The China Syndrome The China Syndrome The China Syndrome is a 1979 American disaster thriller film directed by James Bridges and written by Bridges, Mike Gray, and T. S. Cook. It tells the story of a television reporter and her cameraman who discover safety coverups at a nuclear power plant. It stars Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas, with Douglas also serving as the film's producer. The cast also features Scott Brady, James Hampton, Peter Donat, Richard Herd, and Wilford Brimley. "China syndrome" is a fanciful term—not intended to be taken literally—that describes a fictional result of a nuclear meltdown, where reactor
Nuclear meltdown was replaced by better-based newer studies, and now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has disavowed them all and is preparing the overarching State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analyses <nowiki>[SOARCA]</nowiki> study - see the Disclaimer in NUREG-1150.) It has not been determined to what extent a molten mass can melt through a structure (although that was tested in the Loss-of-Fluid-Test Reactor described in Test Area North's fact sheet). The Three Mile Island accident provided some real-life experience, with an actual molten core within an actual structure; the molten corium failed to melt through the Reactor Pressure Vessel after over six hours of exposure, due