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BY BRANDON TWICHELL

ANCHOR MEGHAN MURPHY

You're watching multisource world news analysis from Newsy

From bad to worse. The Japanese government announced its nuclear disaster is now at Level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale - the same level as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.

And while the Japanese government reassures citizens the radioactive material release is just 10 percent that of Chernobyl, a nuclear engineer tells CNN he’s not so sure.

“Chernobyl was covered by this point in time, and here this accident is just continuing on. There was, what this means is there have been ten thousand trillion disintegrations every second have been released already from the plant. So this is based on what has already happened, and really it can get worse as you look forward.”

The president of the nuclear weapon-free group The Ploughshares Fund agrees telling MSNBC the situation in Japan is a - quote - “slow-motion Chernobyl.”

“You’re seeing the possibility that you could emit as much radiation over a longer period of time that you saw in Chernobyl. So we’re going to see months--even under a best-case scenario--months of instability at this site, months of leaking radiation, and no clear solution in sight.”

But a researcher at Kyoto University tells DailyTech there’s one major thing that separates Japan’s nuclear disaster from Chernobyl’s:

"If everything inside the reactor came out, obviously that would surpass Chernobyl... But at Fukushima, most of the reactors' radioactive elements remained within the reactor. That's a big difference."

And a writer for The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch says raising the level doesn’t make the two disasters equal.

“Fukushima is not Chernobyl... And someday, investors might wish they spent less time reacting to dramatic headlines, and more time determining the point at which Japan’s crisis will have finally turned a corner.”

But despite the government’s reassurances, one Japanese citizen tells Al Jazeera he’s had it with the official response.

“If they’re going to announce something like that, they should do it in a way that isn’t so alarming to people. If one comes out and says it’s at level 7 and the same as Chernobyl, and then a video of Chernobyl starts playing, of course people will be worried.”

The Japanese government has asked citizens within a 19 mile radius of the nuclear plant to evacuate. Scientists at the plant continue to work on keeping the reactors stable.

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