CNN 2011-03-21

You've made it to the end of the week with CNN Student News. Thank you so much for joining us. From the CNN Center in Atlanta, Georgia, I'm Carl Azuz.

First up, water is the key ingredient in efforts to avoid a nuclear meltdown at a power plant in Japan. The workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant are trying to cool down the fuel rods inside the nuclear reactors 1. The normal cooling systems aren't working. So, engineers are using fire trucks and police water cannons 2, like you see in this animation 3 here, to try to attack the problem from the ground. Using military helicopters to drop water from the sky. Thursday, authorities said these efforts had been "somewhat effective." That was based on the steam coming out of the reactors and on the lower levels of radioactivity around the plant.

But radiation is there. The workers who are at the site have full-body hazardous 4 material suits on. But that protective clothing isn't very effective at actually stopping the radiation that these workers are being exposed to. One way of measuring nuclear radiation is in units called millisieverts. Radiation levels at these plants have spiked 5 to higher levels in an hour than people naturally come into contact with in a lifetime. These guys are experts, though. They work around nuclear reactors. They know exactly what the dangers are. The fact that they're willing -- in some cases volunteering -- to stay at the power plant, to try to prevent a meltdown, that's why they're being called heroes.

The massive earthquake that started all of this hit about a week ago, and Japan is still feeling aftershocks. Watch what happened while CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta was talking with Kiran Chetry from CNN's American Morning.

We're feeling an aftershock right now, Kiran. I'll just tell you the, I don't know if you saw that at all, but things moving around a bit on us even as I'm talking to you. These aftershocks have come quite frequently. It's still continuing here. OK. I think we're all good.

OK, we're going to bring in Steve Kastenbaum. He's a national correspendent for CNN Radio who just got back from Japan. Steve, you were in Japan right after the earthquake happened. Talk to us about the wreckage 6 you saw.

It was pretty amazing. The earthquake itself really didn't cause a lot of damage in much of the northeast region of Japan. It was the tsunami 7 that really caused a lot of the problems that we saw the pictures of. You're looking at some images of a small fishing and farming village called Ishiyami that I was in, north of the city of Sendai. And you can just see what the tsunami did to this area. It just barreled through there with a tremendous amount of force, literally 8 lifting houses right off their foundations and dropping them on top of other homes. It was almost wiped off the map.

And Steve, afterward 9, in the days that followed, we've heard so much about this radiation from the nuclear plant in Japan, and we know that a lot of folks are trying to get out. You were in Tokyo. What did you see at the airport there?

We saw massive crowds of people. The lines literally snaking through the terminals at Narita Airport in Tokyo. You're looking at some pictures I took on the day that we left. Look at that. The lines just went on for as far as the eye could see, and it took forever to check in to the flights there. And the terminals were extremely crowded, yet it was a very orderly place. Nobody was complaining, you didn't see looks of anxiety on people's faces. People just wanted to get out of Tokyo by any means possible. They would take seats on flights that would get them out of the country and it proceeded in a very orderly fashion. There really wasn't a panic at all. Tokyo, the streets of Tokyo, were unusually quiet and traffic was very light for Tokyo, a city that's known for having incredible traffic jams. So, people were definitey staying off the streets, most likely because of their fears about the potential for radiation contamination.

Steve Kastenbaum from CNN Radio, thanks very much for speaking to us today on CNN Student News.