With U.S. nuclear and energy officials offering dire assessments of Japan’s nuclear disaster, the state department expanded the evacuation zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant to 50 miles, four times that ordered by the Japanese government. France, Britain, Australia and Turkey have all ordered evacuations of Tokyo or warned against travel to the region.

BBC:

Greg Jaczko, chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), said attempts to cool reactors with sea water and prevent them from melting down appeared to be failing.

[…] US Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said that the situation at the plant appears to be more serious than the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979.

The US state department has urged Americans living within 80km (50 miles) of Fukushima Daiichi, which lies 220km from Tokyo, to leave the area—a much wider exclusion zone than the 20km advised by the Japanese government.

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