I do not know if this plant has a sloping zircon shield.

IF we found the Fukashima plant designs we would among oursleves know more than what CNN is telling us.

We would know more about the fuel pellets, shielding etc.



joeseph, How is fission being allowed to occur...?

We may not know exactly however if the fuel did not have time to get covered since the earthquake and the tsunami were only about 5 minutes apart, then it is clearly possible that a hot reactor left in such an in between state would suffer runaway heat.