An accident at a nuclear facility is rather dfferent than the effects of a nuclear weapon. The radiation exposure produced is much more gradual. It's not as ins

An accident at a nuclear facility is rather dfferent than the effects of a nuclear weapon. The radiation exposure produced is much more gradual. It's not as instantly lethal as a bomb of course, but the effects of Chernobyl are still lingering. Obviously they didn't have to encase Nagasaki or Hiroshima in a concrete sarcophagus. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fairly small, and air burst vs. ground burst. The amount of radioactive material in the bombs is a tiny fraction of what was released at Chernobyl. People are fond of saying you can't compare Chernobyl to other reactors, etc. but it's all we had until recently. I'm sure we'll have some better examples in the future, but for now, according to the IEAE: http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/features/chernobyl-15/cherno-faq.shtml http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/features/chernobyl-15/cherno-... "How does Chernobyl’s effect measure up to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The accident at Chernobyl was approximately 400 times more potent than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima" I assume things would look different in Japan if we had dropped a couple hundred of those bombs vs. one.