Meltdown: From Metallurgy to Metaphor

[beamjockey]

Someone mentioned an "emotional meltdown" to me this week. I realized that the word "meltdown" has not always been with us-- it was a term used by specialists until a particular historical moment, after which it was on everyone's lips. I used Google Ngram Viewer to investigate this.

Before 1940, the word appears in metallugical literature, and occasionally in discussions of the manufacture of ice cream. Its frequency is approximately 0.0000001000%, as the Ngram Viewer likes to say, or 1 in 1 billion.*

Today we know "meltdown" best as a word for an accident in an overheated nuclear reactor.

"Meltdown" starts to appear in nuclear literature to describe an accident with the EBR-1 breeder reactor at Arco, Idaho, in 1955. For an example, see "How Safe Are Our A-Power Plants?" from Popular Science for November 1956. I presume the nuclear engineers got it from the discourse of metallurgy and materials science, which play a vital role in reactor design. Ice cream-- not so much.

By 1960 there are many appearances of "meltdown" in nuclear engineering literature. It has climbed to around 2 words in 100 million. Between 1962 and 1965, almost half the appearances of "meltdown" in the Google Books English corpus are accompanied by the word "reactor." A search for "meltdown" without the words "nuclear," "reactor," or "atomic" reveals that the metallurgists and dairymen continue to use it.

The event that made "meltdown" a household word was the accident at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979, just a few weeks after the release of the film The China Syndrome. (I have not determined whether the word "meltdown" is spoken in the movie.)

Rapidly "meltdown" shoots up to around 1.5 words in 10 million. At first, the growth is due to the rise of nuclear safety as a topic of wider general discussion. Eventually, writers seize upon it as a metaphor. There are mental meltdowns and financial meltdowns. In the late Nineties, it takes another jump, rising to about 4.5 words in 10 million, where it remains today. (Well, not today today. Until things cool down in Japan, we will be saying "meltdown" to each other a bit more often than we usually do.)

Google searches of the Web (rather than Books) reports 1.3 million hits on "financial meltdown" and 124,000 hits on "emotional meltdown." The Google News Archive suggests that in 2009, journalists reported that the Labour Party, Serena Williams, Wall Street, and the Copenhagen global warming talks all experienced meltdowns.




*Dear Google: I would welcome an option to label the axes of Ngram Viewer charts in scientific notation.

Comments

[controuble.livejournal.com]

Today we know "meltdown" best as a word for an accident in an overheated nuclear reactor.
Only those of you who don't have kids on the spectrum - the rest of us know what it really means.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

"The spectrum" is another term that has a new meaning that it didn't have a few years ago.

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

And one I am seemingly unaware of...

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Some information may be found here.

[acmespaceship.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed. Although the phrase "overheated nuclear reactor" could be applied to our kids, in which case the original statement is still correct. Hmm...wonder if dumping seawater on their heads is a viable mitigation plan. So tempting sometimes.

[redbird]

Not just kids on the spectrum: I've heard it applied to stressed or exhausted neurotypical kids, and even adults. (Note: the reference to an adult was someone talking about their own reactions.)

[billroper]

OT: So was that you who got an acknowledgment in the Heinlein bio that I just finished reading this morning?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Bless you, my boy, for being the sort of person who reads Acknowlegements!

I actually made a a really subtle link in this blog entry to the page where I am thanked, but nobody noticed.

I gave Bill Patterson some information about Robert Cornog and he was gracious enough to thank me in the book. He has been very helpful in commenting on my own research. (Which, come to think of it, I should send you!)

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I sometimes read acknowledgments, though (I must confess) usually only if I have some reason to think I might know someone who'll be mentioned there.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yes. But in things like a Heinlein bio, or really any SF writer bio, the odds of that are non-trivial for me by now; so I usually do.

[acmespaceship.livejournal.com]

Re: Ice cream meltdowns. I recall an unusually warm spring day at the Lincoln Park Zoo in the 1980's. The Good Humor trucks were down to their least popular items. The resulting meltdown, littering sidewalks all over the zoo, lives on in my memory as the Great Frog Massacre. It was quite grotesque until we established that it was, in fact, ice cream, and neither unfortunate amphibians nor odd polymers boiling out of the ground.

[dmh-phoenix.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

Or perhaps this (http://www.cslacker.com/images/funny/clever_amusing/melted_ice_cream_truck/)?

[gypsy1969.livejournal.com]

I use meltdown to refer to emotional out-of-control states, but when I hear it on the news, I figure it's a nuclear accident they are talking about.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Bill.... ice cream is yummy, and keeps blood sugar from crashing, it may have played a critical role in reactor design.

[charlie-meadows.livejournal.com]

" 'The spectrum' is another term that has a new meaning that it didn't have a few years ago."

The use of "spectrum" to which you link is likely lifted from the earlier existing medical/clinical appearance in such terms as "broad-spectrum antibiotic".* It *is* a bit of a wandering for the meaning to drift from "rainbow" to "range"...

* going back to at least the '50s (I can see how the Ngram viewer can be addicting...)

[(Anonymous)]

I have the China Syndrome movie and the word meltdown is never used the words "melts right down" are the closest thing. For those that don't know the movie involves a TV news reporter and her cameraman touring a controversial nuclear power plant to do a fluff piece but during the tour they witness and film what looks like a problem the nuclear engineers in the control room are frantically running around and acting bewildered. The cameraman later takes the film to a couple of anti-nuclear experts who interprets the footage saying it looks like the operators almost exposed the core. The reporter asked if that would be bad and the one of the experts explains the China syndrome:

Direct quote from movie:

" If the core is exposed for whatever reason the fuel heats beyond core heat tolerance in a matter of minutes nothing can stop it and it melts right down through the bottom of the plant theoretically to China but of course as soon as it hits ground water it blast into the atmosphere and sends out clouds of radioactivity. The number of people killed would depend on which way the wind was blowing rendering an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable. Not to mention the cancer that would show up later"

(Thank you Professor Killjoy.)

There you have it that is the closest they come to saying meltdown and the movie never shows a meltdown. After the reporter knows what happened on the film she confronts one of the operators at his home about almost exposing the core. The plant operator dismisses it saying the system worked and the core was fine but he tells the reporter he has uncovered a real problem at the plant. He has come to realize someone has falsified weld certifications that could compromise the plant and he asks her to help him expose the problem to the public. Well, of course the evil all knowing power company thugs interfere by running a TV station guy carrying the evidence to an NRC hearing off the road. In the meantime the operator who supplied the evidence realizes it might not get through so he goes to the nuclear power plant with a gun and takes over the control room. He demands to talk to the reporter or he will flood the containment area with radiation ruining the reactor. The plant owner humors the operator to buy time so the police can cut into the control room while plant workers trip the reactor into SCRAM mode. The reporter arrives at the control room and starts broadcasting but the plant owner cuts the broadcast and trips the reactor while the police shoot the operator in front of the reporter. As the operator is dying the control room goes haywire and the welds fail in a non critical portion of the plant causing a little damage. The movie ends with the dead operator being portrayed as a crazed gunman by the plant owners while the reporter tries to contradict their coverup.