Sorry, that is unfortunately incorrect. There was an earlier disaster, with the cover up of a massive sodium leak leading to a senior executive's suicide, back in Jan 1996.
This is a separate event, involving the plant manager in charge of the fuel section, a hard core engineer, in February of this year.

The Japanese have built and used a similar tool for removing fuel from their troubled Monju fast breeder reactor prototype. The latest glitch was that the tool fell into the reactor and got stuck. The senior engineer on the effort committed suicide after this.
The tool was retrieved last month, after much effort.
It would be a shame if the Brits ran into similar problems, so hopefully they are talking to the Japanese and getting some lessons learned.

The absence of control over the cross fertilization from GM plants is a legitimate issue that is thus far not adequately addressed.
People breeding pure strains that are inadvertently contaminated from adjacent GM plants may see their business destroyed with no recourse. This has happened in the case of some orange growers. It also is a concern for those seeking to market GM free vegetables that command market premiums.
Thus far, the proponents of GM plants have essentially had a free ride on this issue and no consequential damages have been paid. This is unjust, as it puts the burden of adjustment on the injured party, rather than on the originator of the damage. When the law acts thus unjustly, people will respond similarly.
I would not be happy either if someone moved a contamination source into my neighborhood and told me that adjusting to it was my problem.

This is an excellent idea.
Afaik, the USPS already has substantial money processing experience. The USPS money order is a wonderfully cheap and reliable way to send small sums anywhere in the country. Expanding that service seems a pretty logical next step.
Moreover, it would help improve civic morality. Not only does it seem much less glamorous to rob the post office rather than the bank, but additionally, the frustration of waiting in line to rob the attendant should drive most would be criminals back to the straight and narrow.

The degree of disfunction in this effort is beyond belief.
The accident was almost 2 months ago, admittedly in the context of a massive natural disaster.
Since then, nothing has happened except the barest minimum. There are a quarter of the workers on site as were there before the disaster, living in a bunker with no showers or decent meals, no hazard pay or adequate equipment. They are going in baby steps because there is not the people or the equipment to do more than one thing at a time. Not even the basic debris clearing has made much headway, less than 50 containers worth from a 1200x400 ft site.
The company is admonished from all sides, but not supported. When the CEO tried to fly back to his office from a remote site after the disaster by using a government plane, it was made to turn back after it had taken off, ensuring a more than 24 hour delay in the response.
This absence of effective national leadership continues, even though the radioactive vapors from the spent fuel pools have poisoned a large swath of central Japan.
At the present rate, the site will not even be free from radioactive flooding until next year, so the problems will fester at least until then. If anything breaks before then, the problem could easily get much worse. Perhaps there is need for a supranational nuclear emergency team setup and a corresponding code of conduct. Japan is certainly showing how not to do it.

It is indicative of the gravity of the situation that the Japanese have not accepted any of the offers of radiation hardened robots designed for nuclear incidents such as this.
The most logical explanation is that the situation is known to be impossible, so why accept foreign robots and the obligations that go with them just to be further embarrassed.
No work can be done in the facility until the radioactive lake in the plant, currently about 1300x80x20 ft is drained, which will not be until year end at best. After all, no one has swimming robots for nuclear cleanup.
So it is a waste of time to fulminate about the slow cleanup, because it is paced by the need to build holding tanks and a big radioactive water treatment facility, expected to start work by the end of May.

Is this not a very expensive way to solve a problem that could be addressed much more simply by just using a large flat mirror to capture the view that we want the telescope to look at?
We do know how to make very reflective large flat surfaces as well as how to point them accurately. The mirror can stay flat on the ground, only the flat reflector moves.
Seen that all the objects are at infinity, any distortions introduced by the reflection should be easy to eliminate.

If the tree rings "diverge unexpectedly from the actual temperatures" recently, how can there be any confidence that they did not do as much in the past? Consistency is lost here.