From what I have read due to the reactor design an international radioactive release is very very low probability. From what some engineers and seismologists said this accident is not and TEPCO was warned. Ignored warnings can almost always be decoded to a cost-cutting decision.
For Japan, large-scale contamination is a different story. But, yeah, it’s not that it is worse then they are telling people, it’s that they are bargaining and in denial themselves.
The normalcy bias refers to a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of the government to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred that it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.[1]
