NYT, tonite:
As the scale of Japan’s nuclear crisis begins to come to light, experts in Japan and the United States say the country is now facing a cascade of accumulating problems that suggest that radioactive releases of steam from the crippled plants could go on for weeks or even months.
The emergency flooding of two stricken reactors with seawater and the resulting steam releases are a desperate step intended to avoid a much bigger problem: a full meltdown of the nuclear cores in two reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.
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I've worked with large amounts of radioactive materials all my adult life. Positron emitters, hard and soft gamma emitters, hard and soft beta emitters, alpha emitters...everything. What's going on in Japan at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is a worse case scenario - an MOX-fueled BWR reactor/spent fuel storage facility damaged by a 9.0 earthquake. Over the next few days, it's going to get scary. Two secondary containment structures have been blown out by hydrogen-oxygen explosions, and gamma ray spectroscopy has confirmed the release of I-131 and Cs-137 into the immediate environment. Taken together, this suggests that partial core (fuel) melting has occurred in the damaged reactors. Last ditch core cooling procedures now involve flooding the reactor vessels with seawater spiked with borate salts (pumped in by firetrucks!) and venting radioactive steam to the environment when you hit critical overpressure. Not good.
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