1000 times higher than normal is still less than a TSA full-body scan. Don't get suckered-in by the hype.
Is that right? Interesting. To counter, the situation is far from under control, and deteriorating. <iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9oNEIj7EmNo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
You know, it just struck me how dangerous those TSA body scanners are. 1000 times above normal x 6 flights a year x 5 years. That's serious radiation exposure.
I read that the TSA body scanner gives you less radiation exposure than what you get during an average day walking around outside absorbing background radiation. However I still worry about them. I was going to choose to get the patdown instead last time I was at the airport but the line was moving so fast that I didn't want to create a slowdown by asking for the patdown.
Official reports are that the containment at Fukushima Daiichi #3 is intact after the hydrogen explosion and there is no immediate threat of large scale radiation release. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Explosion_rocks_third_Fukushima_reactor_1402111.html On the topic of dose, I believe that the accepted limit for emergency workers in this situation is 100 mSv which is about 40 times the annual natural background dose in a year. So far I've only seen one report of a worker who received >100 mSv.
Anybody obsessing about radiation dose can find a lot of information in position papers from the Health Physics Society here: http://hps.org/hpspublications/positionstatements.html
As the bits and pieces of info come in, the situation is starting to make more sense at Fukushima. I believe there were 6 reactors at that site. 3 were down for maintenance. The three in difficulty were running at or near full power when the Tsunami hit. For reference the cooling pumps at full power are around 36,000 horsepower per reactor, perhaps 2% of the reactor output power used for the pumps. The diesel generators ran for about an hour after the event before they failed. When the reactor is shut down, there is about 6% power produced by residual nuclear reactions in the fuel. This residual decays with a half life period. The reactor doesn't go to absolute 0 power production immediately. I seems this is the residual heat that has caused the problem. Thankfully the diesels ran for that hour. I believe reactor #3 (the Toshiba unit) at Fukushima in difficulty has mixed oxide fuel loaded. That is a mix of old weapons plutonium and uranium. Likely poses more of a contaminant problem if containment is breached. Colling the core with seawater as said, pretty much ends the service life of the reactor. I don't know where else we can get our energy from in the near term but from oil, coal and fission. This will likely start a worldwide political debate on fission when the dust settles...