Realtime results for Fukushima, the tweets are racing:

http://twitter.com/search/%23japon#search?q=Fukushima

It's going to be interesting see what happens with Twitter on a topic like this. I am thinking  along the lines of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast. I am wondering whether governments will have to compete with Twitter as to urgency and with complete transparency if they are to prevent panic.

"When a fail safe system fails, it will always fail by failing to fail safe"

Japan Orders Evacuation Near 2nd Nuclear Plant
By Matthew L. Wald, New York Times, March 11, 2011

.....The power plants, known as Daiichi and Daini and operated by Tokyo Electric Power, experienced critical failures of the cooling systems after the plants were shut down, as they were during the quake.

About 45,000 people were affected by the evacuation order at the Daiichi plant, where those living within a six-mile radius were told to leave. The evacuation of the second plant was for a one-mile radius because “there is no sign that radiation has been emitted outside,” an official said.....

....Nuclear safety officials focused initially on the Daiichi plant. But by Saturday morning Japan had declared states of emergency for five reactors at the two plants, an escalation that added to worries about the safety of nuclear facilities in the quake-prone Japanese islands.

The Daiichi and Daini plants are 10 miles apart in Fukushima Prefecture, about 150 miles north of Tokyo and close to the quake’s epicenter off the coast.

The plants’ problems were described as serious but were far short of a catastrophic emergency like the partial core meltdown that occurred at the Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979.

A Japanese nuclear safety panel said the radiation levels were 1,000 times above normal in a reactor control room at the Daiichi plant. Some radioactive material had also seeped outside, with radiation levels near the main gate measured at eight times normal, NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, quoted nuclear safety officials as saying...