Japan's battle for Fukushima is far from over, one month on

[jpak]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/12/japan-battle-fukushima-one-month

Radiation, aftershocks, fire, a tsunami evacuation, and hours and hours of difficult, dangerous labour trying to do what nobody in history has done before: prevent four doomed nuclear reactors from a catastrophic meltdown.

Today was a typically extraordinary day at work for the several hundred engineers, contract employees and emergency personnel at Tokyo Electric's Daiichi power plant, where standards of normality have shifted along with tectonic plates since a magnitude nine earthquake struck offshore just over a month ago.

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The prognosis remains uncertain. A confidential assessment by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, leaked to the New York Times, suggested the situation could yet spiral out of control because of pressure on containment structures and the vulnerabilities of the emergency cooling system.

But Japan's prime minister, Naoto Kan, insisted yesterday that things were moving in the right direction. "Compared with before, today's situation is improving step by step, or as I have just said, the release of radioactive particles is declining," Kan said. "But it has not yet reached the point where we can predict what will happen."

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[Zoeisright]

1. Right direction my ass.

The trouble has only just begun.