You and I both knew..along with very few others on this site...that this was much worse than people there and here would admit.
It doesn’t surprise me that people on this site are still claiming that it isn’t all that bad.
Meanwhile, they have finally admitted there has been a core meltdown, (won’t admit that there has been any full meltdown) that there are likely holes in the containment vessel, there are likely leaks...
No end in site
And it just keeps getting worse.
Reactor 4 is leaning.
But very few on this site will admit how bad this situation is.
There was an interesting story on FR from a man who listened to a guy from Russia talk about how they put radioactive things in construction materials..not realizing the harm they were doing. I can’t remember the exact story.
Radioactive materials will be in construction materials in Japan.
The whole "reactor 4 is leaning" story comes from a russian today story that showed a video that people watched and thought it looked like the reactor was leaning.
Dr Robert Jacobs and his colleagues at the Hiroshima Peace Institute observed what could fearfully prove to be the most serious crisis escalation since the March 11 catastrophe began. “This began for us as speculation, but on the web cam you can watch the four reactors. It began to get obvious that building Number Four was leaning to the right, just a little bit from the visual field of the webcam.”The "reactor building" is a huge concrete block set solidly in the ground. It's not a high-rise waiting to tip over. The top structure of the building on top of the main concrete building was blown out, but it wouldn't indicate that the base was tipping.
Of course, #4 isn't even running a nuclear reactor; the vessel is empty. The only concern there is keeping water in a pool; so even if the optical illusion of "leaning" were real, it would make no difference. It's not like a solid concrete block is going to tip over, any more than an island might tip over if you get too many people on one side.
I think reality is bad enough. You have a nuclear power plant where 4 of the 6 units have been destroyed, billions of dollars of investment lost. You have 3 units that had partial meltdowns of the core because they lost water coolant -- this was a fact known from the day it happened, not something that was kept secret.
There was major radiation releases on two units, also well-known at the time, which included hydrogen gas and led to exposions. There was the inexplicable at the time loss of water coolant in unit 4's spent pool leading to unexpected hydrogen release and explosion -- of course we've known about that since the explosion as well.
"isn't all that bad" is relative. I've got a public presentation from late march which has proven accurate in most of the problems that they are still dealing with -- once your fuel melts, the task of cooling and shutting down is going to take a long long time.
I don't know what your definition of "full meltdown" is, but it appears to be the kind of hyperbole that makes it harder to discuss the serious problems that DO exist, along with other hysterical claims like that all the fuel got blown out of the #3 pool, that they opened the double-doors on one reactor to implement a secret plan in the dead of night to flush all the radiation of the building, or the "reactor four is leaning (clearly meant to imply that it might fall over and spill out it's spent fuel pool -- otherwise who would care that it was leaning?).
This was a serious accident from the time they lost backup power. You can't really take people arguing against fanciful doomsday scenarios and accuse them of downplaying the real problems.
I completely agree with you that there is no end in sight, although in the real world the risk of new serious problems has dropped to the point that the news has moved on.
I’ve noticed that TEPCO tends to respond to queries with “We cannot deny ...” when it confirms a negative piece of news. So apparently, where information is lacking (either the public doesn’t have information or that TEPCO doesn’t have it), TEPCO states the most optimistic interpretation (’all is well’) because they CAN DENY the worse scenarios technically. By that I mean ‘Hey, you can’t prove otherwise so we are ALL going to proceed if all is well! Next question!”. I think we’ve seen some of that on FR as well over the past weeks.
Normally, if information is unavailable, the default position is not set on ‘optimism’ when developing plans to deal with disasters because baseless optimism can cause you to respond to little, too late, or flat out choose the worst possible course of action if the situation is not in fact as well as proposed. It seems like that is happening right about now - they planned water entombment and now have to ‘reexamine the roadmap for recovery’ because their optimistic plan may trigger a catastrophic explosion. Or most painfully - when the backup generators first went down the day of the tsunami - TEPCO could choose the most optimistic scenario (’we will defnitely be able to restore power without outside assistance) or the most cautious (notify foreign nations offering assistance that if we are unable to get power back up ourselves by 8 we will ask them to fly theirs in and we would need them here by 10 at the latest). TEPCO seems to have relied strictly on ‘best case scenario planning’ and there are those who post on FR and other websites often seem to reason the same way - unless proven otherwise, the best of all possible outcomes is in progress and any diversion from this party line is ‘fear mongering’.