Melbourne, Mar 14 (ANI): Experts say there is no possibility of a Chernobyl-style accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Despite a second explosion at the site, Japanese authorities are playing down the danger of a core meltdown in one of the reactors.
They say that a core meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant is unlikely to result in a Chernobyl-like disaster, but its impact will still be significant.
Most experts are comparing the situation to the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, which resulted in radiation affecting an area 16 kilometres around the reactor.
Professor Aidan Byrne, director of the College of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra, says Three Mile Island failed because of lack of cooling water.
"This one's a slightly different scenario because they're able to put cooling water onto it, so it might not progress to that scale," ABC Science quoted him as saying.
When a reactor is running normally the fuel rods are surrounded by coolant, and lowered or raised to regulate the number of nuclear reactions, known as fission.
"In a meltdown you lose the coolant and the fuel rods get hot enough to actually physically melt, which is a couple of thousand degrees Celsius," he says.
"The Japanese reactors [also] have a containment vessel around them, and the hope here is that as with Three Mile Island, if there is a meltdown then it will be within that containment vessel." (ANI)
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