Here in Japan you "charge" the payment systems before hand with cash at machines that are all around. They are not linked to any kind of personal data at all if you don't want them to be. Upside you don't have the problems you mentioned. Downside you lose a fully charged card you're out all that money, same thing with cash though. There are also no fees here in fact I get airline miles by using mine, it's quite convenient really.

We are far enough away as not to worry horribly personally, but this is happening in the country I live in. My question to those familiar with such things on here is how effective is the technique they will use over the next two days of flooding the core with sea water? That is as much as we know technically at this point so I can't go into more details, not being an expert on nuclear power myself, but I would to here any info from the slashdot crowd on how this works and how effective it might be.

And to quickly summarize from this perspective for those outside the country trying to piece together news. All the reactors here (I believe) shut down properly when the quake struck, as designed. However Fukushima Dai-1 (No. 1) was also hit hard by the tsunamis which took out it's main and back-up generators which were used to pump cooling water into the cores. Late last night they were frantically trying to fly in generators but apparently they did not get there soon enough or did not work well enough and you have what we see now, a meltdown which has probably already begun (nobody here knows either). A lack of power to get cooling fluid into the core causing a possible meltdown, to simplify even more...