Worst of all, the reporting has put the focus entirely on the Fukushima nuclear plant. As worrisome as the issue is, it has been completely blown out of proportion, with talk of meltdown and massive destruction. The tragedy is that the victims of the earthquake and tsunami are all but forgotten at times. While the world turns away to ponder its own nuclear policies — which, for better or for worse, are far from urgent — people are starving and dying after having survived the disaster itself.

The nuclear plant story is exciting and dramatic and is easy to exaggerate, but it will quickly wear thin as the plant cools and the international public realizes that the fears were deliberately whipped up. By then, it could be far too late for many survivors.

A top official at Japan's nuclear-safety regulatory agency sees no slowing in the country's campaign to expand atomic power, despite the battle to contain the world's worst nuclear crisis in 25 years, saying in an interview that the alternative is "blackouts."

"There aren't that many easy alternatives available for us," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a former trade negotiator tapped to help deal with the Fukushima nuclear crisis, on Wednesday. "Japan couldn't go forward without nuclear power in order to meet its demand for energy today," he said. About 30% of Japan's electricity output comes from nuclear, and the government has set the goal of increasing that to 40% by 2020.

Just a month before a powerful earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi plant at the center of Japan’s nuclear crisis, government regulators approved a 10-year extension for the oldest of the six reactors at the power station despite warnings about its safety.

The regulatory committee reviewing extensions pointed to stress cracks in the backup diesel-powered generators at Reactor No. 1 at the Daiichi plant, according to a summary of its deliberations that was posted on the Web site of Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency after each meeting. The cracks made the engines vulnerable to corrosion from seawater and rainwater. The generators are thought to have been knocked out by the tsunami, shutting down the reactor’s vital cooling system.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

We do not know their names, their faces, their families or their personal stories. Nobody really does. They are strangers, in a faraway land, doing the unthinkable. In Japan they have a name: The Fukushima 50. A coterie of nuclear plant employees - some reports indicate 50, others suggest four working rotations of 50 - who stayed behind while 700 of their co-workers were evacuated from the stricken Fukushima-Daiichi facility on the Japanese coast.

Five have been killed. Two are missing. Twenty-one have been injured in a struggle where, in the words of Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan, "retreat is unthinkable." The men understand the stakes. They know there is no turning back. One worker told a departing colleague he was prepared to die - that it was his job. Another informed his wife he wouldn't be coming home anytime soon.

As Japan's nuclear crisis deepens, a gulf has developed in the way in which the foreign and Japanese media are covering the unfolding drama. The disparity has led to a stark difference in public perceptions of the gravity of the situation: Many Japanese are going about their daily lives and routines as normal. In sharp contrast, many foreigners have left after being deluged with phone calls from relatives pleading them to leave Japan after watching and reading media reports in their home country.

The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents and underestimated earthquake risk in Japan’s atomic power industry.

...

Nuclear engineers and academics who have worked in Japan’s atomic power industry spoke in interviews of a history of accidents, faked reports and inaction by a succession of Liberal Democratic Party governments that ran Japan for nearly all of the postwar period.

In summary it is looking more and more probable that the death and injury toll from the Fukushima quake strike will be limited to the one worker killed in a crane accident and others hurt by the quake and subsequent explosions at the site, perhaps with some very minimal long-term radiation effects among site workers. All being well, nobody else will have their health damaged in any way, and prospects are good that most or all of the current evacuation zone will be re-opened in a reasonable amount of time.

This article, unusally level-headed for a Western media outlet, was posted yesterday afternoon. To my knowledge, there is no more cause for pessimism now than it was then.

Over in the vegetable section, boxes of fresh tomatoes, daikon, cabbages and citrus fruit are stacked high, awaiting delivery. At the shops surrounding the main market, meanwhile, there's a real abundance of food on sale. The contrast with the 'trapped and starving in post-tsunami Tokyo' stories doing the rounds in tabloid newspapers overseas is pretty striking: if this is scarcity, we'd be interested to know what excess looks like.

Mamasan went to the coin laundry yesterday and got in a conversation with one of the other patrons, who was a local. Upon learning that mamasan and her family were evacuees, this person went home and soon returned with some home cooking: nice hot miso soup. This was their second hot meal since last Friday.

NHK is reporting right now that there are 285,000 people in over 2,200 shelters throughout the affected areas. Many shelters are short on food, medicine, and other essentials, so mamasan & co. can still be said to be relatively lucky.