Page 29 - Treactor Core News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Reactor core and control rods and pods here warming with your uranium inside a nuclear reactor. those rods are warming water to water warm to warm steam to water a turbine. goes on and on and on. as long as all processes are working, it's great. the problem is it didn't work right because when the earthquake happened, power got shut off. this was generating its own power. the power shut off and then the backups came in. the backups were a little generator, literally. they got flooded by the tsunami. then they went to backup power by batteries. batteries are only supposed to last for eight hour...

The years have been built to very exacting specifications and you don't, however, predict an earthquake that occurs once every 500 years to occur as soon as this one did. so, that the -- even a very well constructed reactor could easily have difficulty given the magnitude of the quake. >> eric: and potentially talking about another hydrogen explosion, and one of the container buildings of the second reactor. what do you predict could happen next? and how do we stop it? >> obviously there's a lot we still don't know but i would emphasize so far -- underline "so far" -- the containment structure...

The radioactive core and you know, it is really a touch and go as reactor operators are in contest with a nuclear nightmare. >> harris: you used a lot of scientific terms there. i want to break it down. what is melt down and are they moving toward it. >> they have lost power to the reactor and 36 hours, they are trying to restore the power in order to move cooling water around the reactor core and the fuel. inulose -- in losing the ability to cool the reactor. enriched uranium swells and overheats and it cracks the tubes that house the uranium and this is generating the hitrogen gas which of c...

Yet whether the thing is under control. there's two reactors that are the biggest concern, numbers three and one, and number three, they thought they had -- it looks like it's under control. number one, just a little while ago, the energy minister said that they were pumping sea water into it, which is a desperate move. it's going to destroy the reactor for good. but he said the gauge didn't indicate that the water was going up, and that worried them, because that either was a broken gauge or there wasn't water getting in there somehow, and he was worried that there could be an explosion of hy...

Let's say people are exposed to high levels of radiation. what does that mean? how does that manifest itself, both short term and long term? >> reporter: well, let's make it clear that nobody here has been exposed to high levels of radiation. there's been some small levels of radiation which could cause an increased risk of cancer in maybe 20 or 30 years for very few people, maybe a dozen or something. but if there was a lot of radiation, it could cause a lot of cancer in a hurry and even more serious, immediate problems in those people, but that has not happened. that's the risk of a big blow...