And I admit that I am no expert on nuclear plant design(far from it). But what I understand to be the containment buildings- are severely damaged. Then there is damage to all the coolant lines. It is hard to believe that they have not been blown apart in some cases. So if there is some other containment vessel then how does the water get there?
And then even a large tank will eventually become full. Then what?
How do we know what is really going on?
Revel. look at the containment building size versus the reactor in the picture I posted. If you actually filled the building up to the reactor, you'd end up still cooling the reactor. Neither the primary containment nor the reactor at any of the Japanese plants have been breached. The news went apesh!t over the damage of something which is somewhat like a pole building built on top of the primary containment. If you had any idea of the wall thickness of the piping in a nuke plant, you'd understand. Here's another photo to show how massive a containment building is compared to the size of the reactor. A containment building is designed to withstand an airliner crashing into it without being breached. It is also designed to shrug off a tornado.
