I work for a small (as in size of the reactor) nuclear reactor design company. We have people assigned to monitor everything going on in Japan with this disaster. That is their sole job.

The opinion is that Chernobyl was much worse, by many times.

By the way, the leads on the engineering team from GE that designed those Japanese reactors all resigned when they found out where the reactors were going to be positioned (in a tsunami zone and on a fault line) and would be relying on the cheap backup power via land lines to the plants.

So.... GE designed it, but Tempco decided, against GEs advice, to save a lot of money over safety.

Nuclear reactors are safe and the new designs with the passive safety measures built in guarantee no melt downs. That is not to say they can't suffer from "worse case sinarios", but the results would be minor compared to what is happening in Japan and certainly what happened in Chernobyl.

Coal burning gives off much more radiation each year than what has and is expected be be given off by the crippled Japanese reactors.

Chernoybl is just bad. Nothing compares to it.... hopefully nothing will.