[colechristensen]

No it’s ludicrous.

Much of the point of the manhattan project was devising mechanisms to bring fissile materials together fast enough and precisely enough that they could reach criticality for long enough to produce an effective weapon. To propose that you could get comparable effects via nuclear materials burning through their containment vessel melted in a pool is absurd and just extraordinarily unlikely.

That quote is about “testimony” of a Soviet physicist… who knows what political or other motivations were at work to justify that statement. I can’t imagine any modern physicist saying that was reasonable and it seems the writer couldn’t make that happen… it just seems like a fishing expedition for the most impressive quote that found someone saying something ridiculous and used that as a source of truth ignoring everything else which wasn’t as “fun”.

[DangitBobby]

You sure are interpolating a lot of your own angle into this discussion. Do you think most laypeople would understand (or even remember) the implications of the difference between a 100kT explosion and a 4MT one? Probably not, right? Why do you think the writer would? Is it actually an important difference as far as the narrative is concerned? You'll find that no, it isn't. Even if it were, it's pretty ridiculous to think that expert testimony from the event wouldn't be an appropriate figure to use for a dramatization of the event.

[colechristensen]

I’m really not.

The contemporary quote was either misattributed, missing context, or a straight up lie.

It’s not hard for an ordinary person to imagine what 4 million tons of explosive equivalent might be, or a hundred thousand, both are ridiculous. The actual risk was an explosion on the scale of a few buildings or a minor criticality incident which splattered melted nuclear material in a very small local area.

You’re not going to find a nuclear physicist who could back anything else up with calculations, the author tried and couldn’t.

The problem with your “viewers are ignorant so it doesn’t matter point” is that viewers aren’t totally ignorant and are then fed with very false information which makes any understanding that they did have considerably worse.