TEPCO has now admitted that three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant have suffered full core meltdowns and melt throughs, meaning the containment has been compromised. This all occurred during the early stages of the crisis caused by an inability to run the pumps necessary to maintain cooling water to the reactor cores and the spent fuel pools. This is an even that could also occur at all 104 nuclear reactors operating in the US if an extended blackout were to occur.

A new study shows an marked increase in infant mortality since the Fukushima meltdowns which has emitted radioactive steam into the air and contaminated the ocean.

The recent CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report indicates that eight cities in the northwest U.S. (Boise ID, Seattle WA, Portland OR, plus the northern California cities of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Berkeley) reported the following data on deaths among those younger than one year of age:

4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 – 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week)
10 weeks ending May 28, 2011 – 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week)

This amounts to an increase of 35% (the total for the entire U.S. rose about 2.3%), and is statistically significant. Of further significance is that those dates include the four weeks before and the ten weeks after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster.

Fukushima is now considered a worse event than Chernobyl and the is consideration being given to raising the highest INES level of 7 to an 8 to accommodate the scale of the disaster. Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates tells Al Jazeera

“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.

Japan’s 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.

Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.

“Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed,” he said, “You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively.”

TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water – as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.

“The problem is how to keep it cool,” says Gundersen. “They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?”

Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.

Blackouts extending more than eight hours that might occur in the event of cyclical geo-magnetic storms could initiate a series of cascading failures at any of the US nuclear reactors. Within a twenty mile circumference, the initial area ordered evacuated by the Japanese government, seventeen million people in the US would need to be displaced. The more appropriate distance should have been fifty miles as hot spots have been found within that range. More than 109 million people in the US live within fifty miles of a nuclear reactor.

Water tables in Fukushima are already contaminated with more than 250 times the allowable safe limit of strontium. Imagine what a nuclear meltdown would mean in the US.