It is perhaps selfish to admit... I have been held in rapt attention by the failures at the Fukushima nuclear power plants. Or, more accurately, by the media coverage of the accidents at the Fukushima reactors.

Because, hey, it is all review to me. Fuel rods, control rods, zirconium casings, backup systems, decay products and decay heat... these are all old, pleasant memories from college classes. I see footage of reactor cores, and I immediately remember standing on top of that reactor core in Colorado, looking down at the rods and that beautiful, beautiful Cerenkov radiation glow.

Yeah, I know how reactors work. Once upon a time, I knew by memory all the possible decay schemes of all the reactor fuel elements.

And their daughters.

So it's been kinda fun to see all those schematics again, now in high tech displays. Listening to media alarm at reported radiation monitoring levels, knowing how minor they really were.

Although, I admit, I had to look up Sieverts. Had never heard of them in my day... it was all rads and rems back then.

But now that I know 1 Sv = 100 rem, I'm good to go again.

But today... when I read the latest fire at reactor 4 was not in the reactor, but in its cooling pond...

Ohhhh, shit.

This is serious trouble, people. As I quickly explained to the wife, losing control on your cooling pond is a whole lot worse than losing a reactor.

And lo and behold, not 10 minutes later, here's Rachel Maddow explaining to the nation why a fire in your cooling pond is a lot worse than a meltdown in your reactor.

Cool. Sort of, if it wasn't so, well, real.

And Rachel got two of the problems right.

First, there's no containment vessel around a cooling pond. So all the bad things that you worry about leaking out of a containment vessel with a reactor accident are instead right out there in the open environment.

Not good.

And yeah, like almost every operating reactor in the world, their cooling pond has more fuel rods in it than their reactor, 'cause hey, we've kinda forgotten the final step of the nuclear power system, which is treating/recycling your radioactive waste!

And thirdly, and this is the point that Rachel missed, spent fuel rods are a lot more dangerous than brand new, fresh ones.

Yeah, their uranium is depleted, so they're not quite so hot... but all that depleted uranium has been split into much more dangerous radioactive elements.

Like iodine, and cesium, which have been mentioned in the media. (Funny how no one brings up strontium yet, but give them time to notice it is in the mix, and biologically just as bad.)

Seriously, if you have a choice between a meltdown of brand new uranium fuel rods, or depleted, spent fuel rods...

Choose the brand new rods. Bad as uranium is, it is biologically not that dangerous. I mean, our military uses uranium bullets, for crying out loud. Uranium is, basically, dirt. Or, at least, biologically as inert as dirt. Eat some uranium and 99.99 percent of it will pass through and come out the other end.

But cesium? Iodine and strontium?

Ecosystems, and human bodies, suck up that stuff.

And hang on to it. In all the wrong places.

Craaaaap.