Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty (and does it have enough water to cover the spent fuel rods)?

Over the last week I have watched countless news reporters discuss how the problems at the nuclear power plant in Japan are the end of the world, that the Japanese government was lying to the its people, that there would be thousands of deaths from the disaster, and all sorts of other horrors. I guess that such stories make for better television that ones in which the reporters said "Truthfully, we do not have a clue what is actually going on at the plant. We will have to all wait and find out in the weeks to come what happened there." Sadly, better television is not synonymous with truth or accuracy. Indeed, most of the reporters do not even seem to care if the stories are close to the truth; many have seemed distressed when people being interviewed said that the events at the plant were nothing close to a catastrophe.

Let me be clear. I do not know for sure what is happening in Japan. There may be a major disaster; there may not be. I do know, however, that none of these reporters no much more than I do. Has anyone outside of the folks at the plant been exposed to high levels of radiation? We do not know. Heck, the reporters cannot even get straight what happened at Chernobyl and that was over 20 years ago. As of today, there is no scientific proof that anyone died from exposure to radiation in that accident, and accident which was at least an order of magnitude worse than this one in Japan.

In our world, we all expect to have all the answers fed to us immediately. there is tremendous pressure on the reporters to have the end to the story always. But guess what? Often we have to just wait for events to play out. This seems to be one of those times.