It's headlines like this that keep me checking back throughout the day: "TEPCO searching for 'missing' radioactive water." And the lede is even worse.

The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is trying to locate thousands of tons of radioactive water that has leaked from one of the damaged reactors.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, says contaminated water is apparently leaking from the No.1 reactor, which is in a state of meltdown.

The scariest part of all this is how matter-of-fact it's become... that journalists can just toss off phrases like "meltdown" as if they're describing ice cream rather than nuclear fuel rods.

So the situation, as best as I can tell from various news reports, is that TEPCO now believes that the fuel rods totally melted down and dropped to the bottom of the reactor, likely during the first few days of the disaster. Also, most of the water they pump into the reactor appears to be leaking from the bottom—you know, where the melted fuel supposedly is—into, well, they're not really sure where. Which should raise the obvious question: How do they know the melted fuel is still in the reactor?

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they don't.