I still remember it. The first shock of it. It was just one big hammer.

I turned to my two American friends Danny and Jeff and said, "Earthquake." They didn't feel it. They looked at me, and cocked their heads a little bit. And then she hit. We were in a turbine building that is built, for lack of a better term, like Fort Knox. The entire building was shaking.

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Elsewhere along the vast stretch of coast hit by the March 11 tsunami there are palpable signs of progress. Almost all of the 23 million tons of rubble has been removed, although rebuilding has yet to start.

But at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the cleanup looks like it has barely begun. Instead, the real work is being done, unseen, deep inside the crippled reactors, where melted fuel remains cool, but whose precise state and location remains a mystery.

The destructive force of three reactor meltdowns is evident as soon as the bus carrying a small group of journalists invited by the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), enters the 20-kilometer (13-mile) exclusion zone imposed after the first reactor building exploded on March 12.

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In the nearly one year since the March 11 earthquake, Japan has suffered a bevy of problems, from rolling blackouts and currency woes, to radiation fears, all under the tutelage of a central leadership that has failed to inspire public confidence.

So much so that Japan changed prime ministers last August – now the sixth in five years – amid a pivotal period in the country’s history. Yet the crisis in leadership, lack of transparency and revelations of nuclear safety oversights have also facilitated activism in a civil society that typically emphasizes cohesion over confrontation.

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Lady Gaga's website is selling $5 wristbands that say, "We Pray For Japan." The website also allows people to make additional donations and says "all proceeds go directly to Japan relief efforts."

A lawsuit filed in Detroit notes that sales tax and a $3.99 shipping charge are added. Detroit-area attorney Alyson Oliver believes not all money is going to help the Japanese and she wants an accounting.

Lady Gaga's spokeswoman, Holly Shakoor, said Tuesday that no profit is being made on shipping costs. She says $5 from each wristband is going to Japan.

The lawsuit seeks refunds for people who bought wristbands.

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The bunny, captured on video and posted to YouTube, was reportedly found near Fukushima at the end of last month. According to radiation experts, however, the likelihood that the rabbit's unusual features are a result of nuclear mutation is very slim.

"To say this is the result of contamination from the Fukushima accident is a stretch, because natural radiation, as well as many other chemical substances in the environment and other factors, can also be mutagenic," F. Ward Whicker, professor emeritus at Colorado State University's Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences, told AOL Weird News. Whicker admitted that radiation "can" cause these sorts of mutations, but that fall out from Fukushima is unlikely to the be the cause of this (probably anomalous) incident of earlessness.

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In the Dec. 19, 2001 document -- one double-sized page obtained by The Associated Press under Japan's public records law -- Tokyo Electric Power Co. rules out the possibility of a tsunami large enough to knock the plant offline and gives scant details to justify this conclusion, which proved to be wildly optimistic.

Regulators at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, or NISA, had asked plant operators for assessments of their earthquake and tsunami preparedness. They didn't mind the brevity of TEPCO's response, and apparently made no moves to verify its calculations or ask for supporting documents.

"This is all we saw," said Masaru Kobayashi, who now heads NISA's quake-safety section. "We did not look into the validity of the content."

The memo has Japanese text, boxes and numbers. It also has a tiny map of Japan indicating where historical earthquakes are believed to have struck. TEPCO considered five quakes, ranging from 8.0 to 8.6 magnitude, in northeastern Japan, and a 9.5 magnitude across the Pacific near Chile, as examples of possible tsunami-causing temblors.

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"It won't disappear here," everyone insisted. "Japan is going to change."

I tried imagining a similar conversation following a national tragedy with friends and family in New York, California and Nebraska. I know what I would hear: the names of potential candidates to lead the Democratic and Republican parties, state laws that could serve as models for the nation, criticism and praise of the media. In other words, I would hear a small-scale version of the garrulous chatter that surrounds us every four years during a presidential election.

So at a dinner part in Kyoto, I asked some friends: "Do you think you will have another election? Maybe your government will change?"

My friend Sakiko, who is 33 and lives in Kyoto, practically laughed. "We don't have heroes in government. We would never elect Obama."

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The contract worker in his 60s was the first person to die at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in northeastern Japan since the March 11 quake and tsunami damaged the facility, causing a string of fires, explosions and radiation leaks in the world's second-worst nuclear accident.

The worker was carrying equipment when he collapsed and died later in hospital, said Naoyuki Matsumoto, spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co. The company does not know the cause of his death, Matsumoto said.

