And there would not have been an entire core that slid down into the Torus. Just a partial amount from the splash effect, that the NRC documented could occur, when a large scale core meltdown happens. All you need is enough corium to cause the reported explosion from down deep within the torus. That small amount of corium bore down through the bottom of the Torus and into the concrete catch. You do realize that Tepco has stated it is impossible to survey the bottom of the Torus. The only section that matters in this case.
And if you read the article I linked, the Torus has to have been breached to produce the amount of emissions that have been measured to have been emitted from #2.
So how many temperature sensors are currently working in #2 RPV ? Why are they failing ?
Probably because of radiation damage. I replaced some thermocouples in a reactor a few months ago that had drifted out of calibration range. We did a PIE and saw evidence of radiation embrittlement. Nothing terribly surprising. In this case it is not a dispositive indiccator of PV breach, although some time ago in a similar thread I acknowledged that the one Oak Ridge study identified the possibility of failure around the instrument tube penetrations. Those would be relatively small areas individually, but there are a fair number in total, so if enough were damaged you could have drippage of melted material out of the PV, but given the relatively low exposure rates reported it is unlikely there is much material in the drywell, if any. More likely is that we're still seeing the fission products from the initial venting operations. If there was significant leakage of core material into the drywell those readings would be a lot higher, just based on what I know uncovered fuel can produce in terms of dose rates, even shielded by the containment and drywell walls.
Look, all I'm saying is now we have hard evidence that a great deal of the FUD generated here and elsewhere in the early days of this event has been debunked. I know many will find that disappointing and hard to accept, but the evidence seems to be indicating that a lot of the FUD was just speculative hype, things like the torus blowing up (it didn't), that this would be "Chernobil on steroids" (it wasn't), that millions would die (no one has, not one person), that the Pacific Ocean would become lifeless (it hasn't), that the fission reactions continued long after shutdown (they didn't), that the SFP went dry and burned up (it didn't), that Japan would become a contaminated zone uninhabitable forever (it hasn't, and won't). IOW, the FUD has been debunked.