juice and get it doubly wrong because not only does I-131 not turn to regular iodine, but xenon... and since that is a noble gas it cannot be detected in the manner shown. A person who is fatally poisoned by radioactive materials is allowed to roam free in public. That doesn't happen, ever. Even people treated with medical doses of I-131 are kept in the hospital ward until their "glow" fades, and the staff is made to wear lead aprons around them to keep the exposure to a minimum. |
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Johnny Sokko And His Flying Robot: There are plenty of times in the show where characters get exposed to some form of nuclear energy and suffer no ill side effects. Most notably in the first episode, where Johnny and Jerry escape the Gargoyle's Island base as a nuclear bomb detonates to activate the title character. Johnny and Jerry stand within several feet of the blast and even look up at the fireball and aren't even physically mutilated from the heat and force of the blast. Giant Robo can also just sap nuclear energy like a sponge which, while explaining why Johnny and the others haven't died of radiation poisoning, still is hard to believe a robot can just suck out any form of nuclear energy and not suffer the effects from Electro-Magnetic Pulse. Granted, one could forgive this for being a show for children but given the frequency of danger the characters themselves get in you'd think they'd take the idea of nuclear weapons seriously. | |
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In Ratchet & Clank, every explosive is nuclear, and produces a mushroom cloud, even though the blasts are about the size of a fairly weak firecracker. Rule of Funny and/or Rule of Cool are definitely in effect here. | |
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In The Godzilla Power Hour, there's an episode where, no joke, exposure to uranium sends the protagonists back in time. To prehistoric times. Even better: How do they get back? By grabbing piles of uranium in their hands and molding them into balls! |
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In the Futurama episode "Godfellas", the microscopic Shrimpkins make working microscopic H-bombs, complete with tiny mushroom clouds (in space, no less). | |
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Season 7, Episode 11 of The West Wing concerns a potential meltdown. President Bartlet talks about a nuclear plant being "A reaction 20 times as powerful as Hiroshima," a wildly inaccurate figure which is akin to drawing a comparison between a birthday candle and a racecar engine. | |
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The "World's Smallest Nuclear Bomb" in MDK, complete with miniature mushroom cloud (about 6' high) and, showing some attention to detail, a ground shock wave. | |
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Touhou Project: Utsuho Reiuji has power over nuclear fusion and fission, so it makes sense she'd be immune to the nuclear reactor in Former Hell. It makes less sense for Reimu and Marisa to not show any adverse effects either. | |
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The Green Hornet: In the episode "Invasion from Outer Space", an unarmed H-bomb (without an installed detonator) inside a truck can supposedly be set off by a detonator attached to the outside of the truck. This is physically impossible. | |
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After War Gundam X is guilty of Idea 1. Defunct nuclear reactors are valuable but highly dangerous targets for scavengers... because apparently some idiot(s) left them all running, and if you pull out too many components(or simply damage the cooling tower bad enough) they will explode like bombs. A fight between mobile suits during a raid results in a second sunrise. | |
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StarCraft has tactical nukes that give off the token mushroom cloud (even in outer space), despite not being powerful to bring down even one half-decent building. Oh, and if you click enough on a neutral critter, it explodes with the same mushroom cloud... In the backstory, they had much, much bigger nukes. With which they sterilized a planet. Once they realized they could actually do that, even the Confederates weren't big enough idiots to keep 'em around. The "nukes" in-game would likely just be big friggin' conventional bombs, called nukes because it sounds badass. (Low damage is more a matter of game balance.) 'Course, StarCraft is just full of these inconsistencies, due to Gameplay and Story Segregation. The mushroom cloud is due to Rule of Cool and The Coconut Effect. |
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In The Sum of All Fears, the workings of the nuclear device were intentionally altered by the author in an attempt to limit the usefulness towards making Real Life nuclear weapons, as noted in the afterword. | |
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Spider-Man: Another "cooling tower = reactor building" misconception occurs in 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!" The "Aunt May almost marries Doctor Octopus" story climaxes with Hammerhead confronting Doctor Octopus in front of a breeder reactor. "The slightest vibration could set off a chain reaction!", Octopus exclaims. Hammerhead doesn't listen, and charges at Ock headfirst — the next page depicts a mushroom cloud, of course. A later issue (which reveals that both villains had survived this) shows that the "chain reaction" was caused by Hammerhead getting his cranium stuck in a control panel. Never mind that the biggest danger with a breeder reactor is fire, not everything going kaboom. |
