Masataka Shimizu apologized again Wednesday. He’s he president of Tokyo Electric Power Company which was the business at the heart of Japan's nuclear crisis. The apology was said a day after the situation there was designated a Chernobyl-level nuclear accident. He and the government are working to create a plan to privide short-term compensation to the anyone affected by the accidents. Prime Minister Naoto Kan said he wants Tokyo Electric Power Company, to produce a timetable for bringing the disaster to an end. Japan declared the Fukushima Daiichi crisis a Level 7 on Tuesday, putting it on par with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union. The reason it is so high up is because of the massive release of radioactivity especially in the first couple of days. Scientists hope the amount of radiation released is only a tenth of what was released at Chernobyl. But the levels for radioactive iodine and cesium all around the plant are in the thousands of trillions of bequerels -- 15 times higher than the threshold for a top-scale event, according to figures released by the safety agency Tuesday morning. This all started on March 11, an earthquake and tsunami that devastated northern Japan. The tsunami knocked out the plant's cooling systems, leaving operators with no way to keep the three operational reactors from overheating after they shut down. So they started pumping water onto the reactors to cool them down, but now that water is highly contaminated. Aftershocks have made this even more complicated. I don’t really want to be incredibly angry because I know that they are trying to contain the situation, but was there no back-up plan? We are dealing with incredibly dangerous and deadly chemicals, so shouldn’t there be like 5 worst case scenario plans. They didn’t really commit a crime except for maybe negligence. But even then you look at BP and you can’t really compare.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/04/13/japan.nuclear.reactors/index.html?hpt=T2
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