[TheOtherHobbes]

The problem wasn't the immediate explosion but the huge cloud of hyper-radioactive fallout it would have produced.

Chernobyl still managed to poison large areas of Europe, but the effects were mercifully localised and temporary.

A steam explosion would have increased those effects and the areas they affected by some orders of magnitude.

[jacquesm]

Temporary is a bit of an understatement, to this day there are large numbers of people in the Ukraine and in Eastern Poland as well as areas of Russia that ended up with Thyroid cancer due to this.

[garmaine]

Nobody knows that. That’s pure speculation based on the linear no-threshold model.

[lostlogin]

It’s not conclusive it’s far from speculation.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6535271/

[jacquesm]

I think that needs a 'but' in there somewhere, and for Eastern Poland/Ukraine the figures are quite a bit higher than for Turkey.

See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14752799/ and many other studies done with similar objectives such as https://www.medpagetoday.org/meetingcoverage/ata/54237?vpass... . It is not something that sits well with various politicians because the liability question was never really answered and so this is just another inconvenient truth.

[lostlogin]

> that needs a 'but' in there somewhere

It does, thank you.

[garmaine]

I'm not debating that. I'm just saying it would not have been a multi-megaton hydrogen-bomb-like explosion physically destroying not just the plant, but the surrounding city as well, like the characters said it would be on the show.