knee jerk my initial reaction to the damaged reactors in japan was that everyone was going to freak. some did. mostly though the reaction seems to be quite a bit more calm than i was expecting. my initial post on the subject was a bit of an anti-knee jerk. and obviously at the time very little information was available at the time. so those who predicted the end of the world were just as wrong as those who stuck their heads in the sand. and perhaps i should include myself in that latter category. i said mostly likely it'd be like three mile island. ie a big fat nothing. but in reality it's a lot worse than that. these reactors were designed in the early '60s. like before i was born. there were computers then. not many. but a few. they had like 1 kilobyte of memory. that's 1000 bytes. heh. today a coder would use that much for temporary throw away space. the computers that went to the moon only had 2k of memory. anywho, these reactors were designed, practically by slide rule, to survive a magnitude 7 earthquake. they got a jolt some 10x to 100x larger. and they held together mostly. at least long enough for most people to evacuate the area. i think two of the containment vessels actually broke and vented a burst of radioactive materials into the atmosphere. 30 miles away the dose was like what you get during a mammogram. you definitely do not want that every day. at the risk of sticking my foot in it again, i'm going to consult my magic 8-ball and predict the extra deaths from the nuclear power plant will be about 1% of the deaths from the earthquake and tsunami.  ¶ 8:00 AM