So I just saw the YouTube video someone posted that showed nuclear reactors starting up, and the first thing I noticed was that they all glowed a very bright, pretty blue. I’m probably an idiot, but I was honestly expecting green, because of many years of dramatized depictions in popular media.
These are probably dumb questions, but:
- Why is it blue? As in, what’s actually glowing in there, and why do we see it that way?
and
- Why do all the movies and comic books and video games go with green instead? Where did that come from?
I’m having a feeling it’s a combination of other stuff mentioned here like radium, which was then put on The Simpsons and then that’s what everyone got the idea from. They made nuclear waste a green liquid and that’s the cultural zeitgeist there, probably.