the container tosspot. this is thursday. we are told on tuesday there was a fire at number four. wednesday a fire at number four and now on thursday there is no more water at number four but a huge problem at number three. and number three if the pressure builds up could explode and cause all kinds of problems. it is also causing the people of tokyo 140 miles away to get nervous. this is the avenue of tokyo. normally the sidewalk would be packed with people but fears of a possible nuclear catastrophe are keeping a lot of people off the streets. rush hour tokyo usually snarled with traffic looked like a sunday. warnings by the government to stay inside due to radiation risks are being heeded. i m worry bid about my health, my life and the radio activity, that is why i m wearing a mask. food store shelves empty. this man says people are buying the food and conserving it for what might be coming and long
they tell us japan is very different. unlike chernoble fukushima did not erupt in a large plume into the upper atmosphere that would travel very quickly. and secondly the amount of radioactive material is much less. by the time it gets here whatever radio activity was let loose in japan it s going to disperse over the six days and 5,000 miles it took to be here. reporter: risk is proportional to dose. experts tell us the amount of cumulative radiation that we are likely to see here in california, hawaii, alaska is probably no more than a chest x-ray or maybe a flight from l.a. to chicago. back to you. megyn: all right, william, thank you. fox news alert it is now 2:20 here in the east. we have been given the two-minute warning to president obama s address to the nation. we are expecting him to speak to this crisis in libya and the
weekend. let s go to anne thompson. good afternoon. restoring that power cable may be the best hope, because the goal is to get those pumps working again so they can circulate water in the reactor core and in the spent fuel pools. the big question is, do these pumps still work? they would have had to survived an earthquake, a tsunami and then these explosions that have happened at the plan the in the week since the earthquake and tsunami. no one is quite sure if it will work. it would be the fastest way to get water circulating. that water is absolutely crucial. the water is what shields the radio activity. when the water levels drop in the reactor core and in the spent fuel pools, they expose the rods to the air. when that happens, the metal around the rods melts and that can release radio activity into the environment. and that s what they re trying to avoid.
chernobyl was a very different kind of reactor. it had a big graphite carbon block that was on fire and the sand was put in really to quench the fire. in this case, you have a meltdown where the melted fuel will be very, very hot and you re releasing radioactive materials already and your main job is really to contain the heat. and i m not clear, i mean, presumably they ve done the calculations and they re considering it. i think there can be negative consequences like melting from the floor if you pour sand on top. presumably they d look at these questions before they actually did that. the consequences of using sand, i think in these two reactors may be very different. it may be a last-ditch effort to prevent the release of radio activity. but i m not quite clear on the pluses and minuses of that sitting here since i haven t done the calculations. arjun and arnie, thank you so much for your time. we were covering breaking news
rods. they re in a storage casing like this. it s essentially a big giant tub. this shows a little bit of exposure. once the rods are exposed, they start to reheat in a dramatic and unstable way. if the water is completely or significantly drained, and we re talking four of the six reactors where they re having problems with the cooling system and severe problems with it, in the sense of if they had more resources, which they don t have right now. they can t get people close to this because of radioactivity levels. they don t haveless tristy up here, are we talking weeks, months, years? it s a 15-round fight. we re probably in round three. the radio activity in the pool has been there for six months. yet, it s still radio active and still hot. it s like pouring water on a