@ MrToad -

That's precisely why energy is such a problem. It's either cheap and dirty or clean and expensive. Everyone wants cheap AND clean. You don't get it both way(at the moment anyway). The problem I see is that nuclear fission is a viable power source right now. Japan uses it because it is extremely potent. They don't have alot of land. That makes solar and wind out of the question, likely forever. The have to maximize their land to energy production, and the best way to achieve that is nuclear. Nuclear could be improved with the new designs. But since the public is so against the current designs they have forced their government officials to stick their heads in the sand and just claim that all nuclear power across the board must be dangerous and could explode. That's simply not true but it also means MUCH less money is spent on new designs that use new materials for the 21st century. It's a classic "chicken or the egg" scenario.

@Buckeye

The steam will contain some radiation. If the fuel hadn't melted, the steam would only be radioactive for a few days. But since some of the fuel has melted, the long lived radioisotopes can be in the steam. How much depends on how much the fuel has been damaged. I'm sure that the operators in Japan are using the amount of isotopes in the steam to figure out just how bad they think the fuel is damaged.

@BrowncoatGR

We'll just have to agree to disagree. The problem I see is that the dangers are so blown out of proportion by the media with no facts to back them up that anyone reading the real facts think it's being downplayed because of how far apart the truth is from the media. It's hard to believe the media is so full of crap, even from my angle. You always talk about how incompetent the media is, but I guess I never saw how completely ignorant they really are.

@Everyone

The reactors in Japan use a torus system. Unfortunately, I know very little about it. I know there are more than one "pools" of water that sit in the bottom of the containment building that are supposed to condense any steam that might be in the containment building(thereby preventing overpressurization). Aside from that I don't know much more. I'll try to ask a few friends at work tomorrow. But if a Torus is cracked or leaking, that's not very good news. I haven't been looking on the news the last few hours since I was playing with my crunchers(got network booting up and running! wee! I've been trying for months to get it to work).

The name of the game is staying up to date with the facts at hand. There's alot of confusion over there. I trust that the people over there are trained as well as here, so I'm confident things will pull through. Let's just hope nothing bad suddenly happens . For instance, if the containment building were to suddenly collapse(I don't know how that could happen since the building just withstood a major earthquake but it might be damaged and we don't know it) then that would turn to very bad news very quickly.

I just ask people keep an open mind and 6 months from now when this is all over step back and look at how "bad" it really was. I hope we'll all be able to agree that it really wasn't as bad as we think it is right now.