I agree with your assessment that it's impractical to meltdown reactors just to learn how to clean them up, but apparently the US government didn't: https://en

I agree with your assessment that it's impractical to meltdown reactors just to learn how to clean them up, but apparently the US government didn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BORAX_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BORAX_experiments