It's been almost 2½ years since the disaster at Fukushima No. 1 (Fukushima Daiichi) nuclear plant commenced, but the precarious condition of the nuclear plant remains a constant fixture in the news.

A sentence that has been reappearing in stories in recent months has been some variation of "the incident has brought the Fukushima plant's vulnerable state into sharp relief" (New York Times, July 18).

The problem is that "the incident" being referred to could be one of many: a rat causing a power outage, radioactive water leaking from storage tanks, steam being emitted from one of the reactors or, most recently, confirmation by Tokyo Electric Power Co. that contaminated water is escaping into the ocean.