Letter to CBS news:
Your headline writer has made a serious factual error of major significance.
"Somber prime minister addresses nation, says country on "maximum alert" following discovery of toxic plutonium pools"
Fact: There are no pools of plutonium. There are traces detected in soil samples at a level around that found after atmospheric tests (the last one being in China in 1980). The ratio of radio-nucleotides suggests they came from the reactor.
TEPCO's press release, accompanied with the actual data, can be found here: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11032812-e.html
This is almost certainly the original source of the information in the article itself; I doubt if the information has been made available independently of TEPCO.
Nobody, not even the very article on which this headline appears, has said anything about pools of plutonium. Yet reader comments demonstrate that people are believing the headline, rather than the article.
The analysis of the pools of water do NOT show plutonium, so there can be no excuse that this is shorthand for "plutonium-contaminated pools of water". The article itself indicates it was found in soil samples.
The truth is serious enough. This is something I might expect from Fox News -- not from the network of Walter Cronkite.
This is a seriously inflammatory and false headline, and urgently needs to be retracted with a public apology.
I first reported this via the comments section about 18 hours ago. Let's see how long it takes them to publish a retraction.
[Update: Updated the link to the article, since it seems to have changed.]
