Japan raises accident severity level to 5 in nuke crisis
TOKYO, March 18, Kyodo
Japan raised the severity level of crisis-hit reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to 5 on a 7-level international scale, the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in the United States in 1979, Japan’s nuclear safety agency said Friday.
The provisional evaluation stands at level 5 of the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale for the plant’s No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 reactors as their cores are believed to have partially melted and radiation leaks continue, the government’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.
Whereas many experts outside of Japan have been saying, for obvious reasons, that it is certainly higher on the scale than TMI. This doesn’t help the credibility of Japan’s nuclear safety agency.
Denial not being just a river in Egypt. This disaster in Japan blew by TMI more than a week ago.
How many reactors are melting down? Calls for international assistance should have gone out the minute they realized that they could not get the cooling systems to operate.
It would not surprise me if the death toll from this accident does not approach the thousands by the time all is said and done.