Capitol Forum: Japanese Demonstrators Continue Major Civil Disobedience Action Against Nuke Restart

About This Interview

Capitol Forum's Tom Ritter interviews Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education in order to update listeners about the status of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the public outcry against the restart of the Oi nuclear power plant in Japan's Kansai region.  Arnie and Tom discuss the civil disobedience exhibited by the Japanese citizens against the production of nuclear energy in the wake of this restart following the Fukushima Daiichi triple meltdown. This interview also discusses the ongoing spread of radiation around the world and Japan’s contaminated food supply.

Transcript

  

English

  

Tom Ritter: A person that is very much making a difference in the world is Arnie Gundersen. He has been involved with nuclear energy for over 40 years and has worked at 70 nuclear plants, so he has tremendous experience with the whole industry. I guess your life in the past year has been pretty much dedicated to what is going on in Japan, is that correct Arnie?

Arnie Gundersen: As I said to Maggie, I do not care, I am not going to let this get covered up like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. I am going to dedicate myself to getting the word out there, how serious this is. Yes, so you are right.

Tom Ritter: So give us a little bit of update about what is going on in Japan currently, we did discuss some things over the break about some of the civil disobedience in Japan and some of the other issues going on over there.

Arnie Gundersen: Well on the site is Unit 4, which is the one that has all the fuel in the spent fuel pool, not in the containment. Their 2 cooling pumps failed in the last day. And so what that means is that the water in the pool is warming up. We are getting a lot of emails about, is this the end. And the answer is no. It is warming up at about 7 degrees F a day and so it probably has between a week or 2 weeks before it begins to boil and then it would take another week or 2 weeks to boil. There is plenty of time for Tokyo Electric to make repairs. I am not apologizing for Tokyo Electric. This should not happen but it is a jury-rigged system. They put it together in a hurry after the accident and it is plagued by problems. We have had people saying, do I need iodine pills and all that and the answer is no, we are OK and we will keep an eye on it. But Tokyo Electric has plenty of time to make repairs.

The other thing that happened this week was Tokyo Electric ran a probe into the basement of Unit 1. This is not inside the containment. This is outside the containment. And on the top of the water surface, they found lethal radiation, they found a thousand rem an hour. So if you or I were to stay there for 20 or 30 minutes, we would die within a week. So it is really bad. But then they put the probe down into the water and what is even worse is, the sediment on the bottom was thousands of times hotter than that. What that indicates is that nuclear fuel has left the containment as particles and settled out on the bottom outside the containment. So I think it is a pretty clear indication that the containment was breached. It just makes decommissioning these plants, taking them apart and turning them back to Mother Nature, it was going to be hard already, but this information even makes it worse.

And then the last thing is, the off-site. We are getting a lot of Japanese sending us the bag from their vacuum cleaner. These people are out at 80 and 90 miles. And those bags are so radioactively contaminated that in the United States they would be nuclear waste. The Japanese sleep on the floor, you know they roll mats out and they sleep on the floor. They are pretty fastidious, they leave their shoes at the door. And yet still we are seeing house dust that is incredibly contaminated. So I think our hearts have to go out to the Japanese. This is not a problem that has gone away or is going to go away in the near future.

Tom Ritter: Now Arnie, we have new listeners all the time and I would assume that a lot of our listeners are not nuclear scientists like yourself. How does this spread? Obviously if you are in close proximity to this radiation, you are going to have a bad day and you are probably not going to be around very long. But how does this spread to get to 80, 90, 200 miles away from the plant?

Arnie Gundersen: That is a great question. These plants were designed with a containment around the nuclear reactor and the containment was supposed to contain. It obviously broke. The containments on this design reactor are broken. That was something that nobody ever anticipated would happen. If the containments had maintained their integrity, it would not have happened. We have got 23 plants in the U.S. like this plant. A little bit north of you, but up in Illinois there is Dresden and Quad Cities. So we have got several that people have known for years have been problematic and yet we continue to operate them. To my mind, the first lesson of Fukushima, is this particular containment design, I am not talking about all our nuclear reactors, but this one, 23 of them, have been shown to be a problem and are just a major concern. If the containment works, to answer your question in 5 words, if the containment works, everything stays inside. But at Fukushima, it did not work.

