It sounds like the strict building codes served them well for residential housing and commercial spaces. However, it looks like the engineering standards for their nuclear reactors could stand to be a little more strict (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42025882/ns/world_news-asiapacif...). Perhaps the news article is overly sensational, but I can't help but wonder, "Why are we even talking about the possibility of a meltdown in 2011?" Shouldn't loss of reactor cooling capability result in an automatic reactor shutdown? Wasn't the lesson of the Three Mile Island accident that you should build your reactor so that the default thing that happens when you lose power (and therefore lose cooling capability) is that the control rods drop via gravity and stop the reaction? Any nuclear engineers out there care to comment on the design of Japan's reactors?
Please don't spread misinformation about this. The reactors stopped automatically, but you still have to cool them. They ran out of diesel, so they're getting mobile power units in to cool the rest.
The BBC had a "live feed" of a huge blazing fire, and the caption was "Government declares Nuclear Emergency".
The fire was at a natural gas storage tank...
I don't know if these news agencies like stoking mass panic, but you need to be a little sceptical about reporting in the media about "contentious" issues like nuclear power.
It's standard procedure in these situations to evacuate a 3km radius from the plant, just in case. If the situation gets slightly more... interesting (as in, they need to vent some steam), they evacuate 10km.
TL;DR: Let's wait and see what happens before declaring that Japan is about to be annihilated by nuclear fallout.
