The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan has raised the crisis level at the Fukushima Daiichi plant to level 7, which has only been applied to the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. Previously, Fukushima's ongoing crisis had been designated level 5—on par with the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. "This is an admission by the Japanese government that the amount of radiation released into the environment has reached a new order of magnitude," Tetsuo Iguchi, a quantum engineering professor at Nagoya University told the Times. “The fact that we have now confirmed the world’s second-ever level 7 accident will have huge consequences for the global nuclear industry. It shows that current safety standards are woefully inadequate." But some analysts cautioned that the new crisis level isn't as alarming as it seems.
The change has not been made because things have suddenly got worse at the Fukushima plant," explains the BBC's Rachel Harvey. "Rather, a full assessment of the available data now suggests that a higher rating is justified... In Chernobyl it was the reactor core itself that exploded, releasing a huge amount of radioactive material in a very short space of time. Fukushima experienced a less critical hydrogen explosion. The initial radiation leak amounted to about a 10th of that which escaped from Chernobyl. The major concern in Japan is that the nuclear plant has not yet been brought under control, and some radioactive material is still seeping out."
Seiji Shiroya, a commissioner and the former director of the Research Reactor Institute at Kyoto University, suggested to the Times "that by alluding to the possibility that amounts of radiation released from Fukushima Daiichi could approach or even surpass that to Chernobyl, Tokyo Electric was likely touching on the extremely unlikely possibility that all of the radioactive inventory at the Fukushima plant might be released into the environment." Although workers have been unable to stabilize the plant, San Diego State University Professor Murray Jennex tells the Post, "It's nowhere near [Chernobyl]. Chernobyl was terrible—it blew and they had no containment. Their [Japan's] containment has been holding. The only thing that hasn't is the fuel pool that caught fire." Oh, that's all.
At least 630,000 terabecquerels of radiation have been released from the plant, and at its worst, tens of thousands of terabecquerels were being released per hour. (At the same time, officials cautioned that the release from Chernobyl was 5.2 million terabecquerels.) The radiation level at Fukushima has dropped, but it's unclear what the current radiation level is. Yesterday another earthquake and a fire temporarily forced work to stop at the plant, and the Japanese government is urging more residents around the plant to evacuate.
