It's hard to know what the heck is really going at the triple meltdown site in Fukushima, Japan as it approaches the five-month mark since the earthquake-precipitated nuclear disaster. The Japanese government and Tokyo Electric, the private company that runs the plant, give out scandalously little information, and what does come out, comes out in Japanese, which often loses something in the translation into English.

But here's a report that the plant operator released yesterday that's got many observers' hair standing on end:

At 2:30 pm on August 1, as radiation level of surface of connection of emergency gas treatment system piping arrangement at the bottom of main exhaust stuck of unit 1 and 2 was detected over 10 Sv/h, keep the area out for restricted area with signature. We will consider countermeasure such as shilding.

The "exhaust stuck" they're talking about is the tall exhaust stack that Fukushima Daiichi reactors 1 and 2 share. You can see the tower pretty well at the top center of this photo, taken from the ocean. There's a more recent photo of the base of the stack here. They say they're measuring more than 10 sieverts an hour at that spot. Ten sieverts is a 100% fatal dose, and so if you stood there for an hour you'd be dead within weeks. Moreover, we're not told how much higher than 10 sieverts the radiation is -- some folks in the know are saying that the meters don't go up any higher than that. If the level is 40 sieverts an hour, you'd be dead if you stood there for 15 minutes.

You've got to wonder how long the photographer stood there taking that photo. And what the heck is going on inside that pipe to throw off that much radiation? Maybe the readings are mistaken, but something monumentally wrong continues to go on over there, day after depressing day.