heating up in this storage pool within one of the rooms of these reactor facilities. when you hear that, how loudly do alarm bells go off and how much does it worsen the situation? well, it s something that we have to be very concerned about because the spent fuel has to also be cooled. it s the cooling of the spent fuel is nowhere near as urgent as the reactor, but if something were to happen to cause the spent fuel pool to lose its water, these are pools that are several stories above ground and are not under the containment the big, thick, heavy reactor containment that you have with the reactor vessel itself. so if something were to happen to compromise the integrity of the pool wall or the structure,
and then over that is a concrete dome, a secondary containment, that s supposed to serve as an extra barrier of protection. what we don t really know or completely understand is, in reactor 2, what has been going on here and if there have been explosions and other events that have compromised the primary containment or have cracked or created problems for the secondary containment. so we re still sort of operating in a situation where i m not sure we have a complete picture. right. to your point, we re piecing some of these bits of information we re getting together. well, not only that. the people on the site don t necessarily have a complete picture of what s going on. you know what? i m glad you brought that up because i know it s a group of some 50 or so workers. robert alvarez, we re going to continue this conversation in the next hour because i have so many more questions for you,
containment, both the reactor vessels and the secondary containment from the japanese authorities. so if all the workers are asked to leave, what does that tell you? well, it tells me that they have given up, and they are hoping for the best and that we we have a very significant chance of a serious radiologic catastrophe. it is a serious, serious situation there in japan. robert alvarez, thank you for loaning us a little bit of your expertise. thank you so much. thank you. and now, to this. the volume of water was so high, the car wouldn t move. he was describing the moments after the massive wave of water hit, moments of sheer panic. coming up, new stories of survival that we re just now hearing and some are still looking for loved ones. and happening right now, a