Here's what the Nuclear Information Resource Service (NIRS) has to say about Level 7:

"UPDATE, 12:30 pm, Tuesday, April 12, 2011. As predicted, the Japanese government has officially upgraded the status of the Fukushima accident to Level 7. In doing so, however, the government appears to be downplaying the actual radiation releases, with several media reports this morning quoting government officials as saying releases have been about 10% of those from Chernobyl.

However, as we reported here on March 23, the Austrian weather service, which has been monitoring radiation across the world and advising the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that releases of Cesium-137 at that time were already 20-60% those of Chernobyl and Iodine-131 releases were at 20%. Note: this updated release puts Cesium-137 releases at 50% those of Chernobyl.

Greenpeace, which issued a statement March 25 saying Fukushima was already a Level 7 accident at that time, referred both to the Austrian study and a study by French nuclear officials. We repost the Greenpeace statement, which includes links to both studies.

The world's media also appear to be missing another important story: the "evacuation" of five more villages to the northwest, that we reported yesterday, is not really an "evacuation." It is a permanent relocation. If people were being evacuated to avoid a potentially immediately threatening radiation dose, the evacuation would not take weeks or even a month; it would happen in hours. Rather, the Japanese government has acknowledged that radiation levels in those villages, although outside the established exclusion zone, are too high to allow long-term habitation. Thus, people will leave from those villages—and will not return."

It's now unclear to me if the Japan Nuclear Safety Commission is ordering a uniform 20 km exclusion zone or just expanding one sector further to the northeast to include newly confirmed "radiation hot spots."

Charley Noble