Nuclear meltdown derived from a 1967 report by a group of nuclear physicists, headed by W. K. Ergen. In the event, Lapp’s hypothetical nuclear accident was cinematically adapted as "The China Syndrome" (1979). Nuclear meltdown A nuclear meltdown (core melt accident or partial core melt) is a severe nuclear reactor accident that results in core damage from overheating. The term "nuclear meltdown" is not officially defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency or by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. However, it has been defined to mean the accidental melting of the core of a nuclear reactor, and is in common usage a reference
Nuclear meltdown was replaced by better-based newer studies, and now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has disavowed them all and is preparing the overarching State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analyses <nowiki>[SOARCA]</nowiki> study - see the Disclaimer in NUREG-1150.) It has not been determined to what extent a molten mass can melt through a structure (although that was tested in the Loss-of-Fluid-Test Reactor described in Test Area North's fact sheet). The Three Mile Island accident provided some real-life experience, with an actual molten core within an actual structure; the molten corium failed to melt through the Reactor Pressure Vessel after over six hours of exposure, due