has about 1,000 times the activity of the hiroshima bomb. maybe 10 times that. it can t blow up, but it releases more radio activity than an a-bomb. that s different than a crash of a plane or a bridge coming down. we have to come to terms with the fact that this is a technology of immense danger and maybe we are not capable of handling it. wouldn t it be obvious that the nuclear power plans should not be located near possible earthquake zones? exactly. it s essentially a jar with a vast amount of radio activity in it. placing the jar at an earthquake fault can cause it to break and be released makes no sense. the late environmentalist david braer designed it as a device defining earthquakes in
question. fuel is very hard to come by. we drove up from tokyo overnight. cars were being turned away that didn t have special permits we were able to get a permit to go on a tollroad. even if you get in a car, there is no gas for them we are leaving rush hour in tokyo and this huge city that is notorious for traffic jams, very few cars on the road. that is against the people trying to get out of the area. we are all becoming amateur nuclear fizzists andy woo don t know what we don t know about how far the travels and 12 1/2 miles is the zone they believe is safe. the wind shifts and we are aware that eight u.s. warships encountered radio activity off the coast of japan earlier. they moved to a safer area.
accident. three mile was very difficult. it was caused by operation error. this was following by a devastating earthquake and tsunami. nonetheless the nature of cooling the reactor was the same. three mile island was the expense x tense sieve meltings of the core. what we have to hope is there s a similar outcome on this occasion. any time you have a core melting there s a substantial increase for radio activity but there s no guarantee. you can find out more about the impact the earthquake has had on our website. i know you ve got a lot of questions about that as have the rest of us. got in touch with a number of agencies to try to answer those queries. all of that is at cnn.com/international. we ve been seeing images
radiation. some radiation can t get past the skin, it bounces off the skin, others pass all the way through like x rays. some last for a second and exist no longer, while others can exist for hundreds of thousands of years. what really matters is how radioactive is a substance, what type of radio activity it is and how long you re exposed. that s why the japanese government in all of these cases is simply encouraging people to stay inside their homes rather than being out in the open air where they would have a higher level of expose chur. we have to put it in context. we are exposed to radiation every day, from the sun, from bana bananas, those things. obviously you want to keep that radiation lower to where there s no consequence. but we do absorb some and you shouldn t think that just
17 crew members were exposed to low level activity in the mission and the radio activity was removed from the affected crew by washing with soap and water and no further contamination was detected so far. so what is a nuclear melt down in what is the base of a nuclear power plant. they were built 40 years ago by general electric. that s right. this is how it takes place. the nuclear scientist, it is too simple for me. but this is how it works . it has fuel rods and there is a nuclear reaction if creates electricity from the rod. it has to be hot . it was hot when the tsunami and earthquake struck.