Singapore saw Cabbage with nine times the level recommended for international trade -Reuters

"As operators struggle to regain control of the damaged reactors three weeks after the quake and tsunami, smoke was reported to be coming from a second damaged nuclear plant: the Daini plant, several miles away from the Daiichi plant, on Wednesday, with authorities saying an electric distribution board powering a water pump was the problem." and thus no external radiation releases were expected. There were some problems at Daini at the beginning of the crisis, see earlier posts."


"the International Atomic Energy Agency said radiation measured at a village 40 km from the nuclear complex exceeded a criterion for evacuation."


TEPCO is consulting with specialists on waste disposal; the eternal question.


There are other issues: the reactors may be burning for years to come unless there is an ever cooling source, and thus how do we control the releases? How much of the releases will end up on the small land mass of Japan, it is about the size of California, and beyond? and how much will keep accumulating in the Pacific Ocean and in the atmosphere and where it will be deposited? With Chernobyl we have not yet even reached the half life of the Cs-137 deposited in 1986.


... "We are entering an uncharted territory" suggested Pierre Le Hir in Le Monde. Molten fuel is way hotter than the concrete's melting point  therefore we can expect the molten core, which has broken its way through the bottom of the vessel, to dig through concrete. Because the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is located on the ocean, the meltdown products will/are making there way through the concrete into the environment and into the Pacific Ocean.