Crisis of confidence for Japan's government

On this date in 1979, a partial meltdown began at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. It was America's worst nuclear disaster, caused by faulty equipment.

A massive earthquake and tsunami are behind the current nuclear crisis in japan, a crisis that's still far from over at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.

CBS News correspondent Lucy Craft reports that workers are scrambling after the discovery of more highly radioactive water around the Fukushima nuclear plant. The pools of water must be drained to prevent further contamination of groundwater and seawater. Meanwhile, soil samples around the plant have turned up trace amounts of plutonium, used in reactor no. 3.

However, officials insist the plutonium does not pose a health threat. In fact some, of it is decades-old residue from nuclear weapons testing.

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Over the weekend, utility Tokyo Electric Power announced, and then retracted, a statement that radiation levels had spiked to 10 million times above normal. The figure was later revised down to 100,000 times usual levels.

The confusion and setbacks are fueling a collapse of confidence in the government's handling of the nuclear crisis, a scenario familiar to Dr. Robert Peter Gale, a leading authority on radiation accidents. He advised the Soviet government during the Chernobyl disaster, and is now assisting Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

"I think people, they certainly don't trust people from the company," Gale said. "They know that people from the government are really just reading data they're given. It's not reasonable to expect a politician to have a fundamental understanding of radiobiology."

That is why Gale is calling for a panel of experts to help citizens make sense of what's going on. At Chernobyl, the only significant source of cancer was contaminated dairy products, which triggered thyroid cancer in 6,000 children. Japan has already pulled milk from the affected area from their food supply.

"Since the Fukushima accident at the moment much is of a much lower magnitude, it's hard to imagine that there would be serious health consequences from it," Gale said.

It may be weeks before the plant is stabilized and years to clean up contamination at the complex. However, Gale predicts the toll on public health will be minimal.