[TineSeign]

now i must ask - why cant they scram it? whats happened so they cant?

The reactor automatically scrammed itself when the quake happened, some type of Civilian/land based safety control Im not familiar with( I worked on Navy Reactors.)

The issue is Decay heat, the Fission reactions have "stopped" ( not all the way but for simplicity sake...) and now the daughter reactions, AKA Decay heat, are occuring. Its basically cooling down. Normally this is aided by the reactor coolant pumps untill its at "shutdown temps" but both the main and aux pumps went offline due to the quake. They are checking the brittle fracture curves and the engineering limits and allowing the core to cool on its own, if it doesnt cool enough they will go into Emergency cooling and/or Feed and Bleed.