
"El Reg used to have a reputation"
1/ Exactly how many people have ever died from plutonium poisoning? A: 0 zip, nada none.
2/ I and many others doubt they will bury any reactors, that would just be kicking the rock down the road for someone else to deal with, the Japanese aren't very well known for this characteristic.
The plants will be cooled, decon'd and then scrapped out, they will prep the site for new Mark3 reactors and get back to generating. (Plant #1 was due to be shutdown permanently, 3 days ago any way), Add to that these units have had hot seawater in them, they are now junk anyway.
3/ Maybe you can explain to the class how a molten anything submerged in water can drip from air into a full vessel of water? Which would be needed to cause a steam explosion you try to make sound scary. Leave out the fact that the reactors are now at or below 100c and pressured up to 70 atmosphere, and unit 4 reactor which has no fuel in it whatsoever is of zero concern.
4/ That's just plain BS. NONE of the radiation detected in the sea or on the land poses any threat to humans it is not a problem. What is a problem is millions of acres of previously productive farmland is going to have to be scraped off for 1-3 feet in depth due to seawater contamination (read stuff won't grow in it) and re top soiled with millions of tons of good soil, peat and fertilizers to bring it back.
5/ There are many folks looking at the aftermath and economic situation, they are the ones not running around like headless chickens, squawking about nonexistent meltdown calamities.
The result of the quake and tsunami and the shutdown power infrastructure are having a major impact on other economies, this is a result of concentrating too much of your manufacturing base in on place. We should be making those products in our own countries, but unfortunately we have let the squeaky wheel get too much grease and allowed the litigators, unions and runaway government regulation drive the manufacturing companies to a friendlier place to do business, ie. They bugged out so they could make a legally required profit, without pricing themselves out of business.