More nukes now! More nukes now!

If you didn't believe it before, here is an analysis showing how the Fukushima nuclear plants have actually held up quite well. Key bits:

In fact, though the quake was far beyond design limits, all the reactors went into automatic shutdown perfectly: triumph number one. Control rods slammed into the cores, absorbing the neutrons spitting from the fuel rods and pinching off the uranium-fission chain reactions powering the plant.

(...)

Backup cooling driven by diesels came on at all the plants without trouble, despite the way-beyond-spec hit from the quake: triumph number two.

For a few hours all was well. Then the tsunami – again, bigger than the plant had been built to cope with – struck, knocking out the diesel backups and the backup diesel backups.

Needless to say, this being a nuclear powerplant, there was another backup and this one worked despite having been through a beyond-spec quake and the tsunami. Battery power cut in and the cores continued to be cooled, giving the plant operators some hours of leeway to bring in mobile generators: triumph number three.

(...)

But proper nuclear reactors are designed so that you can't get water breakup to hydrogen and oxygen inside the containment vessel, only outside it: triumph number four for the Japanese plants' designers. Thus the hydrogen explosions which subsequently took place, though visually spectacular, did nothing more than blow the roofs off the reactor buildings – the containment vessels and their systems remain unbreached and under command from the relevant control rooms. The risk of explosion was known and notified in advance: it was accepted by the plant operators and regulators in return for the very slight reduction in radiation exposure close to the reactor buildings.

All reactors' temperature is now under control and the residual heat reactions inside them continue to die away; soon, no further cooling will be required. The three worst affected will cost more to put right than the other ones, having been cooled with the backup-backup seawater system and lost their roofs, but the process of sorting them out will not be a lot more onerous than a normal periodic refuelling. All the other affected reactors have achieved quite normal shutdowns, though nuclear safety being nuclear safety it will be some time before they can be fired up again.

Radiation health effects have been pretty much zero. At times there have been heightened radiation levels inside the plants from short-life isotopes in the steam releases – sometimes enough that an unprotected person next to a reactor building might have sustained a year's normal dose from background radiation in an hour. This is not particularly terrifying, really – nobody is scared at the prospect of living another year on planet Earth – but it is being reported under scaremongering headlines. Another thing the weekend reporters have missed was the fact that all but tiny traces of the airborne radionuclides (from the salt in the seawater coolant) were disappearing before they could even cross the street; there is essentially no health hazard to people living nearby. Precautionary evacuations and tests were just that: precautionary.

(Stuff highlighted in bold is my emphasis.)

Read the whole thing, and marvel at the perversity of the MSM who have pretty much gotten this entire story wrong.