First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima plant

yes

I assume the commenter was referring to ionizing radiation.

It took 10 years to even get a robot that could get close to the fuel... and people still ask if nuclear might not be as bad as coal!

The truth is that accidents like this can never be cleaned up or salvaged. It's time to move away from nuclear, as other countries have already figured out.

Fortunately for us in the US, the last nuclear plant under construction today will likely be cancelled, as the last two were. There are no plans to build another one here. That doesn't relieve of us of the chance of a homegrown Fukushima on American soil, but it shows that the future isn't nuclear for environmental and cost reasons -- of which "decommissioning" costs billions, even if there's no meltdown.

While I realize it was likely impractical to meltdown reactors just to develop the technology to clean them up, I find the process here pretty interesting. A lot of good engineering has gone into the effort, and the engineering challenges (and risks) of post runaway reactors has gotten a lot more data.

The Chernobyl folks just entombed everything, which is a one approach, even though they can "walk up to"[1] the remains of the nuclear fuel which they call the "elephant foot."

I also find it interesting that the "China Syndrome"[2] speculation is pretty much completely debunked. Molten/melted fuel diffuses into the material it is melting into until it loses criticality and then freezes where ever it is. All modern reactors have a borosilicate sand pile underneath the reactor. The boron acts as a neutron absorber (poison) which stops the chain reaction once the fuel has been glassified by the silicate.

[1] It is too radioactive for that to be literally true, but it is on a floor with direct access rather than being underwater and only accessible through cracks as the Fukishima fuel is.

[2] Speculation that a blob of melted core material would just keep melting into the ground until it "got to china" (which in fact would be interrupted by getting to the earths core).

[3] EDIT: Corrected for the effects of Boron on the reaction acting as a neutron poison (absorbs neutrons) rather than a moderator (which just bounces them around)

Not there yet. They got in far enough to touch it with a grabber. Didn't get a sample yet. Removing it for disposal is years away.