Reactors Protectively News Today

>> reporter: its reactors protectively shut down after the earthquake. than an emergency system pumps in water to cool the facilitys fuel rods, but the cooling system failed so did the backup system when the tsunami hit. now operators are using sea water to try to cool the fuel rods and prevent a meltdown. >> its a very frightening situation. and we can only hope for the best, hope meltdown doesnt occur. >> well, some scientists say the best-case scenario is the situation in japan -- that the si...

Data that comes into the center. we have the terrain, land use, the kind of buildings and structures available. we use all that information to basically attempt to estimate the impact that occur downwind from the release point. >> how quickly can you track what it is and where its going? >> so the models will typically run fast in five to ten minutes, we get a close picture to what occurred on the ground. >> winds over japan have been blowing eastward to the pacific coast. the information from n...

Great personal risk, theyre putting their lives on the line, my guess is many of them will pay the ultimate price. and theyre doing it because they care about their country and because someone has to stay. you know, the other issue here is that each day we sort of discover a new problem. and heres the new problem. if you have multiple reactors next to each other and you need to be working on three or four or reactors to try to keep them from melting down and you have a big problem at one of them...

Reactors. thats a high number. much higher than it should be. and another important fact, which is up to 175 miles away on the uss george washington, they were detecting low levels of radiation. so imagine radiation gets released as it starts to disperse, the amount of radiation, the levels are going to start to go down. walking around a country like the united states, for example, youre subjected to about 3 millicevers a year. 400 at any given time right next to the reactor. what that means for...

Health." exactly what that means is still unclear. glenn shadeen joins us via skype from texas to break down all of this for us. good morning, glenn. >> good morning. >> how did this go from a situation where they felt they were going to get a handle on this, find some productive backup system to continue to cool to what were talking about today, which is the leak of at least some amount of radiation from one of these reactors? >> well, ive got to tell you, things have dramatically changed in th...

Which is a battery-powered mechanism that also failed. that means inside because theres not water pumping in one, two, three different ways into this fuel core, you have heat. and that heat is a serious problem as this begins to melt. as you begin to damage this core. engineers went to battery pumps. those worked for a while, they went dead. you saw the diesel pumps, they worked for a while and went dead. its not exactly clear what happened. of but in the last-ditch effort, theyre starting to pu...

Inside the reactors. first, this is all the seismic activity youve seen in japan over the past week. i mean, the original seismic event, you cant see it anymore because these yellow dots show you how many other aftershocks theyve been. heres inside the nuclear plant before the quake and tsunami. reactor one, two, three, and four. most recently an explosion at reactor number four. three explosions overall, and a fire. i want to take you inside on what exactly is happening inside that reactor. hol...

Now, according to officials, there was a build-up of heat and fuel rods were sitting in a pool. that pool of water may have evaporated exposing those rods, and they may have been damaged releasing radioactive material into the air. theyre continuing to put safeguards into place to try to protect people. the 20 kilometers, the 12 to 13-mile exclusion zone is in place. now the prime minister is also warning that people within a 30 kilometer radius must also keep their windows closed, their doors c...