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[b]Costs rise in 'worst industrial disaster'[/b]

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"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Gundersen asserts. "We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl ... The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometers being found 60 to 70 kilometers away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up."....

Certainly if some of the worst-case predictions materialize, and a sizeable part of Japan turns into a nuclear desert, we'll face urgent questions about where we are heading as a species; this may happen even in a more optimistic scenario....

Fukushima is worse than what we are being told. There is no doubt about that. How bad exactly it is may not become clear for years. Debates about its meaning are likely to stretch much longer. The crisis brings some fundamental questions about our system of social organization to the fore, and the answers may influence what the world looks like in the future.