GURPS Disasters: Meltdown and Fallout

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by johndallman

There's something called AL-356 listed in the Radiation Protection Table on p8, but it's not obvious what this material is, and web searching isn't telling me anything clear. It has the same statistics as aluminium alloy, and the name suggests that might be what it is - but why list it separately?

It's a specialised aluminium alloy which is slightly better at soaking radiation – but that falls below the resolution of this listing. My notes have 16.80cm as the halving distance, rather than 16.87cm for plain aluminium, and we didn't spot how similar the values were.

Originally Posted by johndallman

Meanwhile on p17, it's a good idea to be able to control the weather if you seem likely to cause nuclear accidents, although the police may see your attempts to disperse the contamination as making things worse.

Sadly, the film Atomic Tornado does not contain what its title claims.

[Bruno]

I loved seeing this in Warehouse 23.
I've done a lot of (amateur) reading/research on nuclear reactors, and particularly on the real-life failures, so this isn't particularly new information for the most part. At least, not for me. But from what I know it all looks good, and it's very handy for gaming purposes to have it all in one place, written up from a gamers perspective (which is much more interested in some of the weirder scenarios than academics are).
It's definitely much more readable than nuclear accident reports, which tend to be... dry. Slowly horrifying, but dry.

I have a teeeeeeny tiny grumble that the concern raised about population panic sabotaging evacuation in event of a disaster further sells that rather dangerous meme... but panic makes for a great gaming scenario. It's a case of reality being "unrealistic", though - people don't panic like that (they panic differently). Fears in civic leadership that people will run around like headless chickens results in suppressing information and downplaying disasters. Teensy grumble.

Of course, the historical problem of leaders downplaying disasters also makes for a good gaming scenario - perhaps players are investigators from an international organization, or are technically-minded people in the disaster area who need to find out the actual scope of the problem and leak it to the media (or higher authorities). Or they're super-heroes who step up to do something about it in a more direct fashion :)

I kinda want another Disasters book about how people behave in disasters - leaders and citizens alike, realistically and the tropes as portrayed in fiction (or in the news media during the "fog of war" period...)

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I kinda want another Disasters book about how people behave in disasters - leaders and citizens alike, realistically and the tropes as portrayed in fiction (or in the news media during the "fog of war" period...)

Write it! I'd definitely buy it.

[Humabout]

Another book that'd be pretty interesting and useful would be Disaster Response (as varied as that can be).

Also, gotta say, Roger did a phenomenal job with this book. It was a pleasure to playtest. It's got sound information on reactors (past, present, and future), an easy to understand rundown of what causes meltdowns and just what happens when reactors do melt down, and a bunch of good ways to tie this into an adventure. The update on radiation rules is a nifty bonus, and the section on cinematic radiation ties it nicely into AtE, if that's your thing. Personally, I think it'd be interesting to use these in a Space game involving NERVAs or nuclear torches or whatever that has or threatens an accident, but I'm a scifi nut and that just sounds like a plot Clarke or Asimov might have written.

Basically, if you do anything with nuclear weapons, reactors, or even just radiation in general, this is your jam people! Go buy it!




Why are you still reading this post? You should be buying the book.





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[acrosome]

What an awesome supplement...

... and having just skimmed it, wow, it is awesome. Great discussion of reactor types and how they function. Great choices for historical background- he talks about Windscale, which is awesome. I brief discussion of the profoundly weird natural nuclear reactors that existed in Africa might have been interesting (sorry if I missed it). Likewise the Demon Core. Of course, I'm someone who unlike Bruno finds nuclear accident reports fascinating...

Great supplement. I mean, really, any RPG book that has the word corium in the glossary just rocks. I'm sitting down to read it thoroughly, now.

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by acrosome

What an awesome supplement...

... and having just skimmed it, wow, it is awesome. Great discussion of reactor types and how they function. Great choices for historical background- he talks about Windscale, which is awesome. I brief discussion of the profoundly weird natural nuclear reactors that existed in Africa might have been interesting (sorry if I missed it). Likewise the Demon Core. Of course, I'm someone who unlike Bruno finds nuclear accident reports fascinating...

Great supplement. I mean, really, any RPG book that has the word corium in the glossary just rocks. I'm sitting down to read it thoroughly, now.

For a really fun reactor accident, look up the SL-1 meltdown. Any accident where someone gets impaled to the ceiling is sure to grab your interest. Not to mention the speculation that the "accident" was actually a murder/suicide. There's also the investigative aspect where nuclear forensics revealed what happened based on neutron activation of the gold in one of the operator's watches.

Luke

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by lwcamp

For a really fun reactor accident, look up the SL-1 meltdown. Any accident where someone gets impaled to the ceiling is sure to grab your interest. Not to mention the speculation that the "accident" was actually a murder/suicide. There's also the investigative aspect where nuclear forensics revealed what happened based on neutron activation of the gold in one of the operator's watches.

Luke

Oh, yes, I've read about that one. The, um, quality of personnel that we had running reactors back in the day was rather suspect.

The Demon Core is fascinating, too, for obvious reasons.

The Tokaimura criticality accident, where workers were pouring uranyl nitrate into a mixing vessel by hand, by the bucketload.

And Castle Bravo, the nuclear weapon test that ended up being 250% as powerful as was expected, due to an error in the physics model...

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by acrosome

Of course, I'm someone who unlike Bruno finds nuclear accident reports fascinating...

To the contrary, I very much like them. They are, however, much dryer writing than SJG house style.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Bruno

To the contrary, I very much like them. They are, however, much dryer writing than SJG house style.

So is my usual writing style. :-)

But seriously, I think that what a gaming book needs to do these days is be a gaming book. If I'd been writing this in the 1990s I'd have gone into a lot more detail about historical accidents, the exact layout of reactor sites, details of various countries' nuclear programmes, and so on: now there are freely-available histories, satellite imagery and keyword searching. (Wikipedia's often not bad, particularly when you just want something plausible enough for a game, but there's lots of other material out there too without going and talking to the pros. As always, cross-check your sources.) So what I concentrated on was how you translate this stuff into games, and the standard Disasters template lays this out very clearly: how do you use it as a minor roadblock, as the focus of an adventure, or as the end of a campaign?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I have a teeeeeeny tiny grumble that the concern raised about population panic sabotaging evacuation in event of a disaster further sells that rather dangerous meme... but panic makes for a great gaming scenario. It's a case of reality being "unrealistic", though - people don't panic like that (they panic differently). Fears in civic leadership that people will run around like headless chickens results in suppressing information and downplaying disasters. Teensy grumble.

They panic like that just often enough to keep the fear of that reaction alive.