Reading the very very long transcripts, which are heavily redacted (censored with literally, a big black marker), it becomes clear why the US military reacted as they did during the crisis stage.
And why they were scrambling so hard to get the Japanese to accept help.
It's extremely complicated, more so by all the things that are still not released. The things that are known for sure, is that nobody actually knows. It's not that TEPCO and the Japanese authorities are not saying, sometimes they actually just do not know what is happening. Or happened.
But after reading all of the documents, I have to agree 100% with
What is perfectly clear in the various documents from March 11th through March 18th – the time period when reactors 1, 2 and 3 were actively melting and exploding and the unit 4 spent fuel pool fires led to a fourth reactor building blow-out – is that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, along with several other departments and agencies of the U.S. government and the UN’s IAEA, were watching the situation very closely.
Our government was intimately involved in withholding accurate data from the public as well as minimizing what was being publicly reported.
http://enformable.com/2012/03/fukushima ... -disaster/
But that is a huge complicated mess of stuff. In regards to the worst case scenario, as far as I can tell, nobody in the media, or even the alarmists blogs, nobody ever came close to describing the worst case disaster that almost happened. The recent Frontline show
http://video.pbs.org/video/2202847024 made it clear just how close it all was, and how a few heroes risked their lives to save not just Japan, but the world.
(No, the Frontline show does not discuss the worst case scenario.) Based on the experts discussing the disaster, as it occurred, the worst case scenario was going to come from the spent fuel pond in building four. Of all things, the reactor that was shut down, not even fueled, suffered the worst structural damage, and threatened to cause a disaster so bad nobody had ever imagined it.