The thing I'm skeptical about is the claim that this would have rendered a large part of the continent uninhabitable. The Stack Exchange discussion is interesting but (as you say) doesn't really bear on that.
Yeah - worst case was 20x more radioactive material (well, I suppose no-seriously-wtf case would be 80x, but that requires the other three active reactors to have gone up as well) since at least 5% of the reactor core was released.
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The thing I'm skeptical about is the claim that this would have rendered a large part of the continent uninhabitable. The Stack Exchange discussion is interesting but (as you say) doesn't really bear on that.
Yeah - worst case was 20x more radioactive material (well, I suppose no-seriously-wtf case would be 80x, but that requires the other three active reactors to have gone up as well) since at least 5% of the reactor core was released.