Like Chernobyl, they and we were actually "lucky", because it was mostly just the gaseous secondary products, not the reactor metals
There's high risk of the STILL MOLTEN runaway cores in two maybe three reactors, and the spent fuel pools, blowing up
technically it should be nearly impossible to have a true nuclear dentation, as to make a bomb is incredibly difficult, takes precise compression and neutron release
but we've never had this kind of mess...still should be extremely low
but doesn't matter, when you have hundreds or thousands of tons of white hot metal, it can cause a steam explosion with the force of a small nuke, several kilotons
that will burst the reactor metals and all other materials, throwing it miles into the air as dust, and kill everyone downwind for hundreds of miles
NOT death by cancer etc year slater, but death within a few weeks or days, very ghastly death.
and unlike these mostly short lives gases foorm original event, the core materials will be deadly forever as far as Human Beings are concerned. It will wipe out much of Japan short of a miracle and even then it will probably kill all the way to Hawaii and maybe the West Coast..
see, they lie to us
Chernobyl and this mess have had prompt criticalities, chain reactions that fizzled (as said making a true runaway chain reaction is extremely hard)
so the cores have been spewing out neutrons for last two years, every damn thing around them will be radioactive as hellfire.
it only took a few kilos of radiated material to kill many thousands at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, as most went high into the sky and decayed/fell into sea before harming folk though stray dust particles from that will still be killing kids with cancer (a few ever year like all the damn bomb tests)
a reactor burst though...
I posted this elsewhere but it has ot be understood how lethal this crap is
thisis about the fourth atomic bomb tests, the stupid idiots set it off in bikini lagoon underwater, where it radiated coral and the landing craft above it, and salt in the sea, making it a dirty bomb:
"On August 11, 1947, Life summarized the report in a 14-page article with 33 pictures.[153] The article stated, "If all the ships at Bikini had been fully manned, the Baker Day bomb would have killed 35,000 crewmen.
If such a bomb were dropped below New York's Battery in a stiff south wind, 2 million people would die."
Two million not because of the force of the bomb, no, underwater detonation of old fashioned A bomb would massively limit the blast and fire damage, but the fallout would be horrendous
but if you detonated such a bomb along with a lot of metals and some elements, or worse, a civilian nuclear reactor with thousands of tons of material....
I wonder if the US military will claim their illnesses are all "hysteria", eh?
