The Perception of Radiation and Nuclear Reactors in Fiction: The Case of Comics and Videogames

The public`s contact with different scientific subjects mainly arise from exposure to popular media such as fiction and newspapers. The subject of this study, fiction, includes any story or setting that is derived from imagination, such as comics, movies, books, and TV series. Our study examines the perception and image of radiation and nuclear reactors in comics and videogames by bringing examples of different appearances in those types of fiction, and tries to reach general conclusions. The full work includes many examples, such as the way Spiderman got his powers, and the way to cure radiation poisoning in Ukraine (The answer - by drinking vodka).

The main conclusion of the work is that the perception of radiation in fiction has turned into a "trope". Tropes are rhetoric and literary tools, motifs, recurring clichés and conventions that allow the writers to easily get across a message, idea or atmosphere without getting into details, by using a tool that the audience is already familiar with and that is deeply embedded within him. Some tropes are so famous that the audience is unconsciously conditioned when they appear: when we watch a movie and see a big red button, we immediately assume that it will activate a self-destruction process or launch a powerful weapon, instead of assuming that it will activate an emergency shutdown, as is generally the case in reality.

Tropes related to radiation include "superpowers" acquired from exposure of humans to radiation, turning animals into terrible monsters, and radiation as having a glowing green color. Tropes related to nuclear reactors include instability (the reactor explodes as a result of any slight problem, and it does so immediately), apocalyptic results of the explosion (the reactor blows up in a nuclear explosion accompanied by the famous mushroom, and the surrounding areas remain desolate and lethally contaminated for hundreds of years).

The use of radiation as the source of superpowers was most common in the 1950`s, when anything related to nuclear power was new and exciting, but the general public had no real knowledge about it. Since then, nuclear power has gotten old, and the public has greater knowledge of the matter, hindering the use of radiation as an easy "scientific" explanation to everything. Historically, lightning and chemistry served as the trope of the "scientific" explanation to everything before radiation, which was in turn replaced by genetic engineering and quantum physics. Although the peak of interest in nuclear power occurred during the cold war era (when the threat of the atomic war appeared real), and has since greatly dwindled, the use of radiation and nuclear power is still present in comics - and so is their fake perception.