On March 11, 2011, an earthquake-tsunami double-punch delivered a knockout blow to Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor complex. Electric power was lost, causing a failure of the emergency cooling systems which, in turn, left three reactor cores to overheat and explode, sending clouds of radiation across land, sea and air. The atmospheric contamination was detected across the US, in Stockholm and below the Equator.
History may be repeating itself. On the morning of March 18, 2013, the damaged Fukushima facility once again lost outside electrical power.
In the early hours of the blackout, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) assured the press that the site's reactors were "unaffected and no other abnormalities were found." (Of course, these reactors are still suffering from the "abnormality" of having exploded and experienced meltdowns — with molten fuel, in at least one case, escaping the metal reactor vessel and spilling onto the floor of the containment room.)
-more-