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The Incredible Hulk: Gamma rays and gamma radiation are depicted as visible green energy, when visible green light is at a lower frequency than gamma rays, and gamma rays are at a higher frequency than visible light, ultraviolet, and X-rays. Of course, the form of gamma radiation that created the Hulk is later revealed to be part of an Eldritch Abomination that doesn't follow scientific laws. | |
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In The Core, the good guys suddenly realize they need to up the yield of a nuke by 30% if they want to save the world. How do they accomplish this? By taking a plutonium bar from the Cool Starship's power generator and placing it right next to the bomb. Stacking anything "nuclear" next to a bomb will not improve the bomb's yield. | |
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Tribulation Force, one of the Left Behind books, heralds the arrival of the Second Horseman of the Apocalypse with two 100 megaton bombs being dropped on London and New York — correction, on Heathrow and JFK, as if such precise targeting would make the slightest difference to anyone with a bomb that would instantly annihilate everything within 100 km. 100 Mt is twice the yield of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuke ever tested, which was subsequently deemed even by the standards of Soviet Superscience to be wildly impractical. Regardless of this, it's treated by the narrative (insomuch as it dwells on the consequences at all) as if the explosions had been smaller by an order of magnitude or four (i.e., closer to 10 kilotons than to 100 megatons). | |
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Chernobyl speeds up the effects of radiation poisoning in the interests of pacing. For instance, the "Red Forest" develops immediately from the radioactive cloud from the burning reactor, the leaves turning red by the morning after the accident. In actuality, this took place over several months. Similarly, the radiation burns from core exposure and handling radioactive material (such as the core graphite and firefighter uniforms) are shown as developing within minutes rather than hours. | |
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The Minecraft mod Industrial Craft 2 has nukes and nuclear reactors. The explosion from a nuclear reactor is actually bigger than that of a nuke. Also, due to interaction with vanilla Minecraft's poisoning mechanics, you can cure radiation poisoning by drinking milk. | |
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In his earlier novel (but not the film) The Hunt for Red October, a Soviet submarine racing to intercept the Red October suffers a catastrophic reactor accident. In a realistic aversion, the reactor core doesn't explode, but simply melts through the reactor vessel and the ship's hull, causing it to sink. | |
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In Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Superman drops Nuclear Man into the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant... and he somehow ends up inside the reactor (which should be located in a different building), which somehow ends up destroying Nuclear Man. | |
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Doctor Who: In "Aliens of London"/"World War Three", the villains' plan is to spark a nuclear war to reduce the Earth to radioactive chunks they intend to sell as fuel. However, nuclear detonations don't make the ground itself radioactive. The radioactivity is the result of particles from the fissile material in the bombs being spread around by the detonation. In 42, when a character gets possessed by a living sun, his body converts to hydrogen to match it... except that's exactly the opposite of what a sun does. Stars are mass in fusion, not fission. |
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In Legacy of the Aldenata, specifically in the novel Hell's Faire, there is a new nuclear-like weapon. It is described as having its primary radioactive isotope scattered in the area of effect, carbon-13, as having a very fast half-life. The trouble is, carbon-13 has no half-life at all because it is a stable isotope. (Carbon-14, on the other hand, is radioactive, if only very slightly; its half-life is on the order of five thousand years. Such a long half-life implies a very low decay rate, and consequently complete unsuitability for use in any kind of 'dirty bomb' application.) | |
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Crysis features several variants of battlefield nuclear weapon; all produce the "columns of smoke" effect that would only normally be seen in a nuclear test. | |
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Person of Interest: In the episode "Relevance", Agent Shaw comes across terrorists assembling a dirty bomb with "half a pound of cesium" (presumably Cs-137) in a glass ampoule. After incapacitating the terrorists, she picks up the ampoule with her bare hands and puts it in an unshielded plastic box to carry along with her. Both of those would be exceedingly stupid things to do and would have her showing acute symptoms of radiation exposure after the mission. A later episode, "In Extremis", gets pretty much everything it presents about radiation and radioactivity wrong. Finch's radiation detector is plastered with radioactivity trefoils. This would be like having flammability warning symbols on a gas detector, or high voltage stickers on a multimeter. Finch detects "alpha particle emissions" while just holding his probe up into the air. Never mind that he wouldn't be able to distinguish alpha radiation from any other kind of ionizing radiation — alpha particles have a range in air of only centimeters, so if he was detecting them that way, it would mean that the alpha emitter was in the air and he was breathing in airborne contamination. Ouch. Upon being told that it's alpha radiation, Reese immediately concludes that "it's polonium", instead of the other hundreds of possible alternatives. Ingesting polonium means that radiation poisoning sets in immediately, and is invariably fatal within 24 hours. In real life, the first symptoms (read: nausea) wouldn't set in for many hours, and death would take weeks. Furthermore, if you knew early on that you had ingested polonium, there's a good chance that chelation treatment could save your life. |
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The Apocalypse tank in Red Alert 2 can be upgraded with experience to fire nuclear ammunition, causing small mushroom clouds about the size of a tank but not necessarily killing anything in the vicinity. Infantry are notorious for surviving direct hits from tank shells. This is about as realistic as Tesla bombs dropped from the veteran Kirov airship that produces an electrical explosion. Oh wait, this is Red Alert we are talking about here, the universe where reality takes a backseat to coolness. | |
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Honorable mention: in Red Alert 3, the Soviet Super reactor will cause a massive explosion when destroyed, which can destroy most units if they're too close - despite nukes canonically not having been invented yet. (What do the plants run on? "Chemicals.") Funnier still, it sports a nuclear symbol and a small chamber from which Cherenkov radiation leaks. | |
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Ball Lightning: The power plant the eco-terrorists held up still uses the same technology as the Soviet-era Chernobyl plant, even though it is claimed as the most advanced in Asia. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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In G.I. Joe: Retaliation, all the nukes in the world are fired but are all aborted (exploded) short of their intended targets — ignoring the fact that they just essentially detonated thousands of dirty bombs in the upper atmosphere all over the earth. All of that undetonated fissile material (it doesn't get destroyed or become un-radioactive in a non-nuclear explosion) will be spread out and drift down to earth, polluting the planet. Then again, this is part of Cobra's evil plan, so it's probably understandable in that the people behind it don't really care, as it is a Win-Win Ending. |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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The Legend of Total Drama Island uses a bit of artistic license to provide a plausible(ish) explanation for the detonation of Izzy's firestarter.note The canon counterpart of this scene was merely a sight gag that viewers weren't expected to dwell on, but the fanfic author is fond of explaining things. According to the story's notes, the story accepts as true the exaggerated claim, from a 1961 Popular Science article, that a californium bomb with a 10-ton yield could be the size of a pistol bullet. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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The Forever episode "The King of Columbus Circle" features a Litvinenko-inspired murder that makes the below-mentioned Person of Interest episode seem like a dramatized IAEA report. After realizing that the corpse of the week shows signs of radiation exposure despite turning down radiation therapy for his cancer, Henry rushes to the body as it's being wheeled out with a radiation detector and concludes: Its half-life has nothing to do with whether or not they would be getting irradiated. He has absolutely no basis for that conclusion, as he has no way of measuring its half-life. It's also completely wrong, since the isotope in question later turns out to be polonium-210... which has a half-life of around 138 days. |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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In Earth 2150, the United Civilized States forces use nuclear reactors to power their bases. When a reactor is destroyed, it blows up like a nuclear missile, wiping out half of the UCS base... wait no, the explosion is completely harmless. At the beginning of the game, the Eurasians destroyed the nuclear stockpile of UCS on Alaska, and the explosion from it was so powerful that it knocked Earth off its orbit, and slowly send it to the sun. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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The Avengers: The villain Radioactive Man frequently uses his powers with no indication that he or his surroundings will become contaminated with radiation, or that the heroes, villains, or any bystanders will receive radiation poisoning from his presence or the use of his powers. But we do know his radiation can deflect Thor's hammer being thrown towards him. