Hidehiko Nishiyama, a deputy director-general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), said the decision to raise the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi plant incident from level 5 to 7 -- the same as the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986 -- was based on cumulative quantities of radiation released. ↘

(Reuters) - Japan’s nuclear crisis is slowly stabilizing and the country must now focus on repairing the damage wrought by the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck the northeast coast a month ago, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said.

He was speaking shortly after new data showed more radiation leaked from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in the early days of the crisis than first thought.

That new information put Japan’s nuclear calamity in the same category as the world’s worst nuclear disaster, Chernobyl, officials said.

The earthquake in Japan was so powerful it shifted the entire Earth's axis, increased it's rotation speed, and moved Japan 8 feet ↘

The massive earthquake that struck northeast Japan Friday (March 11) has shortened the length Earth’s day by a fraction and shifted how the planet’s mass is distributed.

A new analysis of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan has found that the intense temblor has accelerated Earth’s spin, shortening the length of the 24-hour day by 1.8 microseconds, according to geophysicist Richard Gross at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

“By changing the distribution of the Earth’s mass, the Japanese earthquake should have caused the Earth to rotate a bit faster, shortening the length of the day by about 1.8 microseconds,”