After visiting the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant last week in Japan, BBC correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes began his report on the two-year earthquake and tsunami catastrophe anniversary grimly:
"It would be reassuring to think that the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl is contained, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is in stable shut-down. Unfortunately a look inside the Fukushima plant suggests otherwise. I was part of a group taken in to the Fukushima plant last week, only the second time foreign TV journalists have been allowed in since the disaster two years ago. Very little that we saw in our brief two-hour tour was reassuring."
Here's what he saw:
- A "race" to get 1,500 highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods out of the heavily damaged Reactor 4 building. The pool holding the spent fuel rods is on the third floor, and engineers fear another earthquake could collapse the weakened structure.
- Reactor 3, which sparked a massive hydrogen explosion that reduced its containment building to rubble, is buried under a pile of shattered concrete and twisted steel. No one knows what's happening inside the nuclear reactor -- the wreckage is too radioactive for workers to explore without risking a fatal dose. The Reactor 3 building also housed spent nuclear fuel rods before the disaster.
- The power plant is innundated with tens of thousands of tons of contaminated water. In addition to the millions of gallons of water plant workers poured on the reactors in the early months of the disaster, ground water and sea water are leeching into the plant through cracks in its foundation.
- The plant manager said the removal and safe storage of nuclear fuel rods at Fukushima's four damaged reactors will take 30 to 40 years.
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