looks. all day long the dow headed south until it finally closed down an ugly 266 points. on wall street, 4:00 couldn t come fast enough. we ve had eight straight days of losses, the first time that happened since the global financial meltdown? 2008. it is a scary picture, and we re going to walk you through it all in just a moment. but first a look at the other stories we re drilling down on tonight. it s ramadan in syria. instead of peace, more bloodshed. graphic new images of bodies dumb it ped like garbage as the death toll rises. can the world look the other way? and japan s endless disaster. radiation levels at their highest since the earthquake and tsunami in march. you won t believe what they re testing now. then with grim news on wall street, everybody is talking about transparency. but these folks did something about it, striptease for social protest. the bears rule in more ways than one. now back to the batd news on wall street. we finally get a debt deal
ignoring violation altogether, and it is aging nuclear reactors, to keep on running and steve centanni has details on this. steve, a lot of people will be surprised by this. what did the study find? reporter: well, it found that this nation s nuclear power plants are aging and we knew that. 82 of the 104 operating nuclear power plants in the country, more than 25 years old, that means equipment wears out and, the safety is compromised and, a lengthy investigation by associated press finds that instead of demanding immediate repairs federal regulators weaken the standards to bring the reactors back into compliance and the report claims there is a, quote, a cozy relationship between the industry and the nuclear regulatory commission. the report highlights some of the main areas of concern, saying, containment vessels have become brittle due to radiation damage and, leaky valves have not met existing standards and those standards have been eased and tubing is cracked and
i want to draw people s attention to these incredible pictures. yeah. harris: this person who got in beyond that barrier, that is a lot of earthquake damage. and then you have a tsunami move in. you say that things could go at any moment. what do you mean by that? right. here in this footage you see this is still a ghost town. no one s there which is one of the reasons the authorities have now mandated that no one can go in within 12 miles of the zone, in part to prevent theft. but also because of the steady radiation damage. you have to understand that there are three reactors there, plus approximately seven fuel ponds jammed with spent fuel. and all of those have major coolant problems. they re not able to keep the rods cool, and that s why they keep pumping water in. the water leaks, they have a radiation water problem. but these facilities have been subjected to stresses that no plant was ever designed to withstand. another aftershock or even the pumping of the water into these
but right now from what i have read and understand, only six workers have received more than 100 mill ee verts, that s a unit we receive from natural sources 3 per year. it s larger than what we receive naturally. in contrast, the former soviet union sent a half million recovery workers to chernobyl to clean up the radiation damage. their average dose for the half million workers was 100 miss ee verts. even among the workers, there s only 6. what is the biggest threat right now from if nothing more happens and we ve had some people say the threat to
you get a mammogram, that s one whether it increases. for a chest ct scan, you get three years worth. so this whole business about x-rays and cts, they re not kidding when they say there s a lot of radiation. more than what you naturally get, months and years worth, they re compared with what you normally get walking around. but i want to underscore they re not considered dangerous levels. we re able to sustain that. it is increased but not to the point where unless you ve had a lot of ct scans or x-rays in a short amount of time, shouldn t be concerned. let s talk about things that we can remember in terms of radiation damage. think about chernobyl. yeah. that s a worst-case scenario. we had mention it s three millie sieve erts a year. when you look at chernobyl, workers there were exposed, we re talking about 124 workers, exposed to levels between 800 and 16,000 millisieverts. so 3 is normal in a year? 3 is normal in a year.