Last year, the Japanese government ordered the nuclear authorities to conduct tests on all Japan's reactors after the 11 March meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi raised questions about the safety of nuclear power, particularly in a country prone to earthquakes and tsunami.

Earlier this week, a team of experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] began a review of the safety tests but said it was up to the Japanese government whether or not to approve the restart of idle reactors.

Currently only three of Japan's 54 reactors – just over 6% of its total nuclear capacity – are in operation after the Fukushima accident forced the closure of active reactors for safety checks.

Japan may announce on December 16 that tsunami-damaged nuclear reactors in Fukushima are in a cold shutdown, the Yomiuri newspaper reported on Friday, an important milestone in its plan to bring under control the worst nuclear accident in 25 years.

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Declaring a cold shutdown will have repercussions well beyond the plant as it is one of the criteria the government has said must be met before it begins allowing 80,000 residents evacuated from within a 20 km (12 mile) radius of the plant to return home.

A considerable amount of the melted fuel is thought to have penetrated the reactor's pressure vessel and fallen to the bottom of the containment vessel, which includes the pressure vessel, TEPCO said.

If it is assumed that all of the fuel at the No. 1 reactor fell to the containment vessel, this could have eroded the vessel's 100-centimeter-thick concrete bottom by 65 centimeters, it said. But the fuel would not penetrate the containment vessel, it added.

At the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors where cooling continued for a certain period of time, about 60 pct of fuel is estimated to have melted. If all of the melted fuel is assumed to have fallen to the reactors' containment vessels, their bottoms could have been eroded by at the most 12 centimeters and 20 centimeters, respectively.

According to a report this week by the International Energy Agency, which isn't an especially alarmist body, the chances grow every day that the world will warm by more than 2C (4F), which scientists estimate is the limit beyond which change becomes chaotic and unknowable, and much more dangerous. To stay within that limit, the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere mustn't exceed 450ppm (parts per million). Its present level is 390ppm and last year, despite recession, more carbon dioxide from fossil fuels poured into the atmosphere than ever before. The world goes on gobbling up oil, coal and gas in increasing amounts and will continue to build power stations and steel mills that depend on their energy. "Fossil fuel lock-in" is the term, meaning an ongoing commitment to coal and oil that will be impossible to undo until long after 2020, which, according to climate science, is when carbon emissions need to start their decline.

Tepco said that the Daiichi reactors were emitting about 200 million becquerels of radiation per hour as of mid-September, about one four-millionths of the amount seen in the days after the March 11 disaster. It said this translates to about 0.4 millisievert per year of radiation measured at the fringes of the plant, below the 1 millisievert legal limit. [...] Temperatures at all four of its spent fuel pools had fallen to levels considered stable by August. As of Tuesday temperatures at all the spent fuel pools were below 40 degrees.

Japan's nuclear safety agency today rejected a claim in British newspaper The Independent that the earthquake itself, not the subsequent tsunami, destroyed cooling systems leading to meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. [...] An IAEA spokesman said that a report from the mission – led by Mike Weightman the UK's chief inspector of nuclear installations – contains detailed accounts of the failure of cooling systems in the early hours of the disaster which challenge the idea that the quake caused the damage, as claimed in The Independent. Meanwhile, TEPCO said on Wednesday that overall radiation released from the three damaged Fukushima reactors is now a 10-millionth of peak levels recorded on 15 March, just after the accident.

What really happened at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant to cause a meltdown? TEPCO and the government of Japan have provided many explanations. They don't make sense. The one thing they haven't provided is the truth. It's time that they did.

ふくいちライブカメラ: A live webcam overlooking the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

So, let’s suppose the whole of Japan was covered in caesium-137 to give everybody a dose similar to the helicopter crews flying over the Chernobyl reactor core. Let’s further suppose that there was subsequently a tripling of leukemia rates throughout the whole of Japan.

What are we up to? I’ve postulated a ridiculous worst case scenario over a ridiculously large area causing a rate of leukemia way above anything actually measured. The result would be that leukemia would rise to about 13 cases per 100,000 people per year. This is about half the rate of bowel cancer increase that has afflicted the country as a result of shifting from their traditional diet to one with more red and processed meat. It’s about a third of the male rate of bowel cancer.

This article has an idiotic title and, like so many other reports on Fukushima lately, contains a hefty dose of alarmist bullshit, but it also brings up a very valid issue: that of Tepco trying to escape its responsibility and generally pinch pennies by using subcontractors instead of employees, both in its cleanup efforts and in its daily operations.

Job offers come not from TEPCO but from Mizukami Kogyo, a company whose business is construction and cleaning maintenance. The description indicates only that the work is at a nuclear plant in Fukushima prefecture. The job is specified as three hours per day at an hourly wage of 10,000 yen (about US$122). There is no information about danger, only the suggestion to ask the employer for further details on food, lodging, transportation and insurance.

Those who answer these offers may have little awareness of the dangers and they are likely to have few other job opportunities.