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If workers are unable to get cooling water into the reactor vessel, as they’re trying to do with helicopters and water cannons, heat from the decaying fuel would boil away any water. If that happens, Allen says, “It’ll melt through it like butter.”

The effect of that would be a “high-pressure melt injection” into the water-filled concrete cavity below the reactor. The sudden injection of the ultrahot contents of the reactor into cold concrete would be “like somebody dropped a bomb, and there’ll be a big cloud of very, very radioactive material above the ground,” Allen said.

Should these events happen, the best outcome would be for the winds to blow east and push the radioactive plume over the Pacific Ocean, he said. “It (the radioactivity) will fall out in the ocean and everything will be fine,” he said. If, however, the radioactive cloud moves toward Tokyo and other cities, the result would be worse than Chernobyl.

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-Natasha Tiku at New York Magazine is scaring the shit out of me.

She has a really superb roundup of what we can expect if things turn for the worse in Japan.