FUKUSHIMA, Japan – Japan suspended operations to prevent a stricken nuclear plant from melting down Wednesday after a surge in radiation made it too dangerous for workers to remain at the facility.

I guess we just wait!
Let me see where did I put my Margaret Attwood books?
"we have met the enemy, and he is us"...Pogo
I wonder if I can get "On the Beach" from Netflix?

If it has come time to give up on getting the reactors under control, perhaps they should start work on entombing the them.

Pondering the worst case scenario, I read that it will be safe to farm within 20 miles of the Chernobyl site in 200 years, and safe for habitation in 20,000 years. If that happens at Fukushima then then it will be like a very valuable piece of Japan has just been deleted.

I wonder if a ship could drag the reactor vessels into the ocean. Of course that does nothing of course that does nothing about the fuel stored in containment pools.

I loved "On the Beach" but I get "Waltzing Matilda" playing in my head any time I think about that flick.

Helicopters. That's what I was thinking, to ask: Where are the hovering-model 'predator drones' that are built configured for hazard-site work?

With tool arms like the deep-sea diving robots have. There should be application-specific ground-crawling robots that can go into lethal atmosphere situations, with grippers and seeing-eyes and pry bars and cutting torches or saws-all tools, etc. Like the bomb-disposal robots and the Moon buggies or Mars rovers and the X-ray chambers at the airport.

Standard computer industry practice is to build test equipment before or besides building the computer-controlled product. So maybe the nuclear industry advance should be frozen in-place until it has equipment for dealing with catastrophic failures and remoted operation.

Here's maybe a prototype of a 'hover robot' idea: video Hexacopter.

It's all a matter of priorities -- military applications of technology is NOT first priority for development. Humankind facility IS.

What about robots?

If they can put a man on the moon, they should be able to march a team of radio-controlled robots in there to take care of business in a flash, or as Elvis used to say: TCB(lightning bolt)

Provide for humankind.

As opposed to, say, this:

KS GOP State Rep. Compares Undocumented Immigrants To Pigs, Suggests Shooting Them From Helicopters, By Ben Armbruster, Think Progress.ORG, Mar 14th, 2011.

... GOP state Rep. Virgil Peck ... said Monday it might be a good idea to control illegal immigration the way the feral hog population has been controlled — with hunters shooting from helicopters.