For example: Half Life. 
There were more plot holes in this show that I could bare to mention, but that shaft stuck in my craw. Forgetting all the other things are ridiculous about this, a reactor cooling tank that is so radioactive as to be instantly fatal, sitting uncovered at the bottom of a maintenance shaft. How the hell did that one get past OSHA ? 
Agree, agree, agree with all the criticisms. What a waste of my time.
And let me add: Christa Miller was godawful! Terrible performance.
Not to mention that this shaft, which was only seperated from the occupied areas by a few sheetmetal covers, connects all the levels. A big deal was made about the levels becoming more and more secure as you do down in the faciility. If anything harmful had escaped, it would have contaminated all the levels.
I also couldn’t help notice that their ‘retinal scanner’ actually scanned their irises.
Those are just a couple of the :rolleyes: moments, there were many more.
Or how about this? If you’re the architect of this super-secure facility and you absolutely must build in convenient maintenance shafts, how about you don’t leave a copy of your 3D blueprints on everyone’s computer? AT LEAST, don’t include all the easy escape routes. Make those pesky scientists work at their escape.
Why didn’t the dude just cover his eyes with his hands when the lights started flashing?
Because he had just handled the script, and his hands were covered in steaming piles of shit. Also, the vast number of plot holes affected his brain like super-mad cow.
Was there any explanation of why the escape shaft was falling apart? The plastic eating bug hadn’t escaped the super-secure chamber, else, wouldn’t they all be, you know, dead? Did the designers think that the nuke wouldn’t be strong enough, so they needed to randomly plant small C4 charges throughout the facility?
I was under the impression that Andromeda has escaped while the scientist was destroying them, and maybe when they are in plastic eating mode, they don’t kill people. For some odd reason, when Andromeda wanted to crash the plane, it didn’t just kill the pilot, it destroyed the plane. I think Andromeda was supposed to be trying to prevent them from stopping the nukes.
So it figured that out, but not that they were brewing tanks full of kill-em-juice? And wouldn’t changing back to insta-kill mode have been a little more obvious a way to dispatch said nuclear bomb off-switchers? Not that you didn’t make a valiant attempt at explaining things, just that when Ralph Wiggum heads up the script department, some things just aren’t possible.
I never said it made sense…
The movie seems less stupid if you watch it with your finger stuck in your nose.
“Andromeda smells like cat food.”
Where’d you get that? I thought the point was that by strip mining the sea vents we rendered the bacteria needed to stop Andromeda extict. Which also raises the question of how people in the future knew it would kill Andromeda. :dubious:
Ahhh, that’s the key! I tried with my fingers in my ears, then my eyes, but the stupid burned its way through.
Eh, why should it make any more sense than the rest of the movie. I figured they developed wormhole tech (thus stripmining the vents) before they actually had to use it to send the message. As to how they knew they bacteria would work - they probably had records of the bacteria, but no more samples of it.
The original movie is still pretty good. It’s much more simple and ominous. There’s no conspiracy crap. It’s more like “hey…you remember that crazy Wildfire program you signed up for thinking no one would ever call you about it? Well…guess what!”
Does every Crighton movie/story follow the same formula?
- Some event or scene forshadowing the disaster to come
- We are introduced to a bunch of brilliant researchers from disparate backgrounds performing their brilliant research.
- Some government agency or mysterious benefactor assembles our team in a secret lab or expedition
- Everything goes to shit
- Race against time to stave off total oblivion
- Final “some things man was not meant to know” message
A couple of caveats - I was trained as a rad tech, not a scientist, nor engineer. I’m also going to be using general cases. When dealing with gamma rays, a lot depends on the initial energy of the photons being emitted. Some energy levels pass through shielding better than others. (And others are much, much less able to penetrate.) I’m also going to be using radcon math in my reasoning - so don’t expect numbers to be exact.
I haven’t seen the movie, so I can’t comment on the scenes shown with all that much confidence, but while water is a coolant, it’s also a pretty effective shield. It’s not magic, of course, but I can imagine a scenario where someone vertically suspended in a pool shielding a rad source could get a lethal dose, while someone a few meters above him with only a little more water between the center of his body and the rad source, got out without any immediately visible effects.
First off, IIRC the general rule of thumb is that for every 24 inches of water gamma rays have to pass through the dose rate drops by 90%. So the guy in the water would have the center of his body almost a full tenth thickness less shielding than the guy in the air, even if they were the same distance from the rad source. Which translates to effectively ten times the dose for the guy in the water.
Now, the way I’m seeing this in my mind, the guy in the air would be on some cat walk say, two or three meters above the pool. Radiation strength varies at the inverse square of the distance from the emission source. So, those extra two or three meters could be almost as effective in reducing the dose to the guy on the catwalk, as the extra shielding tenth thickness of water was. So, for easy calculations (radcon math - always choose your numbers for easy calculations!) let’s say that the guy on the catwalk is now three times as far from the source as the deader in the water - which means that the guy in the catwalk is only getting one tenth of the unshielded dose that the guy in the water got. And because of the extra shielding the guy on the catwalk gets only one tenth of what he’d have gotten without that shielding. So the guy on the catwalk could be getting as little as 1% of what the guy in the water is getting.
