Back when the Fukushima event was unfolding, we coordinated a group effort to figure out what was happening as best we could from the sparse video evidence that was available. Certainly there were the dramatic videos of the hydrogen explosion of Reactor #1, and then the far more exothermic and dramatic explosion of Reactor #3. Whatever happened to #3, it was not a hydrogen explosion as claimed at the time by TEPCO.
Along the way we also uncovered some pretty compelling evidence that Reactors #1 and #2 had melted down, and we were certain that #3 had suffered the same fate. At the time, though, the official pronouncements were still that meltdowns had not happened — and then 'partial' meltdowns were admitted, and every step of the way, quite confusingly low temperature readings, allegedly from the vessel cores, were being released.
We accepted none of that as fact, as neither the official statements nor the data comported with what we could see with our own eyes on the video evidence, nor from other tangential evidence, such as the US military preparing for full-scale evacuation of the island.
At the time, we urged our Japanese readers as far south as Tokyo to consider leaving, because if what we were seeing was true, and the winds were to shift, then potentially dangerous levels of radiation could have drifted over Tokyo with no means in place to safely evacuate the city.
Now, a bit more than a year later, it turns out that our scouting was right, and that our early decision to heavily discount the information coming from TEPCO and the Japanese government has been validated:
Videos Shed Light on Chaos at Fukushima as a Nuclear Crisis Unfolded
Aug 8, 2012
Though incomplete, the footage from a concrete bunker at the plant confirms what many had long suspected: that the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant’s operator, knew from the early hours of the crisis that multiple meltdowns were likely despite its repeated attempts in the weeks that followed to deny such a probability.
by rje 
