With something like 20,000 people confirmed dead or missing after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, media attention has of course been obsessed with a nuclear power plant which at no stage threatened to kill any people beyond its immediate area.

Of course there were enormous leaks of radiation which amounted to an exposure equivalent to– one chest X-Ray or a tiny fraction of a CT scan.

With all the breathless reporting of radiation "spikes" around the plant, there will be no mention of an even greater "spike"– the number of abortions of babies by mothers unnecessarily terrified that their babies will be born with deformities. After Chernobyl, regarded as the worst nuclear breakdown in history, 200,000 women from Italy alone aborted their babies despite the fact that there was no risk of damage to the babies caused by the great radiation plume from that incident.

There have also been claims about lax regulation by the Japanese Government and shortcuts taken by the owners of the plant. The truth as always is somewhat different:

The Fukushima power plants were required by regulators to withstand a certain height of tsunami. At the Daiichi plant the design basis was 5.7 metres and at Daini this was 5.2 metres. Tepco has now released tentative assessments of the scale of the tsunami putting it at over 10 metres at Daiichi and over 12 metres at Dainii. The plant sites were inundated, causing the loss of residual heat removal systems at both sites as well as emergency diesel generators at Daiichi.

Meanwhile, the media seem, as always, to be ignoring the main story- the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people caused by the total devastation of whole towns and the long slow rebuilding process ahead.