Well...The term China Syndrome is slightly overstated....most people in the know say the liquefied core would melt through the metal and concrete container and bottom out at about thirty feet. It seems that for all the hand ringing about nuclear disasters that as disasters go this one is not near the Apocalypse one of these things was suppose to have been!!!
Remember Y2K? Remember how it was supposed to be the end of modern civilization?
Those of us who actually wrote code for Big Computer Systems were laughing our asses off about the panic.
I don’t believe that any bona-fide nuke operators or objective physics jocks are laughing here, but they’re not running around in circles, yelling “Repent, the end is near!” either.
Cleaning up this mess will be a long, slow, expensive slog... but it will get done.
And the death toll still stands at about: The nuke plant? Three (from physical deaths due to the disaster, not “atomic” deaths), and over 20K from the tsunami.
The hysterics continue to point a quavering finger at the reactors... while ignoring a pile of bodies the size of a pretty good sized town causes by the flooding. I fail to understand the illogic of this, to this day.