First of all, let me state that I am in favor of nuclear energy, it is an important/necessary part of the renewable energy infrastructure we will need in the future should we expect to maintain our collective quality of life.
Also, I would have to agree that the mainstream media in general tends to go overboard in their reporting of any sort of disaster scenario.
That being said, I would first question the sanity of building nuclear reactors in tectonically active/tsunami prone locations unless they are engineered to withstand the most powerful event EVER recorded + 5-10%, rather than the 8.2 level per the cited article states the plants in question were built to. This goes equally for any other construction anywhere else that might need to withstand other types of natural forces, e.g., one built in the American Midwest should be engineered to withstand an F5 tornado, or on the Gulf Coast a Cat 5 hurricane.
I have to take the cited article with a grain of salt as it reads like something that the government would put out to try to calm/placate the general populace to avoid panic; I'm not a nuclear scientist, and can't refute everything said, but there are several factual errors in the reportage, which should make one take the post in it's entirety somewhat askance:
- "Building a nuclear bomb is actually quite difficult (ask Iran)" No it's not. If you have enough fissionable material, a very strong piece of pipe/tubing, and sufficient explosives to blow the fissionable material together at speed, you will achieve "critical mass". i.e., a Hiroshima type explosion.
- The author seriously downplays/underestimates the potential ill-effects to one's health that releases of radioactive Celsium/Iodine isotopes can be. Go on the net and research the after-effects of Chernobyl...
- There is not enough granular, detailed information that has been made publicly available to make the assumptions the author makes about the condition of secondary/tertiary containment systems in the plant. If the initial hydrogen explosions blew the outer shell/systems to smithereens, it is rather foolhardy to ASSUME there was no collateral damage to other critical systems.
If you live within a couple of hundred kilometers of the plant and can state "I am not worried about Japan's nuclear reactors", you are a blithering idiot. Note that the MIT author of the post is ca. 10,750 kilometers away. Hopefully everything will turn out OK, but the loss of electric power generation from the effected nuclear power plants will play hell on the Japanese economy for some time to come.