a court appeal in belgium and would like to see the plant closed down officials say they aren t panic mongers. it s about a potential nuclear accident and taking the best possible disaster prevention measures for. andrea companies us on the seventy kilometer journey to the controversial nuclear facility she can t believe people live so close. i can imagine living here i get a little queasy just thinking i live in auckland though it s quite a few kilometers away. i d move away from there. cracks have been found in twos reactor vessel the power plant has been shut down repeatedly over safety concerns belgium has also distributed pills but the belgian nuclear control agency says its plants are safe where you are insured it was safe they were stopped or stopped for more than two years until they could prove so now
radioactivity, and you ll have a breach of the reactor vessel, melt through the reactor vessel. at a certain point it will melt through the concrete reporter: plant is running out of room to store the contaminated water, raising the radiation hazard. the potential risk is that it could seep into the ocean and the soil affecting the food supply. it will depend on the currents, the tides, the patterns of deposition. this isn t a pipe carrying radioactivity out. this is deposition on the surface so a lot will depend on the dynamics of whether that pollution will go out, mainly to sea or whether some of it will contaminate the shores. this problem is going to go on for a long time. reporter: so that, the contaminated water found in that tunnel is 330 times higher than the dose of radiation an average person should be exposed to in a year, and that little bit of exposure could increase the chances of developing cancer by 0%, that according to the international atomic energy
that level would clearly force operators and workers to stay out of that area. at least if it s at some meaningful level that we can measure and stay away from and/or limit the time that workers are in there, we can continue to work on the power plant, which is very important, as you know. tom, i want to ask you about the significance of it. this is confusing for a lot of people. can you explain why it s so significant and how toxic it could be? this is the primary concern, that a real leak of this sort exists. is it? yeah, it is a concern. keep in mind that the reactor is contained the core of the rearchitect, the fuel, which we know is contained in all three units is contained in a reactor
going on in the reactors. most of the sensors are still dead, and the few that do report, you know, reports are worry some, when they indicate the water is still not covering the fuel. we know that there has been damage to some fuel rods. we can see the damage to the external containment vessels. we know some radiation has been released. we are now two weeks into this. given all we already know about what is bad, how significant would it be to find out that an internal reactor vessel had cracked this way? how much worse would that be than the situation we than what we know the situation already is? depends on where the crack is, how high it is. if the bottom of the vessel is still intact, then it still can serve as a pot and prevent the melt through through the bottom. hold enough water to ever keep
to an anonymous senior nuclear executive that the paper described as having broad contacts in japan. the executive says there is a long vertical crack running down the side of the reactor vessel itself. the severity of the radiation burns to the injured workers are consistent with contamination by water that had been in contact with damaged fuel rods. quoting the executive directly, quote, there is a definite, definite crack in the vessel. it s up and down and it s large. the problem with cracks is that they do not get smaller. how important is that if it s true? and do the injuries to those heroic workers at daiichi imply that it is true? and does the fact that this is one reactor that includes plutonium in the fuel mix make this a worse situation than would be true if it happened at the other reactors? today japanese authorities tried to bring down worries by saying the reactors were stable. they expanded evacuation advice.