If the press stops reporting on something is it still a disaster?

Whilst the focus of the world media has moved onto it's newest shiny bauble in the shape of Osama Bin Laden's hidden porn stash, things are still going horribly pear-shaped in Japan and it's crippled nuclear powerplant at Fukushima.

TEPCO finally admitted last week what just about everbody on the planet had suspected all along, when they announced that there had been a meltdown in their number one reactor. Not a 'minor' one, or a 'slight' one, but a full-on 'holy shit' meltdown. Apparently the fuel rods were fully exposed and all of the water that they've been pumping into the core to try and keep it cool had simply been flowing through the molten mess of what was left of the fuel rods, and through the holes in the floor of the containment vessel and then escaping into the basement underneath. There is no word on where the highly radioactive water has been going from there, although 'directly into the sea' is a bloody good guess.

Whilst you try and wrap your head around how bad that all is, don't forget that TEPCO also announced at the same time they finally came clean about that little nugget of truth, that they actually knew that they were in deep, deep shit only 16 hours after the earthquake. In other words they knew they were headed full-tilt into a meltdown in at least ONE of their reactors and they lied about it.

Now comes the news that reactors 2 and 3 are having similar "difficulties", including the suspicion that both vessels have been breached by melted fuel rods just like number one, and that they are abandoning plans to try and cool number one entirely because the water is just leaking out.

So, in a nutshell, there are three nuclear reactors on the east coast of Japan that are in various stages of full-on meltdown, the company in charge of the power plant has basically admitted that they have been lying their asses off from the start, and no-one has a plan in place to stop the meltdowns from speeding up. Brilliant!

Oh, and I almost forgot the best part, there was a pool that contained hundreds of spent fuel rods, and remember, those are the really toxic buggers, and TEPCO hasn't been talking about them very much, if at all, which makes me very, VERY worried for the people within 100 miles of that place...

But by all means lets not allow that to get in the way of the truly important international topic de jour...whether Osama Bin Killed had any lezzie porn on his 'putey...