Well, the inundation buff was definitely a mistake...
I do feel sorry for them... I heard a nuclear power plant is melting down too...
Good news and Bad news.
Bad news:
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has a scale to measure the seriousness of nuclear accidents, running from 1 to 7. Chernobyl was a 7, while Three Mile Island was a 5. After the damage to the torus and the spent-fuel fire, Fukushima was raised to a 6, making it the second-worst accident in history.
Good news:
A 6 on the IAEA scale means that some of the workers experienced dangerous levels of radiation but the public did not.
The IAEA's ranking of the Fukushima accident seems perfectly accurate. Public exposure was nowhere near the level of Chernobyl, a unique event at a facility for which the Soviets had not ever bothered to build a containment structure. (All the world's reactors, including those in Russia, now have them.) But Fukushima surpassed Three Mile Island, where neither the public nor plant workers ever experienced seriously dangerous levels of radiation exposure.
Mixed news:
The regulatory process in the United States moves so slowly that it will be years before any new reactors are built. Take, for example, the Westinghouse AP1000, a Generation III reactor designed to overcome precisely the design flaw behind the troubles at Fukushima: the need for cooling pumps. Engineers realized in the 1990s that the need for electrical power in the face of a cataclysmic event was a critical vulnerability, so they designed new reactors with passive circulatory systems that rely on natural convection to keep water moving. General Electric's Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor has the same design. But after seven years of review, it has not yet received design approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, much less an operational go-ahead, even though four are already under construction in China.
Source:http://www.powergenworldwide.com/index/display/wire-news-display/1381576054.html
