[stormbrew]

There is obviously a difference between:

- There are many passive systems that work in concert to prevent the fission material from having a runaway chain reaction that continues on its own,

and

- It is literally impossible within our understanding of physics for the reaction to continue without the continued application of power to the reaction chamber.

No matter how 'safe' the former gets, it's just asymptotically approaching the latter. There will always be more assumptions and caveats involved in preventing a self-sustaining reaction from continuing.

In particular, re. that article, a lot seems to be resting on the sodium cooling pool being present while there's something else going wrong. So what if an earthquake breaks it open and dumps it out. Or a bomb.