Reply #3: Can you blame them?

[FBaggins]

They've got good reason to avoid using it.

"Meltdown" could be anything from relatively minor core damage all the way up to the entire core sitting in a molten pool at the bottom of the containment vessel. And then you've got a whole range of potential damage to that containment ranging from essentially nothing all way up to total failure.

IOW, "potential meltdown" covers a long range from, say, 1 to 5,000 where 1 means no human even gets a dose equivelent to an extra x-ray, and 5,000 means a catastrophe (still not "chernobyl", but Japan has a pretty high population density).

If you use a word thinking that right now you're looking at something between a 1 and a 250 on my imaginary scale, there are still people while will "hear" a warning that a 5,000 event (or worse) is under way.

And since this is the country with the greatest experience getting hosed with nuclear devices... they probably have their fair share of people who will hear it as a 5,000.