Japan Races to Contain Nuclear Impact

Monday, 14 March 2011 | by Pat's Picks

Devastating photos and ominous headlines continue to roll out of Japan this morning. The country is on high alert as the world watches to see what will happen to several nuclear reactors damaged by the massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck Japan on Friday. The New York Times explains that there’s quite a difference between a full and partial nuclear meltdown.

The main concern is that the uranium core will melt, leading to a “widespread release of radioactivity.” A partial meltdown, which Japanese officials suspect happened at two plants over the weekend, means that the uranium cores were damaged slightly, not melted. Hopefully, that means only a small amount of radioactive element made it through the cracked cores and into the fuel.

The Times does a good job of describing how the reactors should properly work and has a great interactive feature explaining how a reactor shuts down. The atomic energy industry has an eight-stage scale to describe a problem at a reactor. The Japanese situation is thought to be at stage 4. Three Mile Island was stage 5. The Chernobyl incident was stage 7.

Here are some front pages from Japan: