The world's attention span is short, and the mainstream news media have grown bored with the story of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. But for those with an interest, lots of alarming news can be found from over there. Today they're going to step up the dumping of water into the damaged spent fuel pool in reactor no. 4, to try to bring the temperature down. This, even though they're also afraid that the weight of all the water might cause the building, already badly damaged, to collapse. Even in the best case, the water will become quite radioactive, and let's face it, most or all of it is going to wind up in the ocean next to the plant. Despite excruciatingly misleading headlines like this one.

They're sending veterinarians in to euthanize the livestock in the evacuation zone. Meanwhile, outside the zone, the government's advising residents not to spend too much time in the public parks -- there's too much radiation there. The kids should wash their hands after playing. No kidding.

They're debating whether to harvest stem cells from the emergency workers now, to try to use the cells to save the workers' lives when they come down with radiation sickness.

A highly radioactive chunk of concrete was found on the ground outside reactor no. 3 -- a foot square and two inches thick, it was throwing off 900 millisieverts an hour of radiation. The maximum exposure for the emergency workers is 250 millisieverts, which that concrete chunk generates every 17 minutes. That's so radioactively hot that it's adding to the speculation that that particular reactor underwent more than a hydrogen explosion. Indeed, when you look at the photos of that wrecked hulk and think about how the reactor top was on a high floor, it's extremely hard to believe that the reactor vessel is still intact.

And they're admitting now that they've been understating how much radiation has been released from the plant, and that it will be at least four months before the releases stop, even under the most optimistic assumptions. Add to this the fact that the Japanese government has taken over information flow and switched into serious censorship mode, it's as scary a story as ever. Just not one that the media cares much about.