The power is back on at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Reactor in northern Japan.  The power to the cooling system on three nuclear waste pools had shut down Monday evening.

A spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) says the temperature in the cooling pools never exceeded 30.5 degrees Celsius.  That’s well below the safety limit of 65 degrees Celsius.  It would have taken only 4 days without a functioning cooling system for the water to reach that temperature.

The pools store the so-called spent fuel for the nuclear reactors.  If the water had completely boiled away, the rods would have been exposed to the air and radiation would have been released.

The Fukushima Triple-Meltdown was two years ago this month, and many more years of work remain before the situation is fully contained.