“Officials weigh burying facility:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Japan+rushes+cool+reactor/4452975/story.html";
When they mention sarcophagus,
You know they’re serious!
.....And on the level of Chernoybl.
I don’t think burial will prove to be a viable option. Too much earthquake risk. Concrete is too brittle.
Although if you read the article, they aren’t weighing “doing it”, so much as they are discussing how that would be one possibility for the future that they cannot rule out yet.
Even the title is less suggestive than “weigh burying”; the title of the article is “Japan weighs NEED to bury nuclear facility”.
Right now, it appears the only substantively uncontained nuclear material is the spent fuel rods which are not normally contained when first removed (they are put in water to cool down, and then later moved to another pond to cool down, and then encased in dry storage).
Simply encasing those isn’t a good idea, because they will just keep heating up and break containment — that’s why they go through the cooling process with water.
If not damaged, they can be moved around, so they could be dropped into a new holding tank built somewhere else on site if necessary. But if they are damaged, I would guess the radiation would be too high to remove them from water to move them.