The man had been wearing a radiation protection suit, mask and gloves while working at the plant's waste disposal building, which stores radioactive-contaminated water that has leaked from the tsunami-crippled reactors.

Two Fukushima workers had died March 11 from the tsunami itself, when waves swept into the plant and heavily damaged buildings and equipment. TEPCO said the workers, both in their early 20s, were found in the basement of a turbine building.

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Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku also said the government has no plans to shut down any more functioning nuclear reactors other than three at the Hamaoka power plant in central Japan. The plant was asked Friday to halt the units until a seawall is built and backup systems are improved at Hamaoka.

"Our energy policy is to stick to nuclear power," Sengoku said on a weekly talk show on public broadcaster NHK.

He said Hamaoka was an exception and that the government's closure request Friday did not mean a departure from its nuclear-reliant policy.

Chubu Electric Power Co., which runs the three Hamaoka reactors, postponed its decision Saturday on the government's shutdown request.

The main concern is that shutting down the reactors would likely worsen power shortages expected this summer.

Nuclear energy provides more than one-third of Japan's electricity. Since the March 11 disasters, buildings have reduced lighting, stores have trimmed service hours and subway operators have shut air conditioning to join a nationwide conservation effort.

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Tokyo Electric Power Co. said workers connected ventilation and air filtration equipment in Unit 1 in an attempt to reduce radiation levels in the air inside the building.

The utility must lower radiation levels before it can proceed with the key step of replacing the cooling system that was knocked out by the March 11 quake and subsequent tsunami that left more than 25,000 people dead or missing along Japan's northeastern coast.

Workers have not been able to enter the reactor buildings at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, about 140 miles (230 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo, since the first days after the tsunami. Hydrogen explosions at four of the buildings at the six-reactor complex in the first few days destroyed some of their roofs and walls and scattered radioactive debris.

TEPCO spokesman Junichi Matsumoto called Thursday's development "a first step toward a cool and stable shutdown," which the utility hopes to achieve in six to nine months.

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A research scientist and winner of the Ig Nobel Prize (for scientists who make discoveries that "first make people laugh and then make them think"), Fisher explains the business of calamity prediction in accessible prose and everyday anecdotes. The third in his series on the science of the ordinary (previous entries were "Rock, Paper, Scissors," and "The Perfect Swarm") "Crashes, Crises, and Calamities" is a toolkit for understanding what is at stake in our lives and for the planet -- and what happens when we don’t understand what a disaster looks like in the making.

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Sure, they weren't just any jokes. (Buzzfeed has ranked the most jaw-dropping of them.) But in many ways, they are typical ones for Gottfried, 56, who has paved a long career with the shock and awe of the taboo. He is famous for his version of the notorious "Aristocrats" joke, delivered a mere three weeks after Sept. 11, at a New York Friars Club roast for Hugh Hefner, which has somewhat romantically been christened (by Frank Rich, the New York Observer and the film made in honor of the joke) as the moment it was OK to laugh again. That epic release was made possible, though, only by the World Trade Center joke Gottfried detonated right before, which drew boos, hisses and the refrain that could wind end up as Gottfried's epitaph: "Too soon!"

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The twin disasters destroyed roads, ports, farms and homes and crippled a nuclear power plant that forced tens of thousands of more people to evacuate their houses for at least several months. The government said the damage could cost $309 billion, making it the world's most expensive natural disaster.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said he was moved by his conversations with victims during a recent tour of shelters.

"I felt with renewed determination that we must do our best to get them back as soon as possible," he told reporters.

The extra $50 billion (4 trillion yen) the Cabinet approved is expected to be only the first installment of reconstruction funding. About $15 billion (1.2 trillion yen) will go to fixing roads and ports and more than $8.5 billion (700 billion yen) will go to build temporary homes and clearing rubble.

"This is the first step toward rebuilding Japan after the major disasters," Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda said. Parliament is expected to approve the special budget next week.

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About 70,000-80,000 people were living in the 10 towns and villages within 12 miles (20 kilometers) of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant before the March 11 earthquake and tsunami wrecked its power and cooling systems, setting off the worst nuclear power crisis since the 1986 catastrophe at Chernobyl.

Virtually all of the residents left when the government ordered the area evacuated on March 12, but some occasionally have returned and police cannot legally block them. There currently is no penalty for violating the zone.

"We are considering setting up 'caution areas' as an option for effectively limiting entry" to the zone, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan will meet with local officials and evacuees to discuss the plans during a visit to the affected region Thursday, Edano said.

Now that the situation at the plant appears to have stabilized somewhat, both residents and authorities are considering how to best weather a protracted evacuation. Residents have been demanding they be allowed to check their homes and collect belongings, while government officials are worried about radiation exposure.

