water comes from somewhere else. the ocean in japan. comes through as a condenser, like the air conditioner in your car. changes the steam back to water and goes through and does the same thing again. we lost this water because the pump died, not because of the earthquake, because of the tsunami flooded back-up generators. the pumps were running on their own power. this whole thing shut down because of the earthquake. earthquake didn t hurt it. what hurt it is the pump shut down because the tsunami swamped the 13 generators, they were the backup to keep this running. when this stopped, they had to put some water in it, something, because all the water steamed out. they haddumping sea water into it. it wrecked it. it wrecked it. the new power generators will never do this.
104 plants in the u.s., about half of which are more than 30 years old. give us the lowdown on a nuclear plant. how does the energy or at least the ones we re talking about, how does that generate energy? a 40-year-old plant. here are the generators, right there. there are a number of ways to move a generator. you can boil and burn coal. that would boil steam. you could run it through a dam. right. big water dam, big lake. all of a sudden the water gets from the generators on it s just electricity. it s how you get it to the generators. how do we move the turbines that make the power. that s it. that s the whole thing in a nutshell. what we re dog with this, we re heating water, tremendously. i m not talking 200 degrees. like 250 degrees c, so really, really hot. big pressure. this is a pressure cooker that you could cook a clam in in about two seconds. so the fuel rods are in the core. the fuel rods touch water.
translator: i stayed outside the whole night. the water gushed in when i opened my door. i was washed away, but i held on to a floating tree that came my way. i struggled hard to cling to it, to stop myself from going under. but i did go under. during my struggle, a totami mat came floating towards me. i jumped on and stayed there. i was washed away. circling around some houses. my daughter was also swept away. i still don t know where she is. thousands upon thousands of people are missing right now in japan. help from around the world is pouring in to help find those missing people and to recover the bodies of the dead. we ve seen crews of people on land and in the water, packs of search and rescue dogs, all the stuff you normally see.
think it s going to be i think it will be fine really. reporter: yeah? what makes you think it s going to be fine? i don t know. i i m just guessing really. reporter: hopeful? just looking at this right now, it s pretty bad. reporter: but we re stopped by a street full of mud and debris and water. we can t get through. what do you think? we can go around that direction. reporter: we could try. at every turn, the road impassable. your parents must be frantically thinking about you. yeah. reporter: we find a way across glass and splinters of wood beams. watch the nails, though. be careful. but again we can t get through. he s so close but so far, and the closer we get, the more anxious paul gets. suddenly, out of the blue rachel, hey! how are you? how are you?
the spent fuel rods in the core there and whether they are caught up in the fire and whether that led to that dramatic jump in the level of radiation to the point that would have been potentially dangerous to people. what they are going to do tomorrow, they are planning on doing is fly a helicopter over that reactor number four, dump water into that pool to try to negate that problem there. also questions about the integrity of the structure the structural integrity of this plant. ultimately it s going to come down. i think you were just discussing with chad t will come down to whether these containment vessels hold. whether the structures hold. whether the safeguards hold. if that s the case and they can contain that radioactivity that radiation and not have it disperse into the atmosphere. but the international atomic energy agency and the officials here are still concerned about what happened in reactor number two with that explosion there. still concerned that it could have damag