nuclear accidents

[geogus]

Is it possible to happen an accidental nuclear accident with a nation that is researching and trying to produces nukes?

If not wouldnt be nice if there is some chance of a accidental nuclear explosion in province with nuclear plant.

After all it was a new technology by that timeand im sure that accidents wer possible

 

[SchwarzKatze]

Nuclear accidents that have an observable effect on the scale of a HoI province is incredibly rare, in fact I'd argue that spontaneous explosions of warships outside of combat is far more common and probably more significant to the game.

 

[KalZakath]

The thing is, it's not that it needs to be like a nuke going off in a zone, but even just taking the reactor off line for x amount of time, retarding the process for the building of nukes, and everything else that having a reactor does for your country could have some impact on who gets the bomb first, etc. Think in those terms it would be a legitimate thing that would happen probably every game, even multiple times, but as far as having a Chernobyl or a Fukushima Daiichi total destruction of a zone, probably a 1 in 10 games kind of thing at best.

 

[SchwarzKatze]

The thing is, it's not that it needs to be like a nuke going off in a zone, but even just taking the reactor off line for x amount of time, retarding the process for the building of nukes, and everything else that having a reactor does for your country could have some impact on who gets the bomb first, etc. Think in those terms it would be a legitimate thing that would happen probably every game, even multiple times, but as far as having a Chernobyl or a Fukushima Daiichi total destruction of a zone, probably a 1 in 10 games kind of thing at best.

What for? It's just random hiccups popping up outside of player's control in a grand strategy game that doesn't deal with such things. Similar things like "defective parts", "factory accidents", "munition accidents" that happen IRL are also ommited here, so unless it's a wholesale implementation of random accidents in every aspects of the game I'm against simulation nuclear accidents.

 

[safe-keeper]

The problem is nuclear accidents don't happen. The only two exceptions I can think of, Chernobyl and Fukushima, were caused by very exceptional circumstances. The chances of a dam breaking or a oil facility exploding are far, far higher than a nuclear meltdown. The others, such as Three Mile Island, can be seen more as demonstrations of how good safety systems work, than as a sign nuclear power is a danger to us. A 10 percent chance of a "Chernobyl event" in a time period that had no nuclear accidents of that scale is a massive exaggeration, almost like saying that there should be a 10% chance of an Tungaska asteroid impact during the game.

I'm all in favour of random events and I do feel HOI3 had way too few of them, compared to EU3 and 4, and I suppose we could have random events such as "nuclear research breakthrough" or "nuclear research setbacks", with various bonuses and maluses, but in general I'm tired of nuclear reactors being portrayed as these ticking time bombs by pop culture when they are anything but.

 

[Surimi]

Nuclear accidents just wouldn't be that bad. They might possibly destroy the reactor, but there's virtually zero chance of a nuclear explosion happening unless you've already built a functional bomb and someone has been silly enough to assemble it and leave it lying around in a near-critical state and something has malfunctioned causing the detonator to fire prematurely. Creating a nuclear explosion was actually really hard with the level of understanding at the time.

Chernobyl and Fukushima were not nuclear detonations, they were leaks or small explosions whereby nuclear material escaped into the surrounding enviornment. Leaking can have a pretty devastating long term effect, especially if it gets into the water supply, but within the HOI timeline the long term effects of radiation exposure were not well understood and the chances are people would have just carried on as normal. The effects, for the most part, would only be felt a long time after the timeline had already ended.

 

[Barnacle Bill]

Another thing is that nuclear reactors of that era just didn't have much nuclear material in them. The first experimental reactor to produce power did not do so until 1951, and it only produced 100kw. At worst, a nuclear accident in the game era would just be a setback in the progress of the program.

 

[LordOfWar16]

Nuclear bombs in HoI IV are already extremely overpowered compared to reallife, since they basicly flatten a whole state but only damage units in one province, which on its own is already several dozens of square kilometers big and thus far bigger than any nuclear blast radius of a ww2 bomb.

