They're going to need a bigger scale.

I agree Allan L, but when I looked up color scales on the Google machine, that pink color is already at the very top for dangerousness so another color will have to be found as well.
More evidence of poor planning on the part of the nukle heads.

Jack thanks for the link to the Arnie Gunderson explanation.

What is silly is that they are still talking about cooling the rods. They lost their rods on day three. They say that it could be months until they have this under control, yet they have no plan for getting the situation under control. At this point the only plan they have is to spray water on the mess, which produces contaminated water and steam, which either drains into the ground, or drifts with the wind, or they collect it, and then dump it into the ocean. Meanwhile everything is getting more contaminated at the site. Soon they will no longer be able to approach the area. A realistic timeline, given their current progress, is that it will be cleaned up in something like 30,000 years.

Since they are dealing with 24 times the amount of fuel that they had at Chernobyl, it seems like that might create too much heat to simply seal it in a tomb and leave it like they are trying to do at Chernobyl.

Thought you would like this. ;)

This scale has such a wide interpretation as to severely distort what's happening. The definition of INES-7 is "Major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures" according to the link you provided.

That describes both Chernobyl and Fukishima, but doesn't speak to the scale.

Does this mean that Fukishima is the new Chernobyl? No. As bad as Fukishima is, and it is pretty bad, it has only released 10% of what Chernobyl did, and what's been released is relatively short-lived stuff that will be gone within our lifetimes. Chernobyl did it's release of as much radioactive fallout as a 50kt bomb (twice what Nagasaki experienced in 1945) in 10 minutes; Fukishima has taken a month.

Chernobyl raised the background count of the entire planet by 300%. Fukishima is nowhere near that bad, yet.

Here's another article concerning the raising to Level 7 in Japan:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13048916

it has only released 10% of what
Chernobyl did, and what's been released is relatively short-lived stuff
that will be gone within our lifetimes.

Bulls**t. Besides the sizable airborne release, which continue, Fukushima has dumped all manner of radioactive crap in the ocean, and there's months, if not years, more of that to come.

Besides, Tokyo Electric doesn't have fully functional monitoring equipment and wouldn't tell you the truth if it could get away with it.

Cesium and strontium have a half-life of 30 years. Unless you're planning to live to 120, it won't be anywhere near gone.

The strontium release has been regarded as incredibly minute, and contained within the site of the plant. I'll concede the Cesium.

However, the scale between the two events is so far apart that this rating really doesn't say anything other than that contamination has left the power plant, which everyone with two working brain cells already knew.

Do we need a more exact rating system for nuclear plant melt down? Is this going to become a common occurrence?