[JERRY2KONE]

Everything to do with nuclear power generation has a shelf life so to speak. Plutonium/uranium once put into reactive mode will generate heat for a certain amount of time. That length of time will depend on the demands placed on it throughout its useful life. Even after the rods are no longer useful for generating heat for steam power systems they still have a reactive state for many many years, and are quite capable of generating significant amounts of heat. these rods can create enough heat to be a problem for a very very long time. The spent rods now in these storage ponds around the world will last longer than you or I will live on this Earth.

So in a sense yes they will cool down, but not in our lifetime. Reading up on Nuclear energy can be quite interesting and informitive. One of the major problems with using nuclear fuel is that our civilization does know how to get rid of the spent fuel rods. They are piling up very quickly and are being stored in storage ponds much like the one at this reactor site, which is now one of the serious concerns for leakage into the soil and seawater there. So no they will not just coold down on there own where we will not have to worry about them. How long ago was the Chernobyl disaster, and that meltdown is still pumping out contamination. That is why there is a huge dead zone around the area(10 sq miles or something like that). This problem in Japan has to be dealt with by man now, one way or another. There is no easy out in this situation, and we cannot just ignore it either or the damage will spread into a mcuh larger area.