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Downstairs and walk away and the machine will shut down all by itself. >> that's been a big question on social media, why can't these things just shut down? >> it will shut down with power. >> you need power to stop the rods from overheating. >> correct. the whole thing happens because the uranium -- i'm not aa nuclear engineer, but i've listened to a lot of very smart guys. it's in and it's out. i'm going to do my best to bring it to layman's terms. fuel rods here get very, very hot. they uranium 235, they're excited, their atoms bounce, they get very, very hot. control rods down below, when ...

What you see in yellow are the control rods designed to drop in place and control those nuclear rods to contain the first line of containment, the first line of defense in the event things go wrong. now, here's the rods as they overheat, okay? the water surrounds the area here and the water is used to try and control the temperature. now, after that water inside the pipeline, if that is not sufficient enough, they pump water in from the ocean. into the area, to try and continue to cool it down and now they are considering whether or not they have to drop helicopter water down from the area, up...

Maintain their temperature at 270 degrees celsius. but if the cooling fails, the temperature could rise to over 1,200 degrees. this temperature is hot enough to melt the fuel rods. when the earthquake hit, the first safety system to prevent a meltdown was activated. control rods rose into the reactor to stop the nuclear fission. as planned, the reactor stopped operating. but the fuel rods were still hot. water should have been circulated to cool them down. however, this didn't happen. because of a power outage right after the quake. so the second safety system turned on. the emergency diesel p...

Pure, pure water. that pure water boils off. it steams, causes huge amounts of pressure and the pressure goes out through that pipe. >> so these rods come in, they hit the water, they steam. >> yep. you have to be careful how much steam you make. they become up and down here with these control rods controlling how many neutrons are flying around in there, the control rods slow down the reaction. you take the control rods out, you get a lot of reaction and you have to -- >> it comes through here. now you have the turbines moving. >> do you need more or less power? is it day, night, more power o...

Inside the reactors. first, this is all the seismic activity you've seen in japan over the past week. i mean, the original seismic event, you can't see it anymore because these yellow dots show you how many other aftershocks they've been. here's 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. hold on a second. there we go. so this is the core. these are the control rods coming up, these are...