"Japan has decided to raise the severity level of the accident at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to the maximum 7 on an international scale, up from the current 5 and matching that of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, government sources said Tuesday.
The current provisional evaluation of 5 on the International Nuclear Event Scale by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, a body under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, is at the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in the United States in 1979.
The decision comes after the release of a preliminary calculation on Monday by the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan, which said the crippled nuclear plant was releasing up to 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive materials per hour at one point after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit northeastern Japan on March 11."(Kyodo News)
Did you pick that yellow highlight up? That's 10,000 trillion disintegrations per hour, or about 40 million times more radiation than given off by the average human body. (Radiation and Life)
The world is trying to ignore Fukushima, but it is going to affect every single one of us, economically at least, in the coming months and years.
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