Let&#x27;s look at the worst possible case for molten salt reactors and imagine that somehow the reactor gets cracked wide open.<p>With a solid-fueled reactor, you need enough fuel for 18 months (the normal refueling cycle). With liquid fuel you can add a little bit of fissionable material as often as you want, so your fuel has barely enough reactivity to keep your plant operating.<p>With solid fuel, the fission products build up over that 18 months. With liquid fuel, three things happen:<p>- Noble gases bubble right out of the fuel to an outgas system. You get a tank of xenon and krypton. You can take that away to secure storage as often as you like.<p>- Some metallic fission products plate onto collectors.<p>- The major fission products we worry about are cesium, strontium, and iodine. In conventional reactors they&#x27;re gases, but in MSRs they bond very strongly into fluoride salts. Optionally we can remove them as we go.<p>So in our imaginary catastrophe there&#x27;s not enough reactivity for a big excursion, there&#x27;s less decay heat than in a conventional reactor, and most of the radioactive stuff is liquid that quickly cools to solid rock. There&#x27;s nothing to drive any kind of explosion, since it&#x27;s all chemically stable and at atmospheric pressure.<p>It&#x27;s worth noting that Fukushima&#x27;s reactor survived a 9.0 earthquake without significant physical damage. It was the loss of electric power that took it out, and that&#x27;s a problem molten salt reactors don&#x27;t have at all.