people often become very irrational when potential dangers are presented. we are not perfect to tackle a myriad of dangerous crises. we often make big and small mistakes. we do have limits of our patience and rationality. we are human beings after all.

we can always hope that bad thing would never happen.

We can always hope that people will remain somewhat rational and not panic when bad things happen. Because even though there are few certainties in this life, one of the things that is certain, like death, is that bad things will always happen. At least in Japan people have remained mostly rational and not panicked, a testament to what a great society it is. Pity that so many people from other countries not affected at all and under no circumstances will be affected at all from the disaster here have not shown the same good sense as the Japanese.

I totally agree. And to me It's sickening.
Thankfully though, this is becoming more and more obvious, to more and more people everyday.

----


I hope everything will work out for the best, I know it will.

Can't thank you guys enough, you natives and you foreigners
in japan, for bringing us perspective on what is actually going on.

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." (and television) Thomas Jefferson

Awesome quote.

Never mind, research told me that Aichi Toyota ish South, so it wasn't affected much...

level
 

Japan raises accident severity level to 5 in nuclear crisis

TOKYO, March 19, Kyodo

Japan raised the severity level of crisis-hit reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant from 4 to 5 on an international scale of 7, 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 on 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 are continuing, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.

While efforts to cool down the overheating reactors and spent fuel continued a week after the plant was crippled by a massive earthquake and tsunami, Tokyo also reiterated its resolve to do everything to control the situation as International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano made an emergency visit to Tokyo.

Kyodo News

again sorta not
 

Dude, maybe in America, americans are purchasing potassium iodide pills because there are nuclear powerplants located in the United States?

In the United States, 23 reactors at 16 locations use the Mark 1 design , including the Oyster Creek plant in central New Jersey, the Dresden plant near Chicago and the Monticello plant near Minneapolis.

The United States produces more nuclear energy than any other nation. It has 104 nuclear plants, many of them old, many prone to endless leaks and kindred malfunctions, all of them dangerous.

Mark 1 design
 

The same GE design :

What if the claim of the International Atomic Energy Agency that the a expected death toll from the Chernobyl accident will be 4,000 was wrong. What if the IAEA underestimated , to the extreme, the casualties of Chernobyl.
just-released publication of a book, the most comprehensive study ever made, on the impacts of the Chernobyl disaster.

New York Academy of Sciences documents. And Chernobyl:

Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, authored by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, Dr. Vassily Nesterenko and Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, finds that medical records between 1986, the year of the accident, and 2004 reflect 985,000 deaths as a result of the radioactivity released. Most of the deaths were in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, but others were spread through the many other countries the radiation from Chernobyl struck.

Makes a good read.