Everytime these guys (P&W) are mentioned, I think of the ending in TWINE. How fantastic that the hero did not let the villain blow everything up, but how can we now blow everything up to get a good ending?
Christmas: The hydrogen gas level is too high. One spark and the reactor will blow (Purvis's idea). I have to stop it!
Bond: Go to the top of the submarine. I'll meet you in the torpedo bay. Go!
Bond: The reactor is flooded. So it's safe even if this place blows (Wade's idea).
*One spark*
Sub blows up.
For what it's worth I understand how they came up with ending. For the sake the movie/storytelling they already made the actual reactor kinda sci-fi compared to the real thing but the idea of the Hydrogen explosion is legit. Renard was trying to get the reactor to meltdown completely and detonate in a massive nuclear blast, which is something that they averted at Chernobyl. To get a massive nuclear detonation from a reactor the conditions need to just right and the fuel needs to meltdown into one solid mass. That was averted in the film. The presence of Hydrogen gas indicates that a partial meltdown had occurred/ fuel rods were exposed to air. They Hydrogen gas would have went to the top of the sub, the spark triggered it and the force of the blast split the sub open and the reactor which was flooded would not pose as big a threat underwater. Essentially most of the time when you hear "reactor coolant" they are talking about water. In real life I think the soviets have disposed of sub reactors by sinking them in the ocean. The explosion in Dr. No was most likely a massive Hydrogen blast. Bond let the reactor go critical which boiled away the water exposing the rods and created massive amounts of Hydrogen which eventually ignited and detonated. The Hydrogen explosion in TWINE is probably the most realistic part of the stuff involving the reactor. For the most part it works because few people know that much about reactors, and they're still doing story things like in Craig's films i.e CR Le Chiffre's stock plot, in SF Silva's hacking skills, there's a hint of reality but for the sake of the storytelling they'll cheat a little and make things more flashy or simple or not fully explain something because they figure we won't fully comprehend it anyway and in big picture it's not something we as an audience are intended to dwell on.
Kinda off topic but on the subject of scripts, anyone else find the unproduced scripts for GE and TND a little eerie now? In GE the target originally was the World Trade Centers and TND there was a plot to cause a Nuclear Meltdown in asia. In real life they was 9/11 and then Fukushima, and the really crazy thing, and I'm not saying I believe everything I hear and read but there have been some claims and accusations that Fukushima was actually engineered by a shadowy cabal that was blackmailing Japan. Supposedly Boris Berezovsky was a member of the faction that was threatening Japan and then now he's since "suicided" and there was his his associate Alexander Litvinenko who was poisoned by eating of all things "RADIOACTIVE SUSHI" while he was at a restaurant meeting with an Italian expert on Nuclear waste clean up. Supposedly this all goes back to the sunken Kursk in 2000 and some warheads were removed and if the rumor are true still floating around out and one of them was used to trigger the quake and it was planted by a deep sea drilling research vessel, The Chikyo Maru that was in the region of the quake in the months before Fukushima happened. Sounds almost like AVTAK. Makes you wonder some times.
The more I think about it and SAF's comments, the rarer it is that screenwriters seem to make it big enough to be the 'voice' of their films...