There is no risk of a steam explosion. The core shuts itself if it overheats so it has been demonstrated that reactivity insertions and loss of cooling can be resolved passively
There was fear in the early days that in a meltdown the core might become denser and produce a small nuclear explosion but after thinking through the problem for years and a lot of experience it seems the core disperses in a worst cast. Dangerous iodine isotopes dissolve in the coolant and are trapped in case of fuel damage. Potentially a fast reactor can capture almost all the tritium produced for use.
You can have a sodium fire but most sodium fires are pool fires which aren’t very dangerous. Fires happen all the time in industrial facilities, you detect them and put them out. They aren’t necessarily a big problem.
At this point we have a deep understanding of what can go wrong in a PWR or BWR, with part of this knowledge deriving from accidents (TMI and Fukuahima) and smaller incidents.
And we've developed a significant amount of mitigations and operators training to cope with these potential failures.
Doing the same thing for breeder isn't trivial at all.
I studied nuclear engineering ( before changing path in 2011 due to Fukushima) with one of my teacher having worked on SuperPhénix, and my wife is a nuclear engineer specializing in accident scenarios and operators training at EDF, so I'm actually pretty familiar with the topic.
There is no risk of a steam explosion. The core shuts itself if it overheats so it has been demonstrated that reactivity insertions and loss of cooling can be resolved passively
https://gain.inl.gov/Shared%20Documents/Fast%20Flux%20Test%2...
There was fear in the early days that in a meltdown the core might become denser and produce a small nuclear explosion but after thinking through the problem for years and a lot of experience it seems the core disperses in a worst cast. Dangerous iodine isotopes dissolve in the coolant and are trapped in case of fuel damage. Potentially a fast reactor can capture almost all the tritium produced for use.
You can have a sodium fire but most sodium fires are pool fires which aren’t very dangerous. Fires happen all the time in industrial facilities, you detect them and put them out. They aren’t necessarily a big problem.