Adding hype to tragedy...

Look, I'm not a nuclear engineer... I'm a casino hack with a news addiction... but even I understand that a "light-water" nuclear power plant like the one all over the news in Japan can't explode into a huge mushroom cloud and spread nuclear material across the planet.

The plant is much the same as Three Mile Island here in PA, and like that now-storied facility, even if the ability of the engineers to cool the core is hampered or stopped completely, the reactor itself is contained in a building that will not allow material to escape. Once the temperature in the reactor goes UP, the reaction STOPS... thus, the need for increasing coolant is negated.

Continued reference to the Chernobyl is both inaccurate and unhelpful... mostly because the Chernobyl plant was built without a containment unit, meaning that when the reactor over-heated and melted down, it was immediately exposed to the open air and massive amounts of material were allowed to escape into the atmosphere. In the months following the Chernobyl disaster, the Russians were forced to pour millions of tons of concrete over the reactor in an attempt to build a containment unit after the fact. This is not something that can happen in Japan... the reactor is already contained in a several-meter-thick concrete shell that can be sealed, allowing only pressure release and coolant application to get the temperatures to functional levels.

Now, I'm not saying that this sort of disaster isn't going to destroy the reactor and possibly the plant itself... that is entirely possible, as we saw at Three Mile Island... but we are not looking at a disaster anywhere near as devastating or impacting as Chernobyl.

Is it really necessary to add hype to a tragedy of this magnitude?