I am playing with weakreferences inside the iterator objects, but this may not be enough. For example, take the code of ApplyResult.get:

def get(self, timeout=None):
    if self._pool() is None:
        raise RuntimeError("The pool is dead!") <--- new code
    self.wait(timeout)

It can be that the pool is alive when we check for it (self._pool() is None) but while the code is waiting with no timeout, the pool dies, effectively leaving the program deadlocked with no error.