As for all the nuclear talk... I'll be curious to find out what the actual situation is. The Japanese are, for obvious historical reasons, super-sensitive about anything radiation-related, so I imagine they're going to do their damnedest to contain all these reactors as well as they can. Not that they have much choice, of course: with such a high population density, real estate is always at a premium. Unusable real estate spells trouble.*
More important, of course, is the question of lives. I shudder to think of the actual death toll. Comparisons with the recent Christchurch, NZ quake are perhaps inevitable, and I'm already hearing that the Japan quake was 8000 times more powerful than the one that struck Christchurch. Japan's 1995 quake in Kobe killed over 5000 people; God knows how many people died this time around.
Digging the living out of the rubble and wreckage, making sure the reactors are safe-- I see these actions being spun into political issues when to me they're merely common sense. Of course the living have to be dug out, and of course the reactors need to be tended to. Imagine if the reactors were left untended and the atmosphere started carrying all that radioactivity away from Japan and over other countries. Anyone who criticizes concern about the reactors is seriously lacking in brain cells. This isn't about money or even electricity: it's about safety.
I've been in only one earthquake in my life, and it wasn't even a true earthquake: it was simply a mild tremor. I can't even begin to imagine what people in Christchurch or Japan or other quake-prone regions go through.
*I don't mean to sound crass, as if the issue were merely about property and money. I mean "real estate," in this instance, merely as a synonym for ideas like land and space.
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