Well, a lot of what you've said is misleading, but the mainstream media is saying the same thing.
The buildings aren't exploding, and they withstood the earthquake and tsunami.
But the ancillary equipment like standby generators, power switching fabric, all the stuff that would make the water circulation pumps go after the emergency batteries run out - not so resilient.
Most of the radiation leakage seems to come from the venting of pressure, essential to give the pumps a chance of being able to pump in cooling water. Especially if the normal pumps designed for this are out of action because of loss of power or tsunami damage to ancillary equipment buildings.

On a forum I saw someone post that they were optimistic because of their faith in Japanese design and engineering. Oh dear, the BWR is a GE design, and pretty old too.

Ah and please, the Richter scale is used mainly by journalists (you can't expect them to know any better) and the moment magnitude scale is used by seismologists for large earthquakes.


Good sources include:
http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N13/yost.html
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/f ... planation/
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/14/j ... r-updates/
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/14/f ... ical-info/
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/15/f ... h-summary/
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/16/f ... h-summary/
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/section.aspx?fid=802
http://mitnse.com/

Ah, I should have said "an explosion inside one of the buildings," that would have been clearer. But yeah, I'd been getting most of my info from the media, which is probably not the best source in this type of situation, as Drew illustrated so well when he provided the link to the bravenewclimate March 16th summary in the news thread early this morning. :)

The Wikipedia link I provided in the news about containment systems does mention though that although gas venting is an intentional part of the upgrade to the Mark I containment systems, it's *supposed* to go through a scrubbing process that greatly reduces the radioactivity of the released gas--so it sounds like something there might not have gone quite as well as intended.

At least I didn't buy into the multiple press reports I saw saying the containment system had actually been breached. >_<

I was *wondering* why "Richter" wasn't mentioned in the articles I was seeing! (So to be fair to the reporters, that was my error, not theirs.) None of the reporters seemed to bother to mention the moment magnitude scale, so thank you very much for mentioning it! I'll miss that name though, it just sounds nice.

Ooh, that MIT second page is a nice one for silly people like me. Thanks for all the info. :)