Now, let’s plug in some numbers to that: the LD 50 dose for ionizing radiation is about 400 REM. But that’s usually after a lovely time fighting rad sickness in a hospital. If the guy in the water has to die quickly, let’s zap him with, say 1000 REM. It’s still probably too little to really kill him immediately, but it’s in the right ballpark, I’d think. If the guy on the catwalk is getting 1% of that dose, he’s only gotten 10 REM. Measurable blood changes don’t even start until about 25 REM. So the guy on the catwalk could be okay, even if the guy in the pool goes belly-up.
Whether I think that geometry is likely is another question altogether. I’m making a number of assumptions about the shape of the source in the pool that probably can’t be considered accurate for close proximity. AIUI there’s usually a LOT of water over the stuff kept in containment pools. Heck, when I toured a 10 KW thermal reactor at WPI their itsy, bitsy, teeny, weenie core was covered by at least a meter of water.
Nah. You need a hell of a lot more radiation than 1,000 REM to actually incapacitate someone. (Much lower dosages will indeed kill someone, but it takes a few days.) This 1971 study (with the catchy title of “Survival Time and Dose-Response Following Supralethal Irradiation of Dogs”) indicates that it took dosages of up to 20,000 rads (approximately equal to REM) to incapacitate dogs within 100 minutes. The guy in the movie was incapacitated almost immediately. Lets be generous and say it took 10 seconds. Lets also assume that 20,000 REM will incapacitate a person. This means that the guy in the water was being exposed to a gamma flux of 20,000 REM/10 seconds = 2,000 REM/sec.
I’ll buy your radcon math for the dose fraction of 1% (taking into account the distance and shielding) for the guy higher up in the maintenance shaft. So 1% of 2,000 REM/sec works out to 20 REM/sec.
The guy up in the maintenance shaft spent a lot of time fucking around in there. However, let’s say he spent just one minute in there. His dose then is 20 REM/sec x 60 sec = 1,200 REM. That’s it, he’s dead. He won’t be incapacitated for hours or days, but he almost certainly will not survive a week.
This whole exercise brings up my original point again, which is: what type of hard gamma source do you leave at the bottom of a maintenance shaft in the first place? :dubious: I know! Maybe that’s why they were warned to stay out of the maintenance shaft! Anyone who attempts to circumvent the security between levels is dead! Makes as much sense as anything else in this stupid movie… :rolleyes:
P.S. IIRC from my nuke training, it takes a great deal of radiation to actually incapacitate someone in a short-term time frame because the only thing that will really drop a person in their tracks is neural damage (i.e. actually killing nerve cells). It takes a great deal of radiation to cause this damage (in the tens of thousands of REM). Much lower dosages will kill a person (500-1,000 REM), but it takes a few days, because the mechanism of death in this case is the fact that much of a person’s DNA has been damaged, so cells can no longer reproduce. This effect is first seen in the quickly reproducing cells, such as cells in the gastrointestinal tract, bone marrow/blood cells, and hair follicle cells. So the doomed person’s hair falls out, their whole GI tract sloughs off (resulting in vomiting and diarrhea), and they get anemic and can no longer fight off infection. Fun way to go… 
I 'unno, Louie Slotin got an estimated 2100 REM and lasted nine days.
He wasn’t running any marathons, though.
robby, thanks for the corrections. I knew I was probably lowballing an estimated incapacitating dose, but I had no idea I was lowballing it by that much.
I do have one vital question, though - did they follow the Hollywood convention and show the radioactive material as being fluorescent green?
At acute exposures past 1,000 REM, survival time pretty much comes down to how much intensive medical care (in a hospital setting) the person is given before they kick it.
I don’t think they ever showed the radioactive material. The light from below was blue, IIRC. They may have been trying to depict Cerenkov radiation.
Also, FWIW, an area with a gamma flux of 20 REM/sec has an exposure rate that is more than 100 times greater than a “Very High Radiation Area” as defined by the NRC. Multiply this by another two orders of magnitude for the guy in the water. We’re talking about “inside the reactor compartment of an operating reactor” type of dosages here. It’s a good thing they had those light gauge sheet metal access hatches for shielding and to keep people out! :dubious:
Thanks OtakuLoki and robby, for correcting the details of my faulty understanding of physics. I had forgotten the details of the shielding quality of water (and the inverse square rule, as well :smack: ).
But at least the essence of my objection – that if there’s enough radiation to kill the guy in the pool immediately, the other guy isn’t going to emerge unscathed, as Stone seemed to do – was more or less correct.