Re: Underground
I'm still sort of skeptical about the validity of that rating, as that's a logarithmic measure-of-magnitude scale, and it just doesn't seem to qualify for some of the tickboxes...
I mean, it didn't send a plume of vapourised reactor contents floating several thousand miles across a large part of the northern hemisphere for one thing. The water pollution is actually fairly slight, and although it's been measured and tracked with ease, that's because radiation detectors are very sensitive devices on the whole. No-one on the site died during the initial incident, no-one received such large doses that they died within a matter of days if not hours, and they didn't have to immediately forcibly bus the entire local population out of the area for fear of them succumbing to radiation sickness before the year was out.
We saw this drama unfolding over a matter of days after all... no actual release of solid nuclear material or fuel occurred, only irradiated cooling water and maybe a few gaseous decay products. The evacuations are mainly on a just-in-case basis. All the melted fuel is solidified somewhere in the ground underneath the plant, so it doesn't need a janky concrete cube to be hastily thrown up around it.
The plant isn't even necessarily unsalvageable, though hopefully they won't be fool enough to try... (he says, having a funny feeling he saw a news story about the second reactor having been put back into service already).
Some byproducts did escape, some people have had significant but not immediately lethal or crippling exposure - the effects of which will take time to show - and there has been significant local disruption as a civil protection measure. But it's not on a "hundreds if not thousands of deaths and immediate ruin of an area the size of Greater London which might last for millennia" scale.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
