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.
TEPCO is now admitting what I suspected was happening all along.
CORIUM...radioactive lava...
And they are also admitting there are holes in Reactor 1 and likely Reactor 2 and 3 have similar situations.
Whatever TEPCO admits..you can assume it isn’t the whole truth.
Meanwhile, Japan is censoring the media.
Reactor 4 looks like is is leaning to me..but perhaps not.
http://www.houseoffoust.com/fukushima/r4sinking.html
It doesn’t matter.
You have got radioactive lava..and holes..and I suspect..that that lava is going to breach the containments.
Time will tell.
So far, I have been right. It is far worse than they were letting on..It just takes awhile for the info to get out.
http://criticality.org/2011/05/whistleblower-shutdown-17-nuclear-reactors/
Corruption at it’s finest...
“But in August 1989 things changed for Sugaoka, during an inspection of one of the reactors in Fukushima he noticed a structural misplacement in one of the reactors and severe damaging in one of the steam dryers. For his surprise when reporting the anomalies to the people in Tepco he is told by them to cover up the damage and erase all the evidence he recorded, including forging video footage. He even reports Tepco’s irregular demands to his superior at GE, but they turn a deaf ear and order him to do as the Japanese requested him to do.”