“The Dark Knight Rises” – in addition to being tied to real life tragedy – is so chockfull of subplots, back stories and caesura for action sequences that critics and viewers don’t seem to care about its primary narrative: After years of wallowing in self-pity and cynicism, Bruce Wayne and his alter-ego, Batman, emerge from Howard Hughes-like reclusiveness to save Gotham City from an evil scheme to detonate a nuclear weapon therein. The device, we’ve been told, has a blast radius of six miles. During the film’s climax, our hero flies the bomb out to sea, a safe distance from shore, with barely a second to spare. When it explodes, Gotham’s citizens watch the resulting mushroom cloud from just over six miles away.
And there you have it! As long as you’re eight or ten or a 100 or 1,000 miles from a nuclear explosion, you’re completely safe. Fallout is contained. The radioactive half-life of the bomb’s fissionable material, we guess, can be measured in minutes.
[…]To be sure, comic book superhero science has never been rigorous. An entire generation of Superman fans believed that if you squeezed a piece of coal hard enough you could turn it into a diamond; after all the man from Krypton did exactly that. But there’s a difference between bad science that results in kids getting their hands dirty while handling briquettes from the family grill and bad science that leads an uncritical population to believe dropping one form or another of hydrogen bomb on Iran, say, is a viable solution to political problems in the Middle East.
Continue reading at The Dark Knight’s Mushroom Cloud
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A nuclear power plant in Byron, Illinois. Taken by photographer Joseph Pobereskin (http://pobereskin.com). カレンダー
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Latest Posts / 最新記事
- Revealed: how a San Francisco navy lab became a hub for human radiation experiments via The Guardian 2024/11/26
- Australia declines to join UK and US-led nuclear energy development pact via ABC News 2024/11/20
- Australia mistakenly included on list of countries joining US-UK civil nuclear deal, British government says via The Guardian 2024/11/20
- 被ばく研究の灯は消さない 国や自治体が「風化待ち」の中、独協医科大分室が移転してまで続ける活動の意義via東京新聞 2024/10/05
- Chernobyl-area land deemed safe for new agriculture via Nuclear Newswire 2024/09/26
Discussion / 最新の議論
- Leonsz on Combating corrosion in the world’s aging nuclear reactors via c&en
- Mark Ultra on Special Report: Help wanted in Fukushima: Low pay, high risks and gangsters via Reuters
- Grom Montenegro on Duke Energy’s shell game via Beyond Nuclear International
- Jim Rice on Trinity: “The most significant hazard of the entire Manhattan Project” via Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
- Barbarra BBonney on COVID-19 spreading among workers on Fukushima plant, related projects via The Mainichi
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I also would like to point out a problem that in the film a nuclear reactor is introduced as a clean energy system in the first place. If I dare to give a credit to the film, it shows the fishiness of nuclear-as-a-clean-energy arguments by revealing that nuclear power and nuclear bomb are two sides of the same coin. But as long as it follows with an idea that “thus good guys must have a control on the nuclear”, the credit is completely marred.