Page 3 - Control Rods News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

In addition to the water being pumped in from the ocean, that's a backup plan, one set into the design of a reactor such as this. see these plates that hold the rods? those can be put in place to control the fuel rods and slow them down and trap that nuclear radiation to make sure it does not release into the air. control rods here are marked in yellow and they can slide down tbhb this case they divide the fuel rods in the four different areas. so again you get more containment on the inside of the fuel rods. one other thing to show you, we can show you the containment walls that are so critic...

Appears to be an explosion and fire in unit 4. apparently the fuel is burning. this reactor was shut down prior to the earthquake, but they have a fuel pool, nuclear fuel pool and it's apparently on fire. >> brian: that's 4. we know there was problems at 1, 2, and 3. and there have been problems with more. >> steve: the big worry is a meltdown. when you've got the meltdown because then all that nuclear stuff melts out of the concrete and steel bubble and then goes to the containment floor and the worst case scenario is -- you can see right there -- you've got the fuel rods inside. they've got ...

Nuclear reaction from happening in an orderly way. i don't know if you ever had the chance to develop a photo in a dark room before everything went digital. you know how you put the photo, or may have seen it in a movie, somebody working with an actual -- with actual film and developing chemicals in an actual dark room. put the photo in the developer until the image comes in like you want it, then once it is in that, you put it in a different chemical bath to stop the developing. that's like the control rods. they stop the chain reaction. but the fuel rods, those pellets of uranium inside big ...

To be very dangerous for children, infants, and pregnant mothers. >> okay. let's go through what should happen at these plants during a disaster? after a quake the nuclear plants, they shut down automatically, right? then you have back-up diesel generators. that's what pumps the water to cool down the reactors? >> well, the process that occurs is at first control rods are inserted that stop the reaction, but the core, the fuel, has a tremendous amount of radioactivity in it and as the radioactivity decays, it gives off a tremendous amount of heat, so there has to be water circulating through t...

Relieve the pressure and avoid a meltdown. i'm joined now by cham dallas, professor of disaster management at the university of georgia. william. >> thank you, will. >> professor, we know that the problem lies inside the cooling system, in at least a couple of the reactors. what are officials doing to avoid disaster? >> well, right now, the -- they have backup systems, and some of the backup systems haven't gone the way they wanted. the thing to remember is that they have already stopped the reactor. they got the control rods done into the reactor so that there's no more fission going on. howe...