This makes for a good lesson in marketing and measuring things. In marketing, if you change the name of a thing on an arbitrary scale, that's newsworthy. If it hits the best/worst thing on the arbitrary scale, that's newsworthy. No actual human being gets a banana worth of radiation more or less because this is a 7 as opposed to a 6 -- it is totally a marketing event.<p>In terms of measuring things: scales with < 10 points on them do very, very poor jobs at compressing certain distributions. It's kind of like saying that someone is in income quintile 5 -- the same quintile as Bill Gates! If you didn't know that the underlying distribution of incomes looks like what it looks like, you might assume that second person is omg rich. (Quintile 5 starts at about $90k a household.) Similarly, the scale of nuclear accidents from "non-event" to Chernobyl to "hypothetical-end-of-the-world" has an awful lot of very consequential dynamic range in it. The <i>overwhelming</i> takeaway among lay people from this marketing event is going to be "Fukushima is about as bad as Chernobyl" -- that is objectively, dangerously false, just like "X is about as rich as Bill Gates" is likely catastrophically wrong and would lead to terrible decisions if you acted on it.