Also per Rand Simberg and others, it appears that Space X is going to launch their 54-ton capable heavy launch vehicle THIS year - thats something like 6 years ahead of NASA's porkbarrel SLS.

Lets cross our fingers and hope that Elon's engine of creative destruction will blow up the market for government directed launch vehicle technology, and start using the Billions allocated for 1960s rocket technology for something like permanent cis-Lunar habitation, asteroid visits, and/or experimenting with off-planet manufacturing so we can start learning how to build and stay beyond LEO.

From human perception, there is no difference between these statements, and that's the problem addressed. The fact that something is statistically likely to "someone" (i.e.: not you) does not make something "probable" for you, which is included in the SA summary of the book.

Same information, but the visual aspect of the animated GIF is somehow much more accessible. One more data point on how the human brain is so poorly adapted to statistical inference as compared to our natural abilities with visual information like "is that tiger going to eat me", or "can I make it across the gap between this tree and that tree when I jump".

When the core is "shut-down" to prevent accidental thermal runaway (aka meltdown, or "china-syndrome") the system still contains a rather significant amount of heat for quite a while due to the secondary radioactive products, but this heat is not nearly enough to drive the normal steam turbine dynamos which generate the utility load - it takes a rather large amount of torque to generate megawatts of electric current. Until the heat is removed and the reactor core, fuel rods, and associated secondary decay radio-nucleotides reach a lower level, something needs to provide the power for the cooling pumps, and to ensure that the trapped hydrogen gas (byproduct of fission) is recycled and contained. There are various schemes to create "fail-proof" nuclear reactors, one of which happened to be the Chernobyl design (and we all know how well that one worked). It was supposedly "impossible!" for Cherynobyl to melt down because of the built-in systems, and the smart, but not smart-enough, engineers wanted to test those "fail-proof" systems...