Radioactivity detected 60 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant

Journalists should be taught a few things about the current design of nuclear reactors. In the case of a complete melt-down, the radioactive material still can't melt through the steel containment vessel. It's designed explicitly to prevent such a catastrophe. Even 3-Mile Island, which had half it's reactive material melt, only made it through less than an inch of the containment steel.<p>So no, the article is very wrong in this point. In the event of a full melt-down, they'll have another completely useless reactor (pumping sea-water to cool it will require a new containment vessel due to corrosion anyway). It's hard enough keeping people informed of how safe nuclear power actually is without journalists constantly spreading FUD.

And as others have pointed out, if you get a "full meltdown" with the control rods fully inserted, the resulting uranium/boron alloy is not critical.<p>In short hand, once the rods are in, its game over, just a question of how hard the final result is to clean up.<p>If you keep it under the melting point of the core you can just pull the fuel and dispose of it in the normal way, if not you have to clean out the non-critical slag core.