It’s always been /worse/. And it just keeps staying tragically the same. It’s remained a global crisis with hemispheric deadly consequences. Japan could still wind up largely uninhabitable (if it isn’t already). Canada could suffer directly a great deal.
Steam and non-water vapour has been off-gassed since the beginning.
The supporters of nuclear power have always been wrong about the extent of the damage to our environment. We have hundreds of tons of highly dangerous waste water piling up by the day at Fukushima, with no way to stop it. Can research and a better plan come soon enough to save us?
ADDED: May writes to ministers.
Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff 
You neglected to mention that the #4 reactor still has over 1,000 new and spent fuel rods on top of it and the current method of cooling the remains of the reactor are pooling large quantities of water that is contaminated under the reactor.
No one has any freaking clue as to where the melted down core has gone. However the lackwits in the government have admitted that the entire complex of six (6) nuclear reactors was build over a known underground lake called an aquifer. Which may now have not one but three (3) melted down cores from three separate reactors dropping into it. No one knows.
The #4 reactor has dropped over 2 and one-half feet since the first drop of 3 feet at the time of the earthquake.
The incompetent lying sons of bitches that work for TEPCO are going to try to remove the fuel rods, that are 100 feet in the air, from the top of the #4 reactor, since it may topple over or get hit with another earthquake. They are going to try to move the rods one at a freaking time by hand. One rod drops, there will be an atomic explosion as the other rods go to critical mass instantly.
No one has ever done this before and the incompetents are going to try it. They cannot even build tanks, that do not leak, to hold the contaminated water that they are recovering from the cooling water keeping the fuel rods from going nuclear explosion. They are going to try to recover the rods?
This is not a Japanese crisis this is a world wide crisis that demands that every stinking penny that needs to be spent to save the world from having six (6) nuclear reactors and their fuel rods from going off like firecrackers be spent.
Instead I am treated to kabuki theater as the top clowns in Washington, DC and London, England try to convince me that I should give a good goddamn about freaking Syria and forget about Snowden.
If we are going to kill people, let them die trying to save the world from the incompetent assholes running the world and disassembling every one of the stinking nuclear reactors in the world.
Fukushima is the only problem that matters. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else. We don’t have to worry about climate catastrophe if those 6 reactors go up.
There will be a nuclear winter.
I’m scooping CNN.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/27/world/asia/japan-fukushima-leak-warning/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
If the fuel rods touch, I’d guess there would be a radiation release that would force them to figure out a new #4 plan.
There isn’t any danger of the melted cores in the other three reactors from melting to the water table; they are cool enough now. A problem is to keep the radiation in solid or liquid media, away from the air of cities like Tokyo.
Right now they have groundwater problems that are forcing them to let highly radioactive water leaching into the ocean, and that will increase cancer rates for coast cities of the world, and seafood eaters, whether or not this is publicly admitted.
And it is hard to learn from your mistake of not building more reactors if everything is classified (for often good security reasons). I Think they should be pumping some water in reservoirs further inland rather than diluting it in the ocean, and really getting aggressive with ditch digging.
…not sure if it is great, but it is looking good now: I wanted them to put the water in railcar tankers and transport it away from the site, to an inert underground cask. This would make the route and new site, polluted at least a bit with radiation, but now everything is leaking and if the Reactor 1-4 decommissioning encounters pitfalls, the dilute radioactive water might be fenced off from humans.
It is like the way Fraser Valley deals with their homeless. Burnaby and the Asians in West Van won’t let shelters be built. The the herd immunity from crazy people other cities have is lost. If you are stuck living in hard drug accessible DT Vancouver, it is unliveable and it turns into a pandemic of mental illness. I think the Prairie work ethic and cold (forced socialization in winter) keeps us sane, albeit drunk.
…another reason (the #1 would be to keep the problems isolated from eachother) for locating the storage site away from the reactor is, is that reactors are generally built near a site with lots of water suitable for cooling. If you think about it, radioactive waste when thought about, it thought to best be stored in places like Nevada (inert, dry, secure). By definition a coastal plant isn’t dry nor secure. If you pump the leaked water, the stuff that is eeping to shore at 4m/month, a few km upstream, you pollute more area and you are upstream of already constructed dykes…it all depends on how bad sea releases are. I think the rise in global cancer medical bills would be enough to justify creating infiltration basins upstream, to buy time to work out the bugs in radiation filter systems.
(re: the Fukushima ice wall plan)
The bottom of the frozen pillar might erode the bedrock a bit.
This structure around the Four Reactors seeks to hydrologically isolate the Reactors. Won’t prolonged deulges pose a problem? If there is enough rain, the rain will flood the now-without-outlet, Reactors. The rainwater will mix with the highly radioactive water and make a high volume of water that is radioactive. It should be possible to enact drainage ditch bypasses or rapid surface pumping to keep the rainwater separate from the radioactive water; to pump it outside the Reactor Complex before it seeps down into the radioactive water’s level. However, merely contacting the surface on site will transfer some radiation to the fallen rainwater. There is a small danger this will drown the Reactor Complexes. One crude way of solving this is steam or hotwater drills right through the ice. I’m sure there are more elegant solutions if this is a problem.
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http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/07/fukushima-disaster-radiation-detected-off-canadas-coast