Japan is raising the severity rating of the radioactive water leak at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant to “Level Three”, a serious incident on the international scale for radiological releases.  It’s a sign the problem is worse than previously disclosed.

300 tons of highly radioactive water has escaped from a holding tank just 500 meters from the Pacific Ocean.  Each liter of the water contains 80 million Becquerels of radiation from deadly substances.  Making matters worse, engineers don’t even know the exact location of the leak.

Officials with Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) had originally assigned a Level One "Anomaly" rating to the leak, but the change to Level Three from the authority’s commissioners today.

Each one-step increase on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) represents a 10-fold increase in severity.  This is a two-step jump, meaning 10x10; 100 times as bad as originally reported.  By comparison, the 2011 Triple meltdown was a Level Seven, the most serious of the INES ranking.

Meanwhile, South Korea's second-largest carrier Asiana Airlines said on Wednesday it was cancelling charter flights to Fukushima in Japan from October due to radiation fears from the problematic Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant.