Corium

A few days ago I saw this meme:

“Corium” is defined by Wikipedia 🔗 as:

a material that is created in a nuclear reactor core during a nuclear meltdown accident. Resembling lava in consistency, it consists of a mixture of nuclear fuel, fission products, control rods, structural materials from the affected parts of the reactor, products of their chemical reaction with air, water, steam, and in the event that the reactor vessel is breached, molten concrete from the floor of the reactor room.

This appears to be quite a specialised definition, as several other online dictionaries lack a gloss for this sense of the word “corium”. The most common definition I could find for “corium” is that it is the name for a particular layer of the skin.

Despite the Elephant Foot’s initial toughness, it appears to have mellowed out over the years 🔗:

By June 1998, the outer layers had started turning to dust and the mass had started to crack, as the radioactive components were starting to disintegrate to a point where the structural integrity of the glass was failing. In 2021, the mass was described as having a consistency similar to sand.

So all we needed to do was to wait a few decades for the mass to disintegrate. Which, when you think about it, is a Soviet solution in its own way.