Good luck, Kirr! I was wondering before if something may have happened to you, glad you're ok ...

They had some other power generators(diesel I bet), which failed..

It gets so many facts wrong.
Like calling control rods "moderator rods"^[1], or describing them as only being used to stop the reaction completely^[2], or implying that the uranium is what's dangerous if released, rather than the way way nastier ¹³⁷Cs (a strong gamma emitter) for example. Or this one:

The half-lives of ¹³¹I and ¹³⁷Cs are 8 days and 30 years, respectively, and the uranium decay hasn't stopped - the uranium fissioning has been stopped.

Pretty saddened by this. Having increased my contact with Japanese culture in the last years (still haven't traveled there, but now I am founder and editor of a fansubbing group), this was a terrible shock, as many of our cappers/translators are in Japan (including one who was actually in Sendai when this all happened).

And now the nuclear problems. It is an absolute tragedy.

They are not as bad as TN claims them to be actually, it's a testament of Japanese building skills that the nuclear plant survived a quake that was 7 times stronger than it was designed for. In any case, I share the feeling though, I hope that they can find some of the missing people!

Keep it like that !
Hope you'll overcome that with not that much problems, Good luck man !

I wasn't even aware of the quake until I saw the news. In Osaka, we got shaken up a little, but nothing major. Even then, I was out of the city at the time.

I'm more than a little concerned, as I have friends in the affected area.

They pumped sea water either into the reactor vessel or the containment (it's not clear yet). Either way that's pretty bad, because that's basically the last resort when you have nothing else left to remove the residual heat from the reactor. It also means those reactors won't be running ever again. Not much will go into the environment though, that's nonsense exaggerated by the media...

By the way, those explosions are nothing to be worried about really...

Better because of the cooling meassures taken than by a meltdown. If I'm not mistaken meltdown of the reactor fuel can threaten the integrity of the vessel itself, am I right? (Correct me if I'm wrong, please).

Aha, nice summaries. I've been following TEPCO's press releases instead.

True, but take into account that the power plant's design is very old by today's standards since it is a Mark I reactor (in fact, reactor I was scheduled to be retired soon) and at the time BWRs required active cooling. Supposedly newer designs have passive cooling which would eliminate / mitigate these kinds of problems (not sure if there are any in operation though).

I think that something we should be able to agree upon is that we shouldn't build nuclear power plants so close to a sea shore susceptible to tsunamis.

Eh, now it works, but very slowly.

The reason you build plants close to the sea is so you can run the last heat exchange on seawater in an open cycle, and thus don't have to build large, expensive cooling towers.

Partial melting of the fuel rods.