Page 72 - Nuclear Explosion News Today

Under a situation that could never be expected. the public in japan has enough to worry about a horrible disaster without worrying there is going to be a nuclear explosion. >> sean: the safety agency rated the damage at the plant in fukushima at a 4 on a scale of 1-7. three mile island was a 5. chernobyl rated as a 7. do you agree with the assessment of jay? >> not at all. i was a 4 two days ago. very bad things have happened since. we dont know what is going to happen. there may not be a signif...

It rusts avery, very fast. when it breaks down, it splits. damage to the fuel rods is a partial nuclear meltdown. one of the things that is released into the air at the water level drops and the fuel rods get exposed to the air and the big metal straws start to oxidize, one of the gases is hydrogen, and it is explosive. they believe hydrogen explosion caused this to happen at one of the reactors friday night, daytime saturday japan time. monday morning, japan time, second reactor tame facility s...

>> i think we just lost lee. if we can get lee back from northern japan, we will absolutely do that. robert bezel is joining us now from tokyo, who has just done a report on nightly news tonight about this third blast at the fukushima reactor in northern japan. bob, what can you tell us about what you learned tonight. >> reporter: rachel, it is ominous news. the company that owns the power plant said that one of the reactors, reactor number 2, where there was explosion yesterday, at a press conf...

Later on they announced that there was an explosion. and the explosion seems to have been inside the reactor. so this reactor was behaving differently. they thought they had it under control with the water. the water wasnt working. fuel analogs became exposed, so they had to try to pump in sea water. when they tried to pump in sea water is when things went badly awry. whether they can still pump in sea water or what happens next they havent said, and i think they probably just dont know now and ...

Robert bezel is joining us now from tokyo, who has just done a report on nightly news tonight about this third blast at the fukushima reactor in northern japan. bob, what can you tell us about what you learned tonight. >> reporter: rachel, it is ominous news. the company that owns the power plant said that one of the reactors, reactor number 2, where there was explosion yesterday, at a press conference this morning, they said that explosion was not like the other two, which was outside buildings...

Open, but if the containment were intact, the pressure inside would be maintaining constant and not decaying as it is or reports show that pressure is dropping. >> in terms of that word containment, it is a word we use commonly not as jargon, it is meant to be several types of structure. containment could be the outside building that surrounds the reactor as a whole. that was what we saw the explosion do so much damage to in the first two explosions, but containment also refers to the smaller co...

I am obviously a layman, trying to understand this for myself as well as make it understandable for viewers. >> it was a solid and accurate description of where we are today. >> okay. within the last couple hours, as i mentioned, a third explosion was reported at fukushima number 2 reactor. number 1 had explosion this weekend, number 3 did 24 hours ago. and now number 2 has happened as well. can we tell yet if this is a more consequential blast than the others or is this likely to be of the same...

Which is why they have been adding sea water to it. with the type of explosion they had and the type of damage they think they have had, can they continue their efforts to keep those fuel rods submerged in sea water? can they keep doing in effect mitigation work to prevent further damage to the fuel rods, further meltdown, or does this mean their ability to even keep that sea water there is also impaired? >> the answer to that is i dont think anybody knows that right now. what happened with this...

At the news conference on the third explosion at the japanese reactor, reporters were visibly angry with the companys explanation of what happened with that explosion. to our understanding of an already stressful situation in japan, we can also add japans history frankly of scandals and coverups related to nuclear power and safety. in 1995 when a reactor caught fire, the government run agency in charge of the reactor tried to cover up how bad the fire was by releasing a doctored video of the acc...

It may have resulted in a breach of the internal containment vessel for the first time, may have. we do not have confirmation on that, it may have. again, an explosion is not the same as a meltdown. an explosion at a nuclear reactor is not the same as a nuclear explosion. what happens happened is that the inability to keep enough water circulating over the giant fuel rods, enough water to keep them cool, that has resulted in damaged nuclear fuel rods and that caused three explosions so far. and ...