Someone passed on to me a short presentation by Tsuneyoshi Kamae, a physicist at SLAC/KIPAC at Stanford University (my alma mater!) with a number of useful links and comments.
It appears from his comments, which I have not reproduced, that even scientists have a hard time understanding some the concepts and units of measure being bandied about, and base their judgments on articles by journalists, which have even less scientific background.
Many of these pages are number-heavy but text-light, so can be read with Google translate.
MIT has set up a good description of the structure of the reactors and expert's analyses on http://mitnse.com/. The eyes do tend to glaze over when reading this, but it is well-written for the average layperson, so worth the effort.
There are many radiation monitoring stations in Japan (on city halls and other institutions), so the reporting is extremely detailed: http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/saigaijohou/syousai/1303723.htm. The radiation levels in the area around the Fukushima plant are at the bottom of this Yahoo.jp page.
Based on another set of data (X-Ray spectrum of dust collected in Tsukuba) which only an engineer could love, Prof Tsuneyoshi concludes that "fresh release of radioactive fallout" has stopped since March 15 and that radiation in the atmosphere is likely due to gases (e.g. Krypton) released from spent fuel rods not covered by water. Hence the ongoing efforts to pump water into the reactors.
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