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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In Identity Crisis (2004), Firestorm the Nuclear Man, mortally wounded after being impaled through the chest with the Shining Knight's magical sword by the Shadow Thief, detonates like an atomic bomb a short while later. The omniscient narrator, Green Arrow, comments: To which reviewer Greg Morrow of the comic book blog "Howling Curmudgeons" had this to say: |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Battlestar Galactica (2003): In the pilot miniseries, 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. The show gets points for avoiding number 2.2, depicting detonations as bright flashes or pulses of light. Helo also has to take radiation meds while on Caprica. Nuclear weapons deployed against the Galactica are handled correctly. Starbuck destroys two incoming nukes by shooting them, rendering them inert, and when one reaches the ship, the resulting detonation causes fires but no cratering or shockwave damage to the side of the ship exposed to it. |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Any implausibilities about nuclear weapons and radiation in Deadlands: Hell on Earth can be easily explained away with one phrase: "supernatural nuclear reactions." Yes, radiation does glow green, but that might only be because everyone expects it to. Yes, there are rules governing the detonation of a "G-Ray Bomb," but only one governing conventional nukes. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Metal Men commits a similar mistake to that described for The Green Hornet, below. Magnus's bomb group is about to let go and obliterate his evil robot twin, but when he sees the Metal Man "Plutonium", he orders them to hold fire for fear of setting it off. The evil Magnus knows this and says so to Platinum seconds before the real Magnus perceives the situation. Of course, in this case, it might not be an error because Plutonium was a sentient creature which could choose its moment to explode. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Played Straight: The process of arming a nuclear weapon has several more steps than just authorizing yourself to the weapon. It is not the one-step affair we see in the film. This and the point above for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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The Chrysalis nuclear reactor in Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars has several rods that can, with proper authorization, meld together to form a critical mass, which will make them explode. In reality, several rods of uranium slowly sliding together will simply produce a large lump of uranium rods. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Maniac Mansion may end badly with the nuclear reactor in the mansion's basement melting down — which causes a mushroom cloud explosion obliterating everything in a five-mile radius. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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The Iron Giant: "My Nuke Is Going Critical" version. When the nuclear missile fired by the Nautilus hits the Giant in space, it detonates. This is unlikely: nuclear weapons are specifically designed to only detonate under specific conditions, such as reaching ground level where the Giant originally was. The missile should have just been destroyed. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Godzilla (2014): The radiation detection capability of the MUTO is quite extraordinary, and radiation is not nutritive, except maybe to certain fungi... this is a Godzilla film, after all. The MUTO creatures are drawn to nuclear weapons including ones on a submarine, but completely ignore the active nuclear reactors on the navy ships. |
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Lois & Clark: There's an episode of where Lex Luthor has built a nuclear power plant and claims that not being able to shut down the reactor once it began its start-up sequence was a 'safety feature'. Also, apparently nuclear radiation is enough to destroy the kryptonite traces in Superman's blood but not enough to kill him. This is despite the kryptonite making him weaker than a human. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Doom tends to have open pools of radioactive waste as a type of hurt floor, typically shown as being slightly less dangerous than lava. The toxic waste is called nukage and is stored in Exploding Barrel drums; the game's booklet describes the damaging floors as "slime and other radioactive waste". There are radioactive warning signs, while the radiation shielding suit, Toxin Refinery, and Nuclear Plant maps suggest Union Aerospace Corporation was operating a nuclear power plant and waste handling facility on Phobos. | |
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Amazingly enough, Mobile Suit Gundam averted this: a nuke is launched in one episode, and is then sliced apart by the eponymous Gundam's beam saber. Slicing the nuke does not cause it to explode, but fall to pieces harmlessly, though he does have to cut it a certain way to avoid detonation. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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System Shock features an anti-radiation hypo that is stated to "accelerate the half-life breakdown" of radioactive elements in the body. This would most likely simply increase the activity of the sample, so the exposure time would decrease, but the damage done to the body would increase as well. | |
