The Washington Post reports the nuclear crisis in Japan has escalated. German TV is reporting there is now partial meltdown in the open air, and the Japanese people are taking one shock after another:

TOKYO — Japanese authorities raised Tuesday their rating of the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis to the highest level on an international scale, equal to that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Officials with Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission reclassified the ongoing emergency from level 5, an “accident with off-site risk,” to level 7, a “major accident.” The reassessment comes at a time when the International Atomic Energy Agency says the plant is showing “early signs of recovery” but still in a critical condition.

The plant’s debilitated reactors face constant threat of strong aftershocks, and the latest on Tuesday morning — a 6.2-magnitude temblor — caused a brief fire at a water sampling facility near Daiichi’s No. 4 reactor. The Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the power plant, said that the critical process used to cool the hot fuel rods had not been interrupted, and radiation levels showed no signs of change.

A level 7 accident, according to the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, is typified by a “major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects.”

[...] Radiation leaking from Fukushima Daiichi amounts to about 10 percent of that from the Chernobyl accident, a Nuclear Safety Commission official, who was not named, said on national television.

[...] According to the Kyodo news agency, Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission reported Monday that the plant, at one point after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, had been releasing 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactivity per hour. The report did not specify when those radiation readings occurred. A release of tens of thousands of terabecquerels per hour, though, correspondents with the radiation leakage level that the IAEA uses as a minimum benchmark for a level 7 accident.

“This corresponds to a large fraction of the core inventory of a power reactor, typically involving a mixture of short- and long-lived radionuclides,” an IAEA document says. “With such a release, stochastic health effects over a wide area, perhaps involving more than one country, are expected.”

And of course, we are still avoiding the world "meltdown" --- although, according to Rep. Ed Markey, the nuclear core has already melted through the reactor vessel.

It's been a long time since nuclear power was in the public eye, and now that we're running out of oil, it seems like a good alternative to people who weren't alive during Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. With President Barack "Clean Coal" Obama endorsing it in the SOTU address, new power plants are inevitable.

Hey, I'd love cheap, clean energy as much as the next person. But states that are dealing with the aging facilities know nuclear energy is not as easy as they'd like us to think. There's the problem of waste disposal, of course, and while the risks of a major event are allegedly small, the potential for human catastrophe is enormous:

But the leaks have the potential to slow, if not stop, the bandwagon. Crucial voices are calling for caution. “I am appalled by the safety procedures not only at Vermont Yankee, but at other nuclear facilities across the country who have failed to inspect thousands of miles of buried pipes at their facilities," US Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, said last week. Earlier this month, Markey asked the US Government Accountability Office to investigate the integrity, safety, inspections, and maintenance of buried pipes at nuclear plants.

Critics say the problems with buried pipes are evidence the plants are too old and poorly maintained to continue to safely operate as many - including plants in Seabrook, N.H., and Plymouth - seek extensions of their original 40-year operating licenses. Nuclear advocates, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, say that while the leaks of a radioactive form of water containing tritium are serious, those that have contaminated groundwater have not exceeded regulatory limits or harmed the structural integrity, operation, or safety of the plants.

“No leak of tritium has ever had a negative impact on the health and safety of the public," said Tom Kauffman, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a prominent industry group. In 2006, the industry took it upon itself to search more aggressively for problems with buried piping and tritium leaks.

“These are the most highly regulated, highly monitored industrialized [power plants] in the nation," Kauffman said. He said the nation’s 104 nuclear plants are some of the greenest sources of energy in the country. “It is very important to keep these plants working."

In other words, safe nuclear energy boils down to the same thing it always did: "Trust us." Well, do you? Do you trust them?

When I first wrote about this many years ago, I said that I would trust power company officials when they built their luxury houses on the grounds adjoining their plants, and moved in with their children and grandchildren to stay. I still say that.

If nuclear energy is as safe as they say, it shouldn't be a problem.