nothing to believe when USA is in action.

Senate now found a way to avoid Nuclear Bill. Dodge/Ford continues to drink OIL.

OIL - Biggest Enemy of Mankind and its involvement in this needs to be known.

The World Nuclear Association's predictions are overly cautious and unable to explain situations in which you have very HIGH levels of natural background radiation, such as in Ramsar, Iran, with no attendant decrease in longevity or increase in cancer rates. In fact, longevity in Ramsar appears to be better than elsewhere.

Right now the media is being very irresponsible in its portrayal of the potential threats of nuclear contamination, likening this to a possible Chernobyl, even though Chernobyl was a different type of reactor entirely and that a meltdown in these reactions (light water reactors) does not cause a violently explosive Chernobyl-style catastrophe. (Credit to your original article for mentioning this, it needs to be reinforced, as networks such as CNN are being absolutely responsible in this respect).

We also forget that Chernobyl killed far less people than is commonly assumed. In fact, the psychological stress has proven to be far more deadly than the actual radiation dosages most people (aside from the plant technicians on-duty at the time) received.

The biggest danger right now is the threat of internal radiation exposure, especially with the reactors constantly exploding and being vented. This, more than anything, caused the majority of damage in Chernobyl when people drank contaminated milk and water, as it does damage to the thyroid. This is the point of handing out iodine tablets--a very good move on the part of the Japanese government.

400 msv is certainly serious--but if you look closely at the reports, they are reading 400 msv NEAR the reactors. Definitely dangerous for those in the vicinity, but saying simply that contamination has been recorded at 400 msv, misportrays this, leading readers to assume that such high levels of contamination are spreading beyond the reactor, which seems unsubstantiated.

Further extending this to the idea that all nuclear reactors and nuclear projects in the developed world should be shut down is just irresponsible. Not only is it wrong to compare nuclear technology today to that used in reactors more than half a century ago, it is explicit misinformation.

So how many people are actually in the immediate vicinity... few to none. The nearest civillians will be some kilometres away, and as radiation is subject to the inverse-square law which states that a specified physical quantity or strength is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source of that physical quantity.
The inverse-square law generally applies when some force, energy, or other conserved quantity is radiated outward radially from a point source. Since the surface area of a sphere (which is 4πr 2) is proportional to the square of the radius, as the emitted radiation gets farther from the source, it must spread out over an area that is proportional to the square of the distance from the source. Hence, the radiation passing through any unit area is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the point source.

So much for 'radiation' per se.

Now to radiactive particles. That is a different matter altogether, and as long as the containment vessels of the reactors remain intact, that should not be such an issue. There will be some dust, gas and debris released from the reactor buildings that might have been iradiated and might have short life radiocative properties but unless the containment is explosively breached or fiercly burnt airborne uranium or other heavy metals should not be a problem in anything other than the local area.