A writer on this highly informative bulletin board about the meltdown at Fukushima in Japan sums up the current situation pretty well:

three reactors with probably completely melted cores, all fuel pools hot, some probably damaged, some filled with debris, corium creeping around and probably eating its way through various levels and pipes, the building structures are cracked, damaged terribly and leaking like fish nets, the water table looks to be in jeopardy, there's leakage into the ocean, there are periodic smokes that disperse radioactivity hither and yon, and nobody seems to really know what to do about it. Oh, and they're not being careful of their workers, to say nothing of the people of Japan or the international community.

And the drama will continue for many years. Agriculture for hundreds of miles around the plant has been gravely wounded, tourism to the country is in the tank, a large "dead" zone will remain for generations (including the coastal waters), beaches will soon be closed to, and shunned by, vacationers, the country faces a permanent energy crisis, earthquakes continue to roll in several times a day, and there's no telling how much more radioactivity will be spilled and belched by the meltdown.

The claims that "it's not as bad as Chernobyl," foolish to begin with, will seem downright quaint in a few years' time.