11 Wildly Inaccurate Movie Science Tropes

4. Nuclear Power Station = Atom Bomb Waiting To Happen

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. The fact that "nuclear power" and "nuclear weapon" use the same word is enough for most writers and the two things are largely interchangeable or at least easily transformed from one to the other.

According to Hollywood, a nuclear reactor of any kind is always mere seconds from going up in a mushroom cloud and blowing everyone into their own shadows.

In reality, setting off an atomic bomb is an incredibly complex and precise process that is more likely to fail than go off accidentally. Any interference with a nuclear weapon is much more likely to disable it than cause any damage, and that's a device that's designed to explode.

A nuclear power plant is designed to do the exact opposite of explode (that's not explode rather than implode for all the pedants at the back) and much of its bulk is made up of failsafe after failsafe to ensure that nothing ever goes bang and, if it does, it is always well contained. Even if it did go into meltdown, that's all that would happen. It would melt into a gooey pile of slag, not explode. Expensive but not exactly deadly.

Oh yeah, and nuclear reactors are supposed to be "going critical". That means it's working properly, not that it's about to meltdown.