Actually they did have explosions at most of the reactors....mostly just hydrogen explosions which uncovered spent fuel rods. New evidence is suggesting there has been breaches of the containment vessels, but no explosions of the containment vessels themselves. The situation for Japan is nowhere near as bad as it was for the USSR when Chernobyl occurred. That situation was WAAAAY worse and even this Japanese nuclear accident doesn't hold a candle to Chernobyl. Likewise, all the americans keep citing the Three Mile Island "disaster". 8-| "Disaster".....AKA slight steam leak that turned out to be next to nothing.
What happened at Chernobyl was truely tragic and you could make a strong case that it's the worst environmental accident.....nuclear or not.....in modern history. Unfortunately the USSR kept a lot of that on the books and never accurately released the severity of that incident and death toll. A new sarcophagus is currently being funded and built to be placed over the current sarcophagus. Chernobyl and Pripyat will sadly never be inhabitable again by our standards. You can take a tour of the site and I plan to once I move to Europe, but as far as long term exposure, hot spots, and the inability to safely ingest food/water long term it's uninhabitable. Plutonium has a radioactive half life that might as well be considered eternal. Off the top of my head, I believe it's somewhere around 250,000 years.......for the plutonium mass from reactor 4 at Chernobyl to decay........250,000 years...for HALF to no longer be radioactive......another 250,000 years for it to be at 25%.......another 250,000 to be at 1/8 and so on and so on. What's even scarier about Chernobyl is that it COULD HAVE been MUCH MUCH MUCH more worse if melting rods from the first explosion have made it to the water table below.....many thanks to the Soviet liquidators(most of which are dead or suffering from radiation) which filled more concrete below the melting reactor core. Estimates range between a 3-5 megaton explosion....a sizeable comparison to many large thermonuclear(hydrogen) bombs(larger than any bomb in current US arsenal[B83=1.3MT]) and the equivalent of 200 times the force of the nuclear force dropped on Hiroshima......already more than any location has ever fathomed before(outside of testing AKA Tsar Bomba), but what is even more devastating is it would of been bar none....the dirtiest and most radioactive rich explosion in history and carried some fun guys like Cesium 137, Uranium, Iodine, and Plutonium 238-239, and so on. Conservative estimates have Europe as no long existing as an inhabitable location and 110 million dead.........but hey...that's no big deal.
As far as Japan, hard saying the severity of it as of now. Nowhere near Chernobyl bad, but if you are in the US, it's insignificant. If you are thinking "Well what's insignificant" mean? It's probably no more significant than you walking outside tomorrow and they are just reporting foreign radioactive isotopes that have a short half life and are in insignificant doses.
On that note, radioactive power is the most dangerous power on planet earth. I personally see no reason why you can't go with alternative sources of energy especially in the economic free for all on this energy crisis. It's also safer to do away with nuclear energy altogether. Whether it be nuclear plants or nuclear weapons they have turned out to be some of the most ill fated inventions known to man. Not saying all radioactivity is bad....x-rays, isotopic testing for cardiac patients, and certain forms of chemotherapy.............but it only takes one accident or one thing to be unaccounted for to make an area an uninhabitable dead zone for hundreds of thousands of years and quite frankly have legitimately eternal effects when that radiation reaches your DNA, alters it, and you reproduce as a species(if you are able to).
LMAO....I was gonna say the same thing.....
