Author: Matthew Bunn, Harvard University

As bad as it is, Japan’s nuclear accident is dramatically less catastrophic than Chernobyl. That accident spread millions of curies of radioactivity — 3-4 per cent of all radioactivity in the reactor core — around the surrounding countryside, exposing millions of people in several countries.

Large areas are uninhabitable to this day. Here, there is no real prospect of a runaway chain reaction as occurred at Chernobyl. Instead, what has happened is the melting of fuel in reactor cores, leading to the release of a very modest amount of cesium and other fission products. Read more…