Good News Out of Japan

I sure hope this is credible. I've become so disillusioned with "official" statements that I don't believe anything made public. But maybe, just maybe, this is true and it means that the corner has been turned.

From the NY Times:

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Friday that roughly 70 percent of the core of one reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan had suffered severe damage.

His assessment of the damage to Reactor No. 1 was the most specific yet from an American official on how close the plant came to a full meltdown after it was hit by a severe earthquake and massive tsunami on March 11.

Japanese officials have spoken of “partial meltdown” at some of the stricken reactors. But they have been less than specific, especially on the question of how close No. 1 — the most badly damaged reactor — came to a full meltdown.

Mr. Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, suggested that the worst moments of the crisis appeared to be receding, saying that the best information the United States had received from the Japanese authorities indicated that water was once again covering the cores of the stricken reactors and that pools of spent fuel atop the reactor buildings were “now under control.”

In addition to the severe damage at Reactor No. 1, the Energy Department said that Reactor No. 2 had suffered a 33 percent meltdown. Mr. Chu cautioned that the figures were “more of a calculation” because radiation levels inside the plant had been too high for workers to get inside, and sensors were unreliable.

...

Questioned about the long-term effects of Japan’s effort to “feed and bleed” the reactors — pouring in cooling water, then releasing it as steam into the atmosphere — he said there was an effort now under way to “minimize the release” of radioactivity into the air.

“They’re trying to reach a steady state,” he said, in which cooling could take place with minimal radioactive releases into the atmosphere.

Apparently it will take over a year for the reactor cores to cool enough to fully "decomission" the reactors. But hopefully things get less worse from here on out.