With regard to Unit 3 at the Fukushima complex from the Wikipedia update link:

"Explosion of Reactor Building

At 11:15 JST on 14 March 2011, a building surrounding Reactor 3 of Fukushima 1 exploded as well, presumably due to the ignition of built up hydrogen gas.[97][98] There is no health risk reported, though 600 people have been ordered to stay indoors. Within minutes, it was reported that as with Reactor 1, the outer reactor building was blown apart, but the inner containment vessel was not breached. Eleven people were reported injured in the blast."

The fuel rods in Unit 3 are even more dangerous than the more conventional fuel rods in the other reactors in the complex, being plutonium-based MOX (mixed oxide) fuel.

This is not a good development (sorry for such understatement but it's early in the morning), and does not bode well for Unit 2 at the same complex which also has experienced loss of coolant.

Meanwhile there are reports of similar loss of coolant problems in a neighboring nuclear power complex, and at a third complex.

The US fleet off-shore has monitored increasing radiation and is being shifted out of the "plume."

So now I'm reminded of one of our chants as we marched on the Midland nuclear power plant in Michigan in the late 1970's:

One rotten nuke, two rotten nukes, see how they melt!

Another academic exercise to do while waiting for more grim news from Japan might be to identify how many of the reactors, similar to those in trouble in Japan, in the States (listed above) are located in major earthquake zones. None are listed for California, Oregon or Washington. Perhaps, only the Cooper nuclear plant in Nebraska City, NE, 760 MW, 1974.

Of course there are other types of nuclear power plants in other West Coast states and if any of them had a loss of coolant due to an earthquake, and their back-up systems failed, we would risk nuclear meltdown as well. No one really knows what the consequences of that would be (not good!) but we may soon learn in Japan.

Charley Noble