Worst Case Scenario focuses on a disaster at the Waketa Power Plant, which falls into chaos after a commercial airplane strikes its electrical wires and damages several buildings. Although the plant itself is fictional, the events that play out are based on realistic possibilities. Much of the characters’ energy is spent explaining the damage to the plant, brainstorming possible solutions, and dealing with the larger implications of the crisis.

Well-known examples of real-life nuclear meltdowns include past incidents at Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. However, Newman’s novel focuses primarily on the complex dangers of nuclear waste. In every nuclear power plant, fuel rods that typically contain uranium are placed within a nuclear reactor. Hundreds of these small rods are bundled together to form a fuel assembly, with a reactor core containing “between 150 and 250 fuel assemblies” in total (“What Is Nuclear Fuel?” United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission). This means that an operational reactor has tens of thousands of fuel rods simultaneously undergoing controlled nuclear fission. This process, in turn, generates power that can be harnessed in the form of nuclear energy. The rods slowly decay until they are no longer useable, at which point they are removed from the core for storage.