all right, patrick fuller, spokesperson for the international federation of red cross. thank you so much and best of luck to you out. there we ll check in with you again soon. nightmarish scene. it is. and people like patrick who have seen so many international disasters describe this as the worst they ve ever seen. you mentioned 127 million people in the country. the country in geographic size smaller than california. you can imagine just the density, the population density and the kind of scope of the tragedy as they try to help people and how difficult how difficult that must be. well, to find out more about the ongoing efforts and how you can help, i know there are a lot of people who want to help in a small way. go to cnn.com/impact. impact your world page. right now we re going to check in with jennifer delgado. hopefully you ll be able to give us more information about the wind direction. they want to make sure this wind continues to blow offshore and not on. that s
personal dosimeter. basically it sounds an alarm if you ve been subjected to one millisievert and gives you an idea of how much you re being exposed to. one way to get an idea of the concerns or levels of radiation, but that s sort of the global context trying to piece all the various numbers and pieces of information together. and that s what it s all about, sanjay. trying to figure out that information because there are so many unknowns and we know that it s changing literally by the minute. sanjay gupta, thanks, sanjay. in the meantime, hillary clinton is meeting with japan s foreign minister at a g-8 summit in paris where she s offering condolences and pledging america s assistance. japan is always is a very generous donor to any disaster
what we tend not to talk about are the significant mental health aspects to this. if you live through an experience like this, 50 years ago and then, suddenly, this is happening to you, and maybe you re homeless, maybe you ve lost a husband or a wife, you re in a shelter, you ve lost all of your belongings and then these memories about radiation or fears that you might be exposed, this is a tremendous burden for people to face, particularly if they are a vulnerable population. if you re a child and expectant mother and worried about your children born in another couple of months and if you have xre existing mental health problems and you re prone to depression or whatever, there is a real mental health dimension to this nobody is talking about and i m sure they are suffering there. they may not be bleeding but there is a lot of suffering. you bring up a good point. it certainly is the uncertainty right now. it seems we are at this point where, you know, it could go either way and no
is deteriorating this morning from haul accounts. there s been a new explosion at one reactor, a fire in another, and this means now that four reactors at the fukushima daiichi power plant have been damaged in some way. some high radiation levels also detected, dangerously high right now, in the air. japan s prime minister is warning everyone within 20 miles of the facility to remain inside for now. meanwhile, the growing nuclear threat has overshadowed the ongoing rescue and recovery effort days after the quake and tsunami, pictures of the devastation are still, frankly, very hard to comprehend. cnn s soledad o brien got a firsthand look at one of the hardest hit areas in the town of kasanuma. good morning, soledad. reporter: yes. yeah, the nuclear issue is one of the reasons we moved a little bit north.
issues are concerned about. you re talking about the spent fuel pond. why was that so dangerous? and what does that signal to you? see, that s been that s something that my colleagues and i have been worried about for some time. and the government had said nothing about it. the way the plans work is they burn up that fuel to produce electricity and that creates waste. and a waste is a nasty brew of highly radioactive materials. at least in japan, not everywhere, we bury that. in japan they try to recycle it. often it sits at the reactor site while it s waiting to be sent to reprocessing plant. and it is a substance that also like the inside of the reactor has to stay cool, has to be covered in water. and when it s not, then it will catch fire. and if it catches fire, that plume will be highly