Japan Syndrome

I was thinking that the worst thing that would happen
would be a melt down that would stay in containment, but
this guy says it could be worse:

If workers are unable to get additional cooling water into the reactor vessel, the molten fuel core will collapse into the water in bottom of the vessel. Eventually the heat from the decaying fuel would boil away the water that's left, leaving the core sitting on the vessel's lower head made of steel.

Should that happen, "It'll melt through it like butter," Allen said.

That, in turn, would cause a "high-pressure melt injection" into the water-filled concrete cavity below the reactor. Because the concrete would likely be unheated, the reaction created by the sudden injection of the reactor's ultra-hot content would be immense, he said.

"It'll be like somebody dropped a bomb, and there'll be a big cloud of very, very radioactive material above the ground," Allen said, noting that it would contain uranium and plutonium, as well as the fission products.

I'll say it now: GAH!

That sounds uncomfortably close to what was described in the China
Syndrome.

Tsunami and nukes

Here we only have Fox and Cnn international and
neither one ever says anything new, they keep talking
about the nukes, when even the worst case exposures would
be a few REM. I've worked with logging sources, and over
about one year I got around 600 mREM, to no negative effect
(twitch twitch). When they mention a dose of 400 uSieverts,
that is a pissant's fart worth of radiation.
[edited after I had a cup of coffee, i meant dose, not rate]

What they seem to be missing is the rest of coastal northern Japan
has been nearly wiped out, the nytimes has an article about
several small towns that were hit by 60' waves. I don't see
how the death toll can't be less then 30 or 40k. Hopefully
no one in the government or the navy is watching Fox, they
need to move ships and helicopters to the more remote towns
where they can do some good.

I would bet the only real danger would be to the 50 guys who
have to go in and fight the fires and keep the plant cool. I
hope they are rotating them enough that no one gets more than
several REMs, and not doing the chernobyl technique of sending in
50 men to die.