Break down on current status of Fukushima Daiichi reactors

Just after the 8 month mark (March 11 to November 11), the Asahi Shimbun reported an update on the status of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant reactors Units 1 to 4. Although radioactivity releases from Units 1, 2, and 3 still occur at the rate of 100 million becquerels per hour, this is a mere 1/8,000,000 the quantity that had escaped at the beginning of the catastrophe. Although each of the three melted down reactor cores' pressure vessels had cooled to below the boiling point of water by late September, the Japanese government acknowledged the need to bring the temperature of the molten nuclear fuel below the pressure vessels below boiling as well. Radioactively contaminated cooling water measured in the tens of tons continues to accumulate in each of the four destroyed units. Reactor Number 2 showed clear signs of ongoing, inadvertent nuclear criticality in its molten core. Decommissioning is estimated to take at least three decades.