Originally Posted By: unimogbert

U- But once the u-slag collects in a pool, there is the chance that the new geometry (of a puddle of hot fissionable slag) can go to criticality then supercriticality creating uncontrolled heat and radiation and fission products. Of course eventually the active badness has to stop as fuel is consumed or splattered about to where it no longer has the geometry to remain critical. Even Chernobyl stopped thrashing about.


OK, so that confirms what I was thinking, which was we might have any number of outcomes, starting with Very Extremely Bad - which is where we are now, and moving on through a series of events, with multiple scenarios ending in many ways, one of which is a supercritical event, which would, I'd imagine, be worst of the worst case scenarios. I hadn't even thought a supercritical event would be on the scenario list, it must be an extreme outlier, owing to the fact that there's all kinds of issues with the mass of the fissionable material and the speed of the reaction.

Finding a great deal of good data out there on this. Scary, but it sounds like they are doing all they can.