Page 27 - Treactor Core News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Plant about 170 miles north and east of our location here in tokyo. workers are having trouble with several reactors there. these are the reactors in question. before the disaster. on saturday a hydrogen explosion blew the roof off and wall containment building unit number 1. that triggered the evacuation of some 185,000 people. on monday, another explosion hit their unit 3. as workers tried to cool the reactor core with sea water. but the real problem now is in unit number 2. officials say water levels there have dropped not once but twice leaving the uranium fuel rods out in the open. >> the...

Now. >> and that fear is probably going to be around for some time. thank you so much for joining us. we are going to go ahead and go now to paul carroll, a nuclear expert and program director. paul, what can you tell us about the explosion at the plant and where things stand right now? >> well, what i can tell you is basically the last updates that i have head it seems to be consistent with what happened to the first unit that had a hydrogen explosion and what is most important for everyone to remember is how little we do know. we really need to be as specific and as careful as we can about w...

Worst possible choice of pouring raw sea water into that plant. we don't have a lot of experience doing this. it certainly doesn't happen to three different plants in a row in three days in a row compounded by hydrogen explosions that have done presumably some damage to the buildings, if not the reactor core. so i think you can prepare for events but sometimes events that have a low probability still happen. that's what's happening here. and then have you interaction effects. like people taking different drugs. you have a tsunami and an earthquake and a breakdown and other things all going tog...

Here is a power failure rather than a design flaw. at least from what people understand at this point. what happened was, when the earthquake struck, they got knocked off the -- they got knocked off the grid. the reactor shut down, as they're supposed to. that's the good news. the problem is is that the cooling system didn't have any power to keep putting water on to the core. so what's supposed to happen is you go to a diesel generator. those kicked in, but what happened an hour after the earthquake struck is the tsunami came in. knocked out the diesel generators. after the diesel generators,...

Quickly as possible to minimize the exposure. >> let's take a look at this grid we have seen, it's a horrific grid, but it compares the various nuclear meltdown scenarios. we have the chernobyl, of course, in our deep memory of the soviet union, where that occurred, and that was the worst. here's chernobyl. it has the highest rating, a seven. the levels below that are at five, three mile island, that got a five. the japanese officials are saying now that the situation at fukushima right now, the one we're looking at, that plant is still a four. give us a sense of what that means, seven being c...