fast breathe reactor. the japanese minnesota industry has opinion japanese ministry has one of the hottest regulation on nuclear, and i don t think i minean, they a slow coming out of information, but they don t tell lies, they don t cover up. what i meant in discussion with the ambassador is they are trying to lead a nuclear strategy in the wrong way and don t really open the debate for that. if i understand you properly, you were referring to what we call the mox, acronym for enriched uranium that has plutonium that has been in some reactors, am i correct? that s right, that s right. if i m right am i right, that is part of the strategy that actually is creating this crisis in the sense that that is a highly enriched and perhaps more dangerous type of uranium and plutonium, that if it were
nuclear reactors, and 23 are the same design as the fukushima nuclear plant. as we look at the multiple crises in japan, the obvious question is this could the same thing happen here in the united states? jim walsh joins us again. he s a nuclear security expert. he s been looking into this question. jim, welcome. good to be with you. first, jim, i got to start yesterday we had this dramatic tension between what the chairman of the u.s. nuclear regulatory commission was saying, he was saying you have no water in unit four norfolk japan unit four over in japan, and 24 hours later we re not hearing anything about this. what do you make of this, the current situation over there? are they making any progress, or are we still on the brink of a crisis? all right, those two questions one, what about this dispute between japan and the united states? there appear to have been some helicopter photographs that suggest that there is some water in the nuclear waste fuel pool, the spe
difference here between the u.s. and japan. the situations between these two countries. we don t put six plants all together in one place. which is part of what the problem is here. but there are some design vulnerabilities, no doubt about that. i think there are two things that people worry about in terms of the nuclear waste, the that s being stored at those plants that you referred to. one is, and this came after 9/11, are they vulnerable to terrorist attack? if you get al qaeda, they grab a plane and aim the plane not at the reactor but at the spent fuel pond that s up in those plants, in those 24 plants, and because there s no containment vessel, they re able to plunge the plane in. you have a dramatic loss of cooling, and then some of them begin to catch fire or they melt or in any case generates a lot of radiation. i think that s the core concern in the last ten years. more in the long term, the question is what are we going to do with all the waste? we re generating nuclear
hour. there s also, they reported, drop in pressure in rector number three. that in reactor number three. that could indicate a rupture. and there s a controversial between what the u.s. says is going on and what the japanese say is going on. the u.s. said yesterday there s little to no water in the spent fuel rod pool for reactor number four. japanese officials say, well, they don t actually know if there is or isn t water. they don t know how much water there might be, if there is any water at all. some contradiction there, but again, the focus right now seems to be restoring power which would be a major step, and fighting getting some water on to those spent fuel rods in reactor number three. there s so much going on, it almost makes your head spin. one of the background issues, of course, is that there were only at one point about 50 people going in to try to handle all this. any sense of what the size is of the force that is actually able to go into the reactor spaces to try
serious questions remain about how japan is handling the nuclear reactor crisis. anderson cooper s in tokyo, has the japanese government or power company provided any additional information to clear things up? reporter: it sounded like the iaea had had one step forward, reporting power had been restored. power had been connected to reactor number two. tepco, the company that runs the reactors, said the iaea report is not true. they are trying to restore power to reactor number two. ultimately they re going to try to restore power to reactor number two. that s what started this cascade of problems, the lack of power to keep the rods cool.