The Serrano Point nuclear power plant meltdown refers to a conflict at the power plant where the Greenway Terminator tried to destroy it.
The Battle[]
A time displacement sphere appears and Wells, a mortally wounded Resistance fighter, staggered out of it. Clutching a wound close to his heart, he grabbed clothes near a homeless man and ran off. The resistance agent crashed into the house of the Connors. Sarah noticed a barcode on his arm, and realized he was a Resistance fighter. He gave information about a man named Greenway and the Serrano Point nuclear power plant at Avila Beach before he died.
The three go to the nuclear plant, which Derek remembered that the Resistance recaptured the plant in the future at the Battle of Avila Beach on December 8, 2026. The girls got hired to the plant as janitorial engineers. Sarah got close to the nuclear technician, Greenway, who was resistant to reactivating the plant. He was an cancer survivor with a prominent scar on his right bicep as a result of two operations to remove lymph nodes from that arm. He was considered overly overcautious by his coworkers, who disliked him intensely enough that one of them shattered Greenway's windshield in the parking lot of a bar.
If the plant was activated as an unsafe facility, Skynet would reap the benefits of its devastation and the millions of dead it would cause; if it wasn't, the Resistance would not get control of it in the future. Sarah got too close when she follows an executive at the plant, who caught her in an unauthorized space. He claimed there was a radioactive spill in the next room and ordered her to suit up and help clean it up. However, even in the hazmat suit, she paniced and got out. A faulty scan (probably rigged) indicates she had been contaminated, so she was subjected to a decontamination wash by the executive, presumably to curb her "unhealthy" curiosity.
Next day, the Terminator prepared to reactivate the plant. But as Sarah watched, she noticed that the scar on Greenway's arm was gone, tipping her off that the person in front of her was a infiltrator. Derek investigated Greenway's house only to find the real Greenway hanging from the ceiling, as a supposed suicide. While on the phone with each other, Sarah and Derek realized the deception at the same time. The terminator worked to overload the reactor but Cameron began a fight with him. Sarah snatched a gun from a guard to assist her but had to go through the contaminated area; Derek went around. Sarah shot the terminator, distracting it long enough for Cameron to slam it into a pair of transformers, frying its circuits and destroying its skin.
Later, Cameron was seen putting all of the parts of a now-dismembered Series 888 terminator into an empty nuclear waste barrel.
Aftermath[]
A representative from Automite Systems, a subsidiary of Zeira Corporation, came to take control of the plant, announcing that his corporation would be installing artificial intelligences to "eliminate the possibility of human error". After his speech, he gets into his car and morphs into the T-1001, Catherine Weaver.