NHK has run two days of specials and interviews about the disaster. Yesterday they showed the timeline to clean up the reactors. It was 40 years, as I recall. Something like that. They also showed a map of the counties around the reactor and the clean-up status. Essentially, none have been cleaned up, and no one has any idea how to clean them up. Even when they clean up one spot, they go to a culvert nearby and find radiation off the scale.
They do expect to get the intact fuel rods out by the end of this year. That is an important step. They have "no idea" how they will removed the melt-down debris. That was quite difficult and time consuming at Three Mile Island. At least they have the expertise from that operation to draw upon. It was called "rubbleized reactor debris." At school playgrounds hundreds of kilometers away they now have billboard-style red light displays of the radiation readings like this: http://uhohjapan2.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/minamisoma-monitor.jpg The fact is, those towns will have to be abandoned for the next hundred years or more, like Chernobyl. There will be no recovery. That photo comes from this blog: http://uhohjapan2.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/day-353-coming-up-on-the-anniversary-the-summaries-begin/ Quoting this one: http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2012/02/schools-reopen-in-former-evacuation.html It says: "This monitoring and display device was made by Fuji Electric. Alpha Tsushin (telecom), the company who was initially contracted by the government to build and install radiation monitoring and display devices throughout Fukushima Prefecture, was suddenly dropped from the contract in November last year because the reading of their device was “inaccurate” – meaning it was 'too high' for the government." - Jed
