The guy was speaking sense. The reactor part is as he described, the primary containment has failed and there has been a partial meltdown in the core but radio active release to wider enviroment is pretty minimal. being in business doesn’t mean you get a labotomy! Can say that about any proffession.
The issue is the way spent low activity nuclear material is stored, which is by the reactor. especially with 4 which has more material in it. Spent fuel needs a coolign water flow. The tank can last 4 days (which it has) before enough water boils off. The tank is about 40ft x 40ft x 40ft of water ! However the material in there is releasing abotu 2MW of heat. Reactor 4 beign decommisioned is more than this. At full loads those reactors are 800MW each so this is a comparitively little amount of radiation / power.
the situation is a dangerous spiral now where so much water is gone that its hard to pore more in due to radiation it needs 50 tons of water an hour as far as i understand. this will lead to the material melting and merging together releasing a lot fo local radiation. the damage to the wider enivorment is way less than chernobyl as there are less radioactive particales.
latest photes show the top where the pools have been is almost completely gone, also far more explosion damage has occured since monday.
Even with all of this the radiation is localised. The reactors will need to entombed but other than that around the site should be perfectly safe. They will probably run tours in the future. The situation is dangerous locally the site will recieve massive amounts of radiation but there is no mechanism for taking that radiation somewhere elese at the moment so its pretty limited as a disaster.
(im not a nuke engineer either so as always pinch of salt).