Fukushima: How Bad Is It, And How Bad Will It Become?

The typography alone
should have been a clue

This bad... and not getting any better. In fact, according to this interview with Christina Consolo, "founder and host of Nuked Radio," 1300 spent fuel rods must be extracted in an absolutely error-free manual process, or any one mistake in handling a rod could result in its going critical, triggering a cascading failure, an "above-ground meltdown, releasing radioactive fallout with no way to stop it." Given the danger, one might be inclined not to attempt the high-risk manual process... but doing nothing has consequences statistically just as risky over time.

Remember the 1957 Disney show "Our Friend the Atom," with its glowing (ahem) claims of "power too cheap to meter"? Right. How about "power no one will live to meter"?

The problem with nuclear power is that it requires only one catastrophic failure... ever... to wreak havoc in the very worst way, and all odds aside, we've had that catastrophe at Fukushima. Hold your breath... no, that won't do any good, either...

UPDATE: thanks to ellroon, who did a much better job excerpting the original ZNet interview than I did.