Good post
Additional reasons why this is not Chernobyl ...
- outstanding construction; reactors built for a high-seismic zone
- withstood 8.9 magnitude quake, which exceeded design criteria
- explosion was most likely a steam explosion (radioactive steam) ... giving good reason to believe the primary containment structure is intact
When are we going to find out the truth and how much radiation is in the jet stream?
Please try to find Before It's Too Late: A Scientist's Case FOR Nuclear Energy by Bernard Cohen. You can get a used one from Amazon for a few dollars. This will put the risks of everything into perspective so you won't be tormenting yourself with images that have little basis in fact. You do know, don't you, that a typical coal-fired plant puts out as waste many tons of radioactive materials per year? And that even if one of the Japanese nuclear plants (light water reactors) completely blew up, it would be, compared to Chernobyl (a graphite core that could burn), like a kid taking a leak against the side of the garage of a house by a river compared to a dam breaking upstream, and that Chernobyl (see reference 4), despite the 31 early deaths of people working at the plant over the next four years, didn't result in a huge number or even a moderately large number of deaths in the surrounding countryside and that the major portion of deaths from Chernobyl was caused by moving people away, giving them a stipend, and their dying from alcoholism as a result or by unnecessary abortions?
Did you know that there are places throughout the world where people have lived for thousands of years that have levels of naturally-occurring radiation that are hundreds of times greater than you could ever receive from a popped nuclear electric plant in Japan (much less Chernobyl) without any statistically higher incidence of cancer? (See also CHERNOBYL: THE FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN by Z. Jawoworksi and "Observations on the Chernobyl Disaster and LNT?" Z. Jawoworski, Dose-Response, 2010, and Nuclear Weapons and Radiation: Miscellaneous Facts, John Moore (look for the part titled "Beneficial Radiation and Regulations."