RADIATION THREAT IN JAPAN

As nuclear reactors keep blowing up and spewing radiation into the atmosphere in Japan, people are validly fearful.  Most of them are a generation or two away from the WWII terror of radiation from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is probably good.

The world's hunger for energy has become a controlling appetite.  Engineers are trying to make units that run on less energy.  As example, 18 years ago, at my house,  we had two Sanyo heat exchanger wall units (powered by electricity) installed in matching 16' x 16' rooms above each other in the rear of the house.  Even though electricity was a bit cheaper then, to actually heat a room .   Running one of the Sanyo units in the winter made electric utility bills prohibitively high.  Last Fall, both wall units really had become disabled and obsolete so two new Fujitsu units replaced the old heat exchangers.  One of them was on all winter, heating a room that normally could be used only during warm months, the heating bills (even with the raise in natural gas costs) did not seem to go up though we had a rather cold winter.  The machines run so quietly, you can not hear them, which was certainly not the case of the previous units.
 Some of us who have lived  long time will remember  8/6 and 8/8/1946 when two bombs were dropped in Japan.   For the next few years we lived in terror that the Russians would do the same to us.  TV 'News' keeps asking the question as to how safe we would be here in the US should we have a similar natural disaster causing our nuclear energy facilities to fail.  Some of these plants are several decades old.