Page 13 - Reactor Two News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Extinguished. they also said earlier today that some more cracks have been found in some of the rack tores all at the fukushima plant. this is one of the english language newspapers here in japan. it has them all lined up. reactor one, reactor two, reactor three, reactor four. all four of them continue to suffer problems. shepard? >> shepard: do we know where we go from here? you know, the japanese government has instituted this no-fly zone around the plant, adam. i understand the basics of it. is it just too dangerous for the helicopters to get up there to try to put this fire out? particular...

Children's dolls, empty shoes, wedding photos covered in mud. as we left, japanese soldiers arrived to begin a cursory search. they go by smell, searching fast. there's too much ground to cover, too many more neighborhoods to search. two search and rescue teams from the united states, fairfax county an excellent search and rescue team. and another from los angeles, another group of remarkable men and women. they've arrived in northern japan. we'll be following their efforts in the next several days. the ongoing nuclear explosion at reactor number two, at the plant that we've been, the daiichi ...

Reactor two is pretty grim at the moment because there appears to be two simultaneous problems. firstly, there is this long-running challenge of trying to cool the fuel rods in the core. and the plant operators have recently said 1.7 meters, and that's a significant amount of fuel rods, are now above water. secondly, there was also an explosion inside the outer walls of the reactor, itself. the fear is that explosion has damaged those outer walls and that creates the potential for the release of radiation. >> how does this compare to three mile island and chernobyl? >> well, i think chernobyl ...

Safe. a week ago they sent workers into this reactor, reactor two. they had an endoscope and a thermometer and a water gauge. you want to fuel to be covered with water so that the fuel can be kept cool and also to shield its radiation. when these workers went into that reactor, they were expecting the level of water in there to be at about 33 feet. what they found was that it was at two feet. that's very, very bad. that is both a symptom that something is very wrong, but either, i guess it's hot enough to be evaporating that water or the water is leaking. it's a symptom of something going wron...

Water that had been overflowing in the past? >> reporter: right. the difficulty you have, of course, is that you still have reactors that are overheated, and they have to be cool. the cores have to be kept at a controllable temperature as do the fuel rods. so they've been dumping water or circulating water to do all of that. the problem is the it's not a perfect system. there are large leaks, it would appear. so you have radioactive water that's escaping from the normal c contamminary. there are collection pools that have been gathering. these are the problems you have, especially from reactor...