david mcneill? remarkableement was for a couple of reasons.e was the sitting prime minister when he turned against nuclear power. since he resigned or since he was taken from power, he commissioned a report in the worst-case scenario for fukushima which included the evacuation of tokyo, which is, is anybody this your nose, impossible. it is impossible to evacuate a city that large. that would be 36 million people. that is what convinced them. japan has 50 working commercial nuclear reactors come including sea coast. japan if there's a problem there, it's a problem for for the shema. what you can see is the poisoning of all of the water that supplies japan's next big city. and hamaoka, if the winds were blowing wrong for tokyo, you could poison tokyo. of then was going 50% energy provided by nuclear power, now already it was at 30%. this is fascinating as you point out, this is a nation that is the only nation in the world that had two atomic bombs, nuclear bombs dropped on it. >> the background to how japan was able to overcome its resistance

david mcneill has been covering the disaster since it began nearly three years ago. >> how serious a crisis do we still have in japan? >> well, i think in is an ongoing crisis. what you have had is a series of ad hoc strategies designed to deal with the crisis that's right in front of you. >> the fukushima meltdown unfolded in a cascade of disasters. each one, more frightening than the last the native earthquake which triggered a 30-foot tsunami. the meltdowns, explosions, attempts to keep fuel rods from overheating and the leaks of radioactive water into the pacific ocean. now, nearly three years later, the most pressing worry is the spent fuel rods still precariously stored in an unstable reactor 4. >> they have thousands of these fuel rods, the and they have to extract one by one. >> last month, tepco began the dangerous year-long task of transferring fuel rods. more than 1300 in all. some 400 tons of uranium to a safer location. >> a lot of experts have warned office this was another major earthquake t could trigger another disaster. >> the real headache comes from the hundreds o