As for their use they are of course, just as in reallife, mainly a political weapon. It can lower the enemies national unity drasticly, but also increase it drasticly because being bombed by such an weapon of mass destruction can also make the population see them as a extremely dangerous enemy that has to be stopped. National Unity also can only drop to a certain degree by nuclear bombs. That way you cant simply carpet bomb the enemy with nuclear weapons and expect them to surrender, infact you can accomplish the opposite and make them even less prone to surrender

Yes, nuclear accidents can happen, but dont result in an nuclear explosion. With nuclear powerplants for example radiation will leak out, but they wont explode. The worst that will happen is that the water tanks overheat and that they will explode due to overpressure, again resulting in radiation leaking out.

AS for nuclear bombs, they made sure to develop them in the middle of the desert where there basicly is nothing. Even if an nuclear bomb exploded for some unkown reason, there wouldnt be anything in range to be destroyed, besides the facility it was built in.

 

[robw963]

The problem is nuclear accidents don't happen.

The German nuclear program under Werner Heisenberg experienced a major setback when Heisenberg's lab blew up and destroyed all his research data. I'm pretty sure no one was killed, but it set them back so far they lost the race to build the bomb first. In that context I'd support some kind of risk of a setback event.

 

[Rubidium]

The German nuclear program under Werner Heisenberg experienced a major setback when Heisenberg's lab blew up and destroyed all his research data. I'm pretty sure no one was killed, but it set them back so far they lost the race to build the bomb first. In that context I'd support some kind of risk of a setback event.

Source? To the best of my knowledge, the Germans were never close to building anything capable of exploding.

The US did have some minor nuclear accidents, but they were along the lines of "individual scientist gets radiation poisoning and dies." The Manhattan Project's reactors simply weren't big enough to cause a Chernobyl-style disaster even if everything went wrong, and the project as a whole was big enough that a few minor accidents weren't going to seriously affect the time table.

From a gameplay perspective, I'm not sure having more randomness thrown in to the development of nukes is a good thing; throwing resources at nuclear weapons instead of developing better conventional weapons is a deliberate player choice, and I don't think making the payoff random will make the game more balanced.

 

[kviiri]

The German nuclear program under Werner Heisenberg experienced a major setback when Heisenberg's lab blew up and destroyed all his research data. I'm pretty sure no one was killed, but it set them back so far they lost the race to build the bomb first. In that context I'd support some kind of risk of a setback event.

I think it's for the best if such setbacks are considered to be already included in the research times. I don't think having extra randomness on top will make it any more fun, or even historically accurate - as has been pointed out, nuclear accidents are pretty damn rare, and for very rare events it's very hard to assign a sensible probability of it happening.

It would also, for the sake of consistency, mean we'd need research and industry accidents of other kinds too. Currently the only "accidents" I know of are planes crashing on takeoff or landing, and those abstractly represented as equipment attrition.

 

[robw963]

Source? To the best of my knowledge, the Germans were never close to building anything capable of exploding.

from the wiki on this page:
June 23, 1942 – Leipzig, Germany (then Nazi Germany) – Steam explosion and reactor fire
Shortly after the Leipzig L-IV atomic pile — worked on by Werner Heisenberg and Robert Doepel — demonstrated Germany's first signs of neutron propagation, the device was checked for a possible heavy water leak. During the inspection, air leaked in, igniting the uranium powder inside. The burning uranium boiled the water jacket, generating enough steam pressure to blow the reactor apart. Burning uranium powder scattered throughout the lab causing a larger fire at the facility.

Let's not pretend these guys were working with benign substances. Fissile material is dangerous stuff and they were figuring out how to handle it as they went along.

 

[keynes2.0]

The German nuclear program under Werner Heisenberg experienced a major setback when Heisenberg's lab blew up and destroyed all his research data. I'm pretty sure no one was killed, but it set them back so far they lost the race to build the bomb first. In that context I'd support some kind of risk of a setback event.

