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>> there is no water in the spent fuel pool known as number 4. it is my great hope that the information we have is not accurate. i would hope, for the sake of everyone, that the situation is not at the state we think it is. megyn: he says there is no water left and i hope i'm wrong. japanese officials said, there is still some water there. then an official came out and said, i think the united states is right on this, there is no water left in connection with this fuel pool number four. what does that mean? >> i believe that we need to get a simple approach to explaining this, because i'm not ...

Years. what's pushing the firemen back is the radiation that's coming from the spent fuel pool, and it's like, they're called gamma rays but it's a very high powered x-ray, and without the water in that fuel pool, there's two things, one, it's not being cooled but two it's not being shielded and so there's an awful lot of gamma rays flooding that site forcing the workers to say further away. >> which is why the water cannons have stopped, they've stopped the water cannons using the water on the facility and they say that they're not going to resume that and it may be because of those gamma ray...

Expand, eventually to rupture, and first to release the gas that's already accumulated within spent fuel, and then as the uranium pellets in the fuel continue to heat up, more and more radioactive material will be squeezed out of the pellets, mostly in the form of cesium 137, which would be a gas at those temperatures. so if the fuel pool has gone dry, that would be a very hard condition to reverse. >> is there at that point a risk of explosion and do either of those matter at that point? >> well, there would be presumably a fire, because the metal around the fuel rods, which is zirconium will...

This would cause fuel rods to expand, eventually to rupture, and first to release the gas that's already accumulated within spent fuel, and then as the uranium pellets in the fuel continue to heat up, more and more radioactive material will be squeezed out of the pellets, mostly in the form of cesium 137, which would be a gas at those temperatures. so if the fuel pool has gone dry, that would be a very hard condition to reverse. >> is there at that point a risk or either of those matter at that point? >> well, there would be presumably a fire, because the metal around the fuel rods, which is z...

The conflicting views that seem to be emerging between united states officials and japanese officials on the severity of the situation? >> lawrence, this is something that's been going on almost ever since the crisis began. just how good is the information that is coming out of japan, and it is not just u.s. officials that questioned it. the officials from the international atomic energy agency based in vienna, the u.n.'s atomic watchdog have questioned just how good the information is that's coming out, and the head of the nrc, gregory jaczko did not back down from his claim that there is no ...