this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
38 points (93.2% liked)
xkcd
17883 readers
138 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Against his own and his entire families wishes...
Dude was in the absolute worst amount of pain imaginable the entire time, but the Japanese government wanted to try everything they could think of to treat radiation, so they just wouldn't let him die.
The demon core guys knew they were cooked when they saw a blue flash from the water ionizing off their eyeballs, and knew enough about nuclear power to know whatever happened next they just got an expiration date. Which is what motivated them to stay and try to mitigate damage rather than panic and run.
Also, I'm pretty sure demoncore was when the fuel rod pinned a dude to the ceiling? That's the reason we started using negative power coefficient reactors. It's a lot safer to slam a rod into a core than to yank it out. Going off memory one of the dudes who saw the blue flash just did everything he could to get it to eject, literally jumped on an overheating core and started whacking it with a wrench to avoid full meltdown. Some full on Fallout type shit.
The guy who got pinned to the ceiling was from the SL-1 accident, and it was due to a poor reactor design which allowed the reactor to go prompt critical by removing only one control rod. Normally the rods were in the down position when the reactor was shut off, but to bring it back online the rods had to be lifted by hand a few inches so they could be attached to the drive cables. Another flaw was that the control rods had a habit of getting stuck, so the leading theory is that the operator accidentally pulled it out too far when trying to get it free. We’ll never know exactly what happened though, since all three operators died in the explosion.