otherwise very nice description! Rachel rocks.

The unfunny thing about this is that all I can think of are the tons of 50’s-60’s Japanese nuclear disaster monster movies coming true with stock photos of millions running away in terror.

Quite frankly, at this point I think we’re screwed. If there is now too much radiation around the facilities at Daichi to allow workers to operate the equipment then there’s no way they’ll be able to get the spent fuel pools stabilized. Dropping water from helicopters is simply not going to cut it. The fire hose idea was a joke.

Without a huge amount of cooling water circulating in the spent fuel pool the fuel rods are going to continue to heat up and burn and melt. And every minute that passes without stabilization makes the situation more difficult to handle as the area around the pools becomes more and more contaminated.

So we are looking at a situation that is likely to continue to spew out radioactive particulates for *weeks*, if not *months*.

Mike.

One mistake in Rachel’s video: at 7m she talks about the containment buildings being ‘busted open’. What you can see in the pictures are not containment buildings.