The article doesn’t give enough information to tell:
That amount of radiation coming from a very small mass would be insignificant, coming from a very large one it would be terrible.
FWIW it sounds to me like it’s coming from a small mass, but with this information one can only guess.
The bigger leak they had last week was about 71,000 gallons of water a day, or about 1 very large swimming pool. Put into the ocean, you wouldn’t notice it. The Pacific ocean contains about 187,189,915,062,857,142,857 gallons of water.
The newer leak is smaller. It is highly radioactive though — at least highly relative to what a human should be subjected to over a year. Not “chernobyl” high.
The “good news” is that the government is taking over, and has a plan to stop the leaking and seal things up. They are going to freeze the ground under and around the plant, at a cost of about half a billion dollars. It’s a very innovative solution, since they don’t have to do a lot of construction, just install a large amount of chiller units — and that will also help them cool the plant.
But they have not published enough information yet to know really how this will work.
I’m waiting for someone to suggest we nuke the plant.