Nuclear history has a -lot- of emphasis on shapes - because the amount of radioactive activity in an amount of a radioisotope depends very strongly on the shape it's in. Facilities that handle radioactive material, if they're doing things right, store the stuff in shapes that are long and thin and as far from spherical as possible - and often have to work out how to do that in plumbing, since some of these materials are handled in, say, liquid forms.

-Fascinating- stuff.

>a puddle of red-hot crap - The technical name for this
>substance is, I kid you not, corium. It's like the nuclear
>equivalent of fordite, only much
>worse.

One of the folks on Nuke Twitter that I follow used to do calculations for the behavior of corium. In Fortran. Within the past few years.

I guess if it keeps working...