Hey, news critters...

So, yeah, Japan's unfortunate nuclear issues continue... having been involved in nuclear power in the past myself, I had a pretty good guess as to where that situation would evolve over time, and, sadly, I was pretty well right. Of course, a fair deal of that guesswork was in spite of news coverage, not due to any great illumination it provided... which is why I felt the need to post something.

Now, I'm sure that many of you one-time journalism majors didn't fare especially well in your college science courses, and I didn't start ranting at you as soon as you started covering the story. I'm aware that the pressures of getting fresh news available to the public ahead of/in tandem with your competitors can cause you to lose focus on some of the details a bit. However, we're now in the realm of weeks of coverage time, and every major outlet has provided an animation or info graphic of what a boiling water reactor is and how it works... I think it's high time you took the time to get your terminology straight, so that you're handing out useful information to the news-consuming public.

For starters, if you're going to talk about "increased" radiation levels, you had best include actual measurements... we can detect radiation levels well below the level where they have any impact on humans. Also, get the difference between "radiation" and "radioactive contamination" straight in your heads... for example, the water leaking out of some of the reactors and fuel cell storage pools is likely contaminated, but isn't in and of itself radioactive. That means that it could, in theory at least, be purified, leading to much less radioactive waste to be cleaned up and kept track of later.

It would also be a good idea to get the names of the parts of a reactor down, as well. Whatever other problems they may be having, I'm quite certain that the "reactor core" isn't leaking on any of them... or, if it is, then it's leaking liquefied radioactive metals from the meltdown that's going on inside. The reactor vessel might be leaking... that's the large, pressurized metal enclosure that holds the reactor core and all that water that's been contaminated by radioactive materials from the core while trying to cool it down. While you're at it, you might want to look into "pressure relief valves"... those are the things that kept letting steam and hydrogen (and any entrained contamination) escape from the pressure vessel and/or the coolant loop. Since those have operated as intended (as evidenced by the hydrogen explosions at a few of the plants), it's fair to say that those reactors have lost "containment" of some of the materials that they were supposed to be keeping bottled up inside... mind you, it's not as bad as it could be, but it's still the source of all that contamination (NOT radiation!) that's cropping up in airborne samples, food, and water from the region.

I'm sure there's more that I could find to nitpick about, but those are the examples that I see Every Single Day that coverage of this tragedy continues. If it's too hard for you, maybe you can spend your time covering the earthquake and tsunami victims instead... that's much more photogenic and easier to understand anyways.