"Fuel Rods Most Likely Melt[ed] COMPLETELY at Reactors 1, 2 AND 3 in the Early Hours of the Crisis, Raising the Danger of More Catastrophic Releases"

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is pulling the plug on continuous monitoring of the Japanese nuclear crisis because:

The conditions at the Japanese reactors are slowly stabilizing.

I hope they are stabilizing. But as I noted last month:

The Japanese government and Tepco claim that the nuclear reactors are "stable" and that radiation releases have subsided to low levels.

But world renowned physicist Michio Kaku - who studied under atom bomb developer Edward Teller - told Democracy Now today:

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The situation is not stable at all. So, you’re looking at basically a ticking time bomb. It appears stable, but the slightest disturbance—a secondary earthquake, a pipe break, evacuation of the crew at Fukushima—could set off a full-scale meltdown at three nuclear power stations, far beyond what we saw at Chernobyl.

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When the utility says that things are stable, it’s only stable in the sense that you’re dangling from a cliff hanging by your fingernails. And as the time goes by, each fingernail starts to crack. That’s the situation now.

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TEPCO is like the little Dutch boy. All of a sudden we have cracks in the dike. You put a finger here, you put a finger there. And all of a sudden, new leaks start to occur, and they’re overwhelmed.

The New York Times summarizes the real situation in a single sentence:

Tokyo Electric in recent days has acknowledged that damage at the plant was worse than previously thought, with fuel rods most likely melting completely at Reactors 1, 2 and 3 in the early hours of the crisis, raising the danger of more catastrophic releases of radioactive materials.