![]() ![]() Usually, the SCRAM mechanism has to actively prevent the shutdown from happening - for instance, by constantly pushing against a spring, or holding up control rods with an electromagnet. What's more, even the failsafe have "dead-man" failsafes. ![]() A switch that usually exists in multiple redundant locations both near and far away from the reactor room, so that you can always reach at least one during an emergency. This is as opposed to real life, where it's typically an automatic safety feature which engages if the reactor shifts outside a certain set of safe operating parameters and where a manual reactor SCRAM is as simple as turning a switch. If a reactor does melt down or is going to melt down, the hero usually has to manually initiate a SCRAM, an emergency shutdown, sometimes going to elaborate lengths to set the SCRAM up or even having to manually insert the control rods into the reactor one at a time.It should be noted though, as the narrator repeatedly assures us, that these bombs do not actually contain radioactive material "so as not to waste this precious resource", defeating the point of the tests somewhat. In fact, here's a film produced by the US Air Force back in 1960 showing nuclear weapons being purposely dropped out of planes, set on fire, and otherwise subjected to movie-of-the-week hijinks to demonstrate that rough treatment of nuclear weapons does not result in said weapons detonating.Blunt force will not set off a nuclear weapon either, no matter how hard. In fact, partial detonation of the explosives will disable the nuclear weapon (but probably contaminate the area with radiation). High precision engineering is required to get everything to come together properly if things are off by even milliseconds, the yield will be dramatically reduced and it may fizzle entirely. The explosives are directed inward in order to generate the necessary chain reaction. note The standard setup for a nuclear bomb is a sphere of weapons grade fissile material surrounded by conventional explosives. Shooting, or even blowing up a real-life nuclear weapon with conventional explosives is likely to disable the warhead, not set it off. to achieve a full-scale explosion (mainly a sphere of conventional explosives being set off in unison around the nuclear mass, compressing it to supercriticality and initiating a nuclear reaction) while fictional nukes act like spheres filled with mega-nitroglycerin. In real life, a nuclear weapon requires precise conditions note The precise engineering of a nuclear weapon makes the best Swiss watch look like a flint knife in comparison.It doesn't matter if it's designed not to do that, it doesn't matter if it's not fissile enough to be used for an atomic bomb, it doesn't matter if it hasn't got enough material for critical mass, it's gonna blow. Related to Reliably Unreliable Guns and Stuff Blowing Up, if something is nuclear, and something, anything happens to it, it's Going Critical and gonna blow up like an atomic bomb.
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