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In The 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 The Future have no blast-wave, and robots of The Future are immune to heat and the EMP that comes from a nuclear blast. Considering that they use EMP as their main weapon against the machines in the movies, it makes even less sense. '...the machines had little to fear of the bombs' radiation and heat.' The former statement is problematic, the later is very much true. Most of a A-bomb's destruction comes from heat and machines are darned better at surviving that then mere flesh. The radiation? Not really an issue, as thanks to the square law of dissipation it'd only matter if you're close enough to be killed by the blast-wave. "Fun fact": armored fighting vehicles still proved surprisingly resilient against both heat and the blast-wave, hence why research focused on increasing the emitted radiation, resulting in the Neutron Bombs. Although the statement about the machines' resilience against heat is generally true, the writers of Animatrix seem to have no idea how much heat does nuclear weaponry actually produce. The temperature near the center of their explosion reaches levels that you can normally meet on stars. To give a small example of their capabilities — during "Trinity" nuclear test, the bomb (with yield equal to "only" 22 kilotons of TNT) was placed on top of a 30-metre tower made of steel, in the middle of a desert. The result? Steel tower vaporized — literally nothing left of it — and sand in about 300 metre radius around the explosion melted and boiled, later congealing into a glassy residue named "trinitite". Now, imagine an entire barrage of a-bombs with many times greater yield than that (nuclear weaponry currently in possession of countries armed with them are much, much more powerful than those built in final days of World War Two) dropped at any city. While the idea of a machine city surviving a single nuclear bomb is plausible, the idea of it tanking a carpet bombing of such warheads (which is what happened to Zero-One) and coming out without a scratch is downright ludicrous. |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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The Bottom of the Well is towards the realistic end of the spectrum; a lot of the tropes commonly wheeled out for nuclear apocalypses are absent. For example: no glowing green stuff (but plenty of grey radioactive ash); electronics being affected by an EMP; harm from prolonged radiation exposure rather than people immediately melting; no Nuclear Mutants. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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In the second episode of Code Lyoko, 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 grid, meaning it's impossible to cause a precision surge of electricity as the episode implies. 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. And this does not even consider the impedance of the power grid. In real life, the power grid cannot even provide enough energy to start up a nuclear plant (gas turbine generators are transported to a nuclear power plant when it needs a "cold boot"). | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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In the Babylon 5 episode "Convictions" a terrorist who uses time bombs says he will have the titular station destroyed in an explosion that will be "as bright as the sun". This clues in Sheridan that his bomb is placed at the station's fusion reactor. As noted above, this is not how fusion reactors work. | |
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The Gamma World Tabletop RPG adventure "The Legion of Gold". If damaged, a fusion reactor will detonate like an H-bomb. | |
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Artistic License – Nuclear Physics | |
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Tomorrow Never Dies plays the trope straight at the beginning, when the top brass is talking about some Soviet nuclear torpedoes detonating or spreading plutonium from their missile strike. Averted, however, with regards to the climax’s missile launch, which is a non-nuclear cruise missile. | |
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The Supreme Commander series averts this trope, Nuclear missiles will explode and deal plenty of damage, but can be shot down safely with interceptor missiles. | |
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Star Trek: The Next Generation: In one episode, Data crash-lands on a planet with a pre-industrial society and develops android amnesia, so he doesn't know the metal in the box he's carrying is dangerous, or even what the word "RADIOACTIVE" printed on it means. Thinking it harmless and grateful to the local village for helping him while he suffers his memory loss, he sells the plain-looking, gray pieces of metal to their merchants, who then sell it as jewelry, and people all over the village begin getting sick with radiation poisoning. With no memory of how such things work but with his capability to learn intact, Data spends the rest of the episode investigating the sickness and learning that the nondescript metal actually gives off dangerous, invisible energy. The realism takes a drop near the end when he cures the town with a liquid medicine akin to Rad Away in Fallout. | |
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