Page 18 - Michael Friedlander News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Evacuations, that it's sort of odd? >> well, i think in retrospect, obviously you have to say that u.s. officials got it right. and michael addressed this earlier. i think it's better to evacuate people out to a zone rather than doing it a little bit at a time in phases. now, at the end of the day, as long as they do leave i think their radiation exposure will be moderate. but the psychological toll, the uncertainty that that creates, they're wondering -- these people are going to wonder why they weren't moved earlier. have they been exposed to something now? i think it would have been cleaner...

Agency, to get into the field and to supplement those readings. and now -- and i think the extension of the evacuation zone and this finding looking back saying there was more radiation released than maybe we had anticipated, my guess is those two things are linked. going forward, anderson, you know, i think of that nrc, the nuclear regulatory commission memo that was leaked. it was a memo from late march that expressed concern about aftershocks because these plants have already been stressed. they've gone through the earthquakes. they're filled with water. you know, and there may be damage to...

>> what does it tell us? >> there are almost 500 different plants. there was an attempt to put everybody on equal footing. the categorization of a seven basically means that it was a really bad accident. that ee about the only characterization you could make. so if you're looking at this accident compared to other ones in other countries, everyone is reporting on a common basis. it really doesn't give you any notion of exactly how bad it is or what the level of effort is going to be. >> okay. michael friedlander, i appreciate you giving us perspective. tell us what story you'd like to see in...

You know, again, at the time we have to look back and see what were the capabilities, what did they know, what kind of instrumentation did they have and things like that? and so it's easy in hindsight to go back and be critical. but i do think that it underscores one of the elements that we have been talking about on this show for almost three weeks now, and that is given the level of radiation that we found around the countryside it's absolutely essential that it be monitored much more closely than it has been. >> jim, what do you make of this? there have been a number now of strong earthquak...

Going to continue to be a concern. >> and michael, now they're expanding the evacuation zone, but they're not doing it based on sort of radius, which is the way we would think. they're doing it based on where they've gotten higher radiation readings in different towns and areas told to evacuate because of those radiation readings. that seems like an odd way to do it, isn't it? >> yeah, you know what, anderson? and again, it's uncomfortable for me to be put in the position of defending people that i've been quite critical of over the last several weeks. i totally get that they're trying to thre...