what would happen if a fully operational fusion reactor exploded in the possibly worst way?
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You break your reactor. That’s about it. You probably won’t even lose containment. A similar thing happened at one of the test fusion reactors a few years ago (I think maybe it was one in Los Angeles?), it just burnt the crap out of the inside of it and destroyed a bunch of expensive stuff.
Fusion reactors can produce a lot of power, but they don’t need much plasma to do it. Once that magnetic field turns off, your fusion stops. Then you just have an uncontained hot plasma while, while it might be tens or hundreds of millions of degrees, there’s not much of it, so the total energy released isn’t going to be substantial in the grand scheme of things.
Fusion reactors are incapable of exploding or melting down like a fission reactor Chernobyl style or exploding like a thermonuclear bomb.
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