[DesertRhino]

When they say “explosion”, do they mean a true nuclear blast? Or a scattering of radioactive crap. I’m wondering because the article mentions a million would have nee killed on a blast and the resulting radiation.
I was under the impression that reactors like this really couldn’t reach critical mass, quickly enough to detonate in a true nuclear blast. That they would always end in a fizzle and meltdown that spreads nasty stuff around.

[tanknetter]

When they say “explosion”, do they mean a true nuclear blast? Or a scattering of radioactive crap.

Chernobyl-style explosion where rapid and sustained buildup of pressure blows up the reactor vessel and scatters radioactive crap.

Nuclear reactors don't have the ability to go critical at the level necessary to achieve a nuclear blast. Nuclear explosions, in their simplest form, require weapons-grade material (uranium or plutonium) to be almost instantly compressed to the point of critical mass. In single-stage weapons (for the sake of brevity I'm not going to go into two-stage/multiple stage thermonuclear weapons aka hydrogen bombs) this happens either gun style (one piece of enriched material is shot into another piece at a very high velocity - as with the Hiroshima/Little Boy bomb) or compression (a core of enriched material is surrounded by shaped charge explosives that are detonated to compress the core into critical mass - as with the Nagasaki/Fat Man bomb).

In nuclear reactors enriched material is brought into close enough proximity to other enriched material to create energy (heat) that is then used to boil water into steam. In a nuclear event the material gets too close/for too long or even touches, causing massive amounts of energy/heat that boils off the water too fast (causing pressure to build for a steam explosion that hauls radioactive material up into the steam cloud that results) and starts melting everything around it.