Uh, no. That would have exacerbated the already severe problem. Nuclear bombs are dirty too. . . and this started dirty. Incinerating radioactive material doesn’t change its radioactive nature. It needs to be encapsulated and put somewhere safely away from anything it can harm if it can’t be processed into smaller, more easily handled sizes, by separating out the non-radioactive isotopes. In this instance, the Soviets were faced with hundreds of thousands of TONS of secondarily irradiated material in the environment, and thousands of tons of primary radioactive material in the corium (the melted melange of fuel and material from the reactor itself) below what had been the reactor. That mass of corium is a mass of semi-solid magma called the “elephant’s foot” which will be radioactive (It’s now at over 70,000 mSeiverts per hour — fatal to a human in five minutes of exposure — 1 mSv/hr is considered very dangerous as 20 mSv/yr is the maximum dosage allowed) for over 100,000 years and maintain a temperature of 2500 Centigrade throughout that time.
Using a nuke would distribute that over a wide area and contaminate the entire area. . . Worse than using a neutron bomb over the same area as the Neutron bomb uses a case that has a half-life that would be over and done after only about 100 years. . . and has much less mass to distribute over the area covered.
I was trying to make FR readers laugh.
Epic Fail, apparently.
However, thank you for your concise essay on radioactivity, which was well written and quite interesting.
Since silicon and granite and most other crust materials melt well below 2,500 C, why doesn't the corium melt everything straight down to the Earth's mantle?