released straight into the ocean by tepco, the plant operator, in the weeks after the earthquake and tsunami. two years on the fishermen are frustrated to hear of further leaks. tepco says they ll dig a hole right in front of the reactor building and throw that groundwater into the ocean before it gets contaminated, suzuki says. but what s happened now is there s a leak in a reservoir above so that groundwater won t be clean. one of tepco s problems is groundwater is leaking into the damaged reactor buildings. 400 cubic meters a day on top of the 300 cubic meters it has to pump through to cool the nuclear fuel debris sunk deep inside the reactor vessels. that water gets contaminated too and all of us needs to be stored somewhere. leaks in the underground reservoir system mean tepco s having to resort to overground tanks. 900 of them. 80% of which are full. last week, inspectors from the
the water circulating again, and the temperature is dropping. there is a slight chance that one of these reactor vessels will have a late failure, not very likely, because the fuel is getting cooler all the time, and they seem to have a way of getting water into these reactor cores. if they keep on doing that, they should be okay. it s a fragile situation. there s a potential for a mistake. reporter: but damage has already been done. the contaminated milk came from farms in fukushima prefecture, about 19 miles from the troubled reactors. radiation levels were five times higher than those considered safe. the spinach was found on farms in the maraki prefecture to the south. radiation was up to seven times higher than those deemed safe. most of the levels are set extremely low to begin with, so five times higher than the legal limit still would not be enough, i don t think, to cause a discernible health effect. reporter: to put it in
water injection and it s not stabilized the situation. reactors 1 and 2 are hooked to electricity now. engineers will soon try to get the pumps running again to cool the reactors, and reactors 50 and 56 diesel-powered generators have the water circulating again. there s a slight chance that one of the reactor vessels will have a late failure. not very likely, because the fuel is getting cooler all the time, and they seem to have a way of getting water into these reactor cores. if they keep on do that, they should be okay. it s a fragile situation, there s a potential for a mistake. reporter: but damage has already been done. the contaminated milk came from fukushima prefecture. radiation levels were five times higher than considered safe spinach radiation was found on farms 60 miles to the south.
quench the fire. and so that was a very, very different situation. here you have destroyed or damaged spent fuel and reactor fuel. and one doesn t know whether the spent fuel would heat up farther and whether it might cause more damage in terms of it going through the bottom of the spent fuel pool. we have this animation that shows what the inside of the reactor looks like. and these rods that everyone is so concerned about. but i had a nuclear engineer on with me yesterday, arjun, who told me on an idea of, say, dropping wet caemt cement down and just sealing up the reactor, he said it doesn t accomplish the goals. if the goal is to keep the fuel rods cool, that doesn t do it. you re looking at the similar situation with sand, correct? right. the spent fuel is somewhat different than the reactor. the reactor vessels are
contessa@msnbc.com. there s a lot of discussion about this online already. conflicting reports from the u.s. and japan and even from officials within japan. let s bring in nader satvat, an engineer at purdue university. it s good to see you today. i want to ask you about the efforts that are already being made to cool those fuel rods that are exposed. water cannons and helicopters, how effective is that? well, for the time being, the challenge is to basically buy enough amount of time so they can get the power back to the facility and start the pumps to run through the storage tanks and the reactor vessels. so it s at this point, we do not have enough information to know how effective it is, but what we re certain about is we have to keep the temperatures below the design bases of the cladding of the fuel rods, which