Now there's another reactor that has lost emergency cooling at the same plant.

Kinda wild, they had electric power to the cooling system, a backup system in case the power failed, and a backup to the backup in case the backup system failed. The earthquake killed the power, the tsunami killed the backup, and now for 3 reactors, the backup to the backup is apparently not working as intended.

They may eventually resort to just hoping that the 8-foot concrete walls will hold long enough for the nuclear reaction to finally come to an end after the fuel melts out of the reactor, thus containing almost everything that they did not intentionally vent. If that happens, it will be a three mile island incident instead of a disaster.

The good news is that a lot of very brilliant people will study what happened here, learn what they did wrong when they assumed this was a earthquake-proof tsunami-proof system, and better reactors will be designed from what we learn about this.

heh, if it was scheduled to be shut down soon, then human nature being what is it, I wouldn't be surprised if we discover that everyone started getting lazy and slacked off on maintaining the backup power supplies. Why bother if everything is coming down soon anyway? Not like we'll have the biggest earthquake and tsunami in the nation's history within those next few months! I'd expect a lot of ritual suicides from some nuclear engineers.

Sounds like the Japanese are acknowledging that at least a partial melt occurred/is occurring in reactor 1. And, reactor 3 is facing the same.

The meltdown isn't the biggest worry, correct? It's the matter escaping the containment dome?

That would be worse, yes.

More in the link: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/as...ake/index.html

****

Doesn't look good. But it seems like they've struggled to control the situation from the beginning.

well, better them than us. Even in California, we only have to deal with one major fault. The island of Japan is in the middle of the horrifying dreaded "ring of fire" with 3 major active continental faults.

Even if Japan goes total Chernobyl with thousands exposed to high radiation, we'll learn a lot from their mistakes and design even safer reactors from this valuable experience. This should not discourage us ***at all*** from nuking up the entire United States, except maybe near the west coast and near the new madrid fault close to St. Louis.

Japan is a crappy place to build a nuclear reactor, but there are lots and lots of tectonically stable places far from any ocean in the US where nuclear reactors would be absolutely perfect and ideal.

Tsunami from almost ground level.

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Amazing use of Google Earth - Before and After images of the area hardest hit by the devastation of the Earthquake/Tsunami. Mother Nature was in beast mode. Unreal.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/ja...eforeafter.htm

Incredible.

Now if only we could get the Phelps clan to protest outside the plants with 'God hates Japan' signs.

Insane

Here's something for teedubya to freak out over :) My son posted this on Facebook...