No, they lost the race to build the bomb first because they weren't even following the right research avenue to begin with, the American research efforts were about 1000 times bigger and they hadn't even begun to speculate on the process of refining fissile materials on an industrial scale. And I mean industrial. Oak Ridge alone employed over 90,000 people in the uranium refining site.

 

[Praetonia]

A nuclear accident causing damage to other stuff and personnel that matters at all on the casualty scale of WWII is just not possible with the technology of the time and imperceptibly unlikely even today.

The main importance of an accident would be the damage it causes to the nuclear programme and this DID happen, e.g. when Germany's first plutonium pile was destroyed in a hydrogen explosion.

Less accidentally, when Germany's supply of heavy water was destroyed by a combination of Norwegian resistance, air attack, and British special forces.

 

[safe-keeper]

The German nuclear program under Werner Heisenberg experienced a major setback when Heisenberg's lab blew up and destroyed all his research data. I'm pretty sure no one was killed, but it set them back so far they lost the race to build the bomb first. In that context I'd support some kind of risk of a setback event.

I actually knew about that one . There is a Norwegian drama series about the heavy water sabotage at Vemork, and it featured that incident. I just didn't think it counted as an accident on the scale of what the OP was talking about.

 

[jcd000]

This is an accident of the scale and type that can be expected in the game.

To my knowledge, this is not well known not because it was insignificant, but because it was not given much publicity.

Well Chernobyl and Fukushima make it seem insignificant i'd say, but the real impact of the Windscale fire is not really known. And the site has been renamed to Sellafield (i guess so that it won remind people of the accident)

Well, i don't expect to see it, but imo nuclear accidents could be in the game, tied with tech level and having one out of a pool of possible effects when they happen (never up to Chernobyl-scale accidents ofc)

EDIT
Just as in Windscale whatever happened happened because the people doing it, didn't really know what they were doing (up to the level of understanding that only comes with practical experience), an accident of similar proportions could have happened with the other pioneers in nuclear research. This translates to a mid-weak negative province-wide effect afaiu.

 

[AledlePieux]

Maybe a comet being sighted could generate a chain reaction from a distracted bomb operator...

 

[Praetonia]

This is an accident of the scale and type that can be expected in the game.

To my knowledge, this is not well known not because it was insignificant, but because it was not given much publicity.

Well Chernobyl and Fukushima make it seem insignificant i'd say, but the real impact of the Windscale fire is not really known. And the site has been renamed to Sellafield (i guess so that it won remind people of the accident)

Well, i don't expect to see it, but imo nuclear accidents could be in the game, tied with tech level and having one out of a pool of possible effects when they happen (never up to Chernobyl-scale accidents ofc)

EDIT
Just as in Windscale whatever happened happened because the people doing it, didn't really know what they were doing (up to the level of understanding that only comes with practical experience), an accident of similar proportions could have happened with the other pioneers in nuclear research. This translates to a mid-weak negative province-wide effect afaiu.

In the scale of WWII, however, Chernobyl and Fukushima are insignificant. Fukushima might correspond to a temporary loss of 1 or 2 IC for instance.

A Windscale fire in WWII could have been significant but only in so far as Windscale was a factory for nuclear bomb materials and the fire would have disrupted the production of those materials.

 

[Secret Master]

No, they lost the race to build the bomb first because they weren't even following the right research avenue to begin with, the American research efforts were about 1000 times bigger and they hadn't even begun to speculate on the process of refining fissile materials on an industrial scale. And I mean industrial. Oak Ridge alone employed over 90,000 people in the uranium refining site.

Basically, this.

By 1942, the race had already been lost even if there had been no accident in Germany.

But having nuclear accidents cause damage on the scale of a game like HOI is a bit silly. I suppose you could include a leadership/research penalty if there was an accident (death of scientists related to the Demon Core in the US), but the kind of nuclear accidents we think of in movies and on TV are just not going to happen in a way that would cause damage worth tracking in the game.

 

[Mannstien]

What about if we have a Broken Arrow and the place the bomber was over get's a bomb? Haiti perhaps