Honestly, if the consequences weren't potentially so dire, the ongoing struggles to clean up the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in northern Japan would be the stuff of comedy. In March, an extended blackout disabled power to a vital cooling system for days. The cause: a rat that had apparently been chewing on cables in a switchboard. Another dead rat was found in the plant's electrical works just a few weeks ago, which led to another blackout. The dead rats were just the latest screwups in a series of screwups by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO). But it's not funny, not really, because the consequences of the meltdown and TEPCO's mismanagement are very real. The latest threat comes from nearby groundwater that is pouring into the damaged reactor buildings. Once the water reaches the reactor it becomes highly contaminated by radioactivity. TEPCO workers have to pump the water out of the reactor to avoid submerging the important cooling system. TEPCO can't simply dump the irradiated groundwater into the nearby sea ... so the company has been forced to jury-rig yet another temporary solution, building hundreds of tanks, each able to hold 112 Olympic-size pools worth of liquid, to hold the groundwater. So TEPCO finds itself in a race: Can its workers build enough tanks and clear enough nearby space to store the irradiated water - water that keeps pouring into the reactor at the rate of some 75 gal. a minute? More than two years after the tsunami, TEPCO is still racing against time - and just barely staying ahead.