Sorry to break a myth, but you'll never hear someone about “THE RED BUTTON ” in a nuclear control room. There's way too much buttons that happens to be red for that.

Nuclear operators are highly trained professionals (two years of training in France, for instance) who know their machine by heart, so what you'll hear will be much more specific like “isolate vapor generator number 3”. Also, the way it's organized it will very rarely be orders, but instead description if what each of them are doing while following the safety procedure, to keep other crew members aware of what they're doing.

So no “Press that god damn red button!” but instead “I'm bypassing turbine through GCTA and moving to step 342.B.3”.

META: Make sure that your adblocker is set to 11 on that site.

In the first edition of The Design of Everyday Things[0], Norman has a photo of beer tap handles on control levers in a nuclear power plant control room. This was done, to differentiate two important handles.

I won’t link to the photo, because it’s on personal blogs, and I don’t want to hug anyone’s site to death.

The photo was removed, in the current version.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

A few years ago I listened to a seminar where a few real professional doctors discussed the hospital scenes in movies or TV shows. They mentioned that those dramatic and chaotic operation room scenes where the doctor yells commands with a loud voice look so fake to them. In a real operation room, everyone (including the doctor and the nurses) is highly trained, works in tandem calmly and efficiently -- there's never a need to raise voice.