New TEPCO update:

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031304-e....

High Pressure Coolant Injection System of Unit 3 automatically stopped. We endeavored to restart the Reactor Core Isolation Cooling System but failed. Also, we could not confirm the water inflow of Emergency Core Cooling System.

This article might also be of interest, based on the information available from authorities in Japan: http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/nuclear-crisis-in-j...

>the US military has flown coolant to the site, but the coolant they use is regular water; I can’t imagine why the US would need to fly in coolant.

The US did not fly any coolant to Japan.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/11/japan-quake-nuclea... "US did not deliver coolant to Japan nuclear reactor"

"Ultimately, however, Japan did not need assistance from the United States but Clinton did not appear to have been updated before she made her public remarks."

0426: Japanese government spokesman Yukio Edano says radioactive meltdowns may have occurred in two reactors at the plant - AFP. via BBC

Lol... This is from one of the comments below the article (I did not write this):

"Feet? Degrees Fahrenheit? This is so funny. How many feet wide is your nuclear reactor core? How many stones does it weigh? Surely this must be a joke.

The article is laden with namedropping but has no information at all on all crucial points such as the actual explosion. That anyone takes this seriously escapes me.

And, seriously? Measurements in body part lengths? Any engineer who went to school must have learned the proper system. I seriously doubt this article is genuine."

I kind of agree. Japanese reactors do not use feet or retarded Fahrenheit scale. If you write a scientific article, use a proper scale and SI standard of measurements in order to be taken seriously (hint, hint, nudge, nudge).

> Japanese reactors do not use feet or retarded Fahrenheit scale.

If they are designed by an American company (in this case GE) in the 1960s, maybe they do...

Meters are stupidly based on the size of the Earth (literally, given some of the ways the meter was originally defined). Give us the reactor dimensions in attoparsecs!

You should read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre

"Since 1983, it is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second"

Yes, that is technically the definition now, but under that logic, since a foot is precisely 0.3048 meters, you can just as easily say a foot is the length of the path travelled by light in 1/983571056 of a second. The meter was clearly originally defined by earth, and the precise definition only clarified later.

The meter was originally defined in terms of the earth, and the foot was originally defined in terms of peoples feet.

No matter how you slice it, feet are just dumb.

The sad part is that some people are STILL trying to argue that...

Because units derived from Earth's orbit are so much less arbitrary than units derived from Earth's circumference...

Any good physicist will be able to give you the dimensions in decillions of Plank lengths.

this was a comment written by US scientist on CNN website, not scientific article.

I'm all for SI, but units of measurements do not matter as long as you know what you're talking about.