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The roadmap for ending the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, presented by Tokyo Electric Power Co. Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata at a news conference, included plans to cover the damaged reactor buildings to contain the radiation and eventually remove the nuclear fuel.

"We sincerely apologize for causing troubles," Katsumata said. "We are doing our utmost to prevent the crisis from further worsening."

Frustrations have been mounting over TEPCO's failure to resolve the nuclear crisis more than a month after a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, knocking out power and cooling systems at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex.

Katsumata, who was hammered by questions over his management responsibility, told reporters he was considering stepping down because of the crisis.

"I feel very responsible," he said.

Katsumata said he was not sure when the tens of thousands who had been forced to flee their homes because of the crisis could go back, but Trade Minister Banri Kaieda said some could return home within six to nine months.

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The announcement came after a magnitude-5.9 earthquake jolted Japan on Saturday morning, hours after the country's nuclear safety agency ordered plant operators to beef up their quake preparedness systems to prevent a recurrence of the nuclear crisis.

There were no reports of damage from the earthquake, and there was no risk of a tsunami similar to the one that struck the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant March 11 after a magnitude-9.0 earthquake, causing Japan's worst-ever nuclear plant disaster.

Since the tsunami knocked out the plant's cooling systems, workers have been spraying massive amounts of water on the overheated reactors. Some of that water, contaminated with radiation, leaked into the Pacific. Plant officials said they plugged that leak on April 5 and radiation levels in the sea dropped.

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Tens of thousands of residents unable to return to their homes near the nuclear plant are bereft of their livelihoods and possessions, unsure of when, if ever, they will be able to return home. Some have traveled hundreds of kilometers (miles) to Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s headquarters in Tokyo to press their demands for compensation.

"We have decided to pay provisional compensation to provide the slightest help for the people (who were affected)," TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu told a news conference.

At the government's request, the utility will start paying out the roughly 50 billion yen ($600 million) in compensation April 28 to those forced to evacuate, with families getting 1 million yen (about $12,000) and single adults getting 750,000 yen (about $9,000), the government said.

Roughly 48,000 households living within about 19 miles (30 kilometers) of the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant would be eligible for the payments, said Trade Ministry spokesman Hiroaki Wada. More compensation was expected later, he said.

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In his 2010 book, "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet," environmental scholar and activist Bill McKibben writes of a planet so devastated by global warming that it's no longer recognizable as the Earth we once inhabited. This is a planet, he predicts, of "melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat." Altered as it is from the world in which human civilization was born and thrived, it needs a new name -- so he gave it that extra "a" in "Eaarth."

The Eaarth that McKibben describes is a victim, a casualty of humankind's unrestrained consumption of resources and its heedless emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases. True, this Eaarth will cause pain and suffering to humans as sea levels rise and croplands wither, but as he portrays it, it is essentially a victim of human rapaciousness.

With all due respect to McKibben's vision, let me offer another perspective on his (and our) Eaarth: as a powerful actor in its own right and as an avenger, rather than simply victim.

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This has prompted a barrage of questions about the possible consequences of the continuing crisis. We turned to  Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a nonprofit organization focused on nuclear security issues, to understand the severity of the current situation, and potential end-game scenarios in Japan.

I think it alarmed a lot of people that now suddenly the Japanese government is saying the nuclear crisis is on par with Chernobyl. Is that characterization accurate?

I think the Japanese authorities finally were forced to publicly recognize the severity of this disaster. They were trying to keep the public calm, to preserve some credibility for the nuclear power industry, so they tried to use reassuring language in their statements, and were hesitant to compare what was going on at Fukushima to Chernobyl. And, of course, it's not Chernobyl. It's different.

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Japanese nuclear regulators said they raised the rating from 5 to 7 -- the highest level on an international scale of nuclear accidents overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency -- after new assessments of radiation leaks from the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant since it was disabled by the March 11 tsunami.

The new ranking signifies a "major accident" that includes widespread effects on the environment and health, according to the Vienna-based IAEA. But Japanese officials played down any health effects and stressed that the harm caused by Chernobyl still far outweighs that caused by the Fukushima plant.

The revision came a day after the government added five communities to a list of places people should leave to avoid long-term radiation exposure. A 12-mile (20-kilometer) radius already had been cleared around the plant.

The news was received with chagrin by residents in Iitate, one of the five communities, where high levels of radiation have been detected in the soil. The village of 6,200 people is about 40 kilometers from the Fukushima plant.

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