Page 30 - Treactor Core News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

You heard a moment ago from janie, her husband was inside one of the crippled power plants. more details on how serious the problems are right you with jean me serve. what's the latest? >> reporter: reports are that at one plant there are elevated temperatures. at the other plant, radiation levels are up. but according to the kyoto news agency, eight times the normal level at a monitoring station outside the plant. 1,000 times above normal in a control room inside the plant. here's what happens. the plant shut down during the quake, but the power into the plant was also disrupted, and that shu...

Tsunami is doing. that tsunami obviously going upstream, engulfing some of the farms and homes in that area. >> just extraordinary. more on the nuclear emergency. you heard a moment ago from janie, her husband was inside one of the crippled power plants. things began getting out of hand. more details on how serious the problems are right you with jean meserve. what's the latest on the two malfunctioning nuclear power plants? >> reporter: reports are that at one plant there are elevated temperatures. at the other plant, radiation levels are up. but according to the kyoto news agency, eight time...

Challenge? >> from what i saw they had brought portable power in, so they'll continue in this vein until they get more power in. without any power at all, the next challenge wouldn't come for, oh, a day or two anyway. >> help the lehman who doesn't understand how this works. when there's an earthquake, there's a trigger. they're automatically shut down. then if you lose power, describe the cooling challenge essentially and the fact of how hot the core would be and what -- why it's so important to cool it down. >> the reactor core when the chain reaction stops, the pieces that are split atom ar...

Explosion and that radio activity has been detected. so this sounds like they could have lost this race against time and this could be a worst case scenario. >> what do you mean by that? >> well, the -- the fuel rods conduct or continually produce radioactive material under great heat and pressure. unless that is cooled down, the heat and pressure will build up and the fuel rods can melt through the reactor core container. and in this case, the building is the only containment to keep it from being released into the environment. and, in fact, now it appears that the building has been damaged w...

Daiichi power reactors. there's two remember. japanese nuclear and industrial safety agency told cnn today. a meltdown is a catastrophic failure, a catastrophic failure. that's what we're hearing of the reactor core with potential for widespread radiation release. a director of the agency's international affairs office expressed confidence, however, that the efforts to control the crisis would prove successful. again, this is uncharted territory because they haven't had anything like this happen. meantime, a second reactor at the same facility as we've been telling you about failed shortly aft...