So no crazy misinformed graphics all over the news.

So even if you drop a hand-grande into that reactor, it just gone be like throwing a rock into a bucket full of toothpaste. Its gone be a mess but its not gone result in a lot of airborne materials.

I'm sure there's all sorts of practical reasons why that wouldn't work, but it's an interesting thing to think about.

Maybe it would need more energy for cooling than what it generates? So it would have to be scaled up to a size where the surface-to-content ratio becomes favourable. There might not be enough salt for that :-)

If I recall the video correctly, solid metal oxide fuel produces offgas at a 50:1 ratio, while being insanely dense. This produces pretty insane internal pressures if the goal of the fuel design is to keep everything contained. Like strong enough to eventually cause mechanical failure of the fuel.

I think there's a lot of really difficult constraints intersecting in these fuel assembly designs, and something that seems obviously simple probably isn't.

Ideally you wouldn't need to expend energy to keep the coolant cold enough; rather, you'd use the coolant to boil water to run your steam generator.

> containing molten salt that has been frozen into a plug

Presumably salt can't be both molten and frozen at once, or is there something about this domain that I don't understand?

If the power fails, the cooling fails and the plug melts.

Think pipes in a house in winter, where one little part of the pipe gets frozen while the rest of the pipes have liquid water in them.

Most materials instead contract when freezing.

Yes, the material is the frozen state of the once liquid reactor fluid.

I hope that clears it up, and would welcome a better way of explaining it!