Tom Ritter: But once again, does the water evaporate and then it rains down upon people or is it because they are burning the contaminated materials or how does it actually get from point A to point B?

Arnie Gundersen: It was released as steam and gas and very fine particles, smaller than a human hair, and wafted with the wind. Then as it rained, it settled out in the forests and in the people's yards, and throughout Japan as far away as Tokyo and Tokyo is 150 miles away. Essentially Northern Japan is contaminated. When I was over there, I took 5 samples and all of them were contaminated. They were in public areas, public parks in the middle of Tokyo. Now, the Japanese are trying to downplay the health significance of that. We call them hot particles and they wind up in kids shoelaces. And then the kid ties his shoes and they are on his hands and then they are in his gut. So it is a long term problem. I am on record as saying that we can expect a significant increase in cancers over the next 20 or 30 years, especially in women and young children as a result of this. But right now, we are just seeing thyroid nodules. The first indication of the problem is that there is about 30 or 40% of the people in Fukushima Prefecture have lumps in their thyroid and that is an indication of radiation exposure that could lead to thyroid cancers.

Tom Ritter: Boy that is very interesting. So if people choose to stay in Japan they very much need to treat their areas, contaminated area and when they go back into their homes, they need to decontaminate, they need to take their shoes off, have like a staging area in their home where they can take their shoes and their clothing off, and basically treat their entire area, if they are living anywhere near the plants I assume.

Arnie Gundersen: Anywhere near is as far out as 100 miles. It is insidious. And what we are advising is people should wet dust. Do not dry dust because it just throws the dust right back up again, but make sure you are dusting with a wet cloth and you frequently change your vacuum cleaner. Things like that. But it is tough.

Tom Ritter: Will a HEPA filter actually filter out or are these particles so fine that a HEPA filter does not even suffice?

Arnie Gundersen: The HEPA will get almost all of them. It will not get every one of them but at some point you got to say, OK, I did my best. Yes, a HEPA filter will .. . we have a couple of people we work with who have, their houses are cleaned with a HEPA filter and they have sent us their HEPA filters. We have had high readings in Japan and also high readings in Seattle, so it is not limited to the Japanese, although Japan is certainly a 100 or a 1,000 times worse. I do not want to minimize the Japanese and claim that the Americans are much worse off.

Tom Ritter: Now the results of the HEPA filters in the United States, was that immediately after it, or is that an ongoing thing, that is going to get contamination?

Arnie Gundersen: We just got a filter that was in for a year and a half. It was put in in February of 2011 and the owner forgot to remove it and took it out just a couple of weeks ago. This is a doctor in Seattle and it is the highest concentrations we have seen in north America, are in this guy's HEPA filter. So that would have been in his house were it not for the HEPA filter.

Tom Ritter: But once again that is of the time frame that was actually preceding the event so it could have happened immediately after. There is no way of determining from that if it is an ongoing problem or if it was just an immediate release.

Arnie Gundersen: There is some other data that suggests that between March, April and May, 99% of the problem occurred. Last year, 2011. What we are seeing now, certainly within America, we are hardly seeing anything. It is interesting, they had an earthquake in Japan the other day and all at once radiation detectors went high again. And what it does is it shakes the ground and all that dust goes airborne again. So it is an accident with no end.

(-Break-)

Tom Ritter: Well, fortunately we have Arnie Gundersen with us on this show and he is a voice of sanity in this crazy world. Arnie I forgot where we left off at the break because we get into such interesting conversations during the break. And for all those listeners, there are some listeners who actually listen in during the break.

By the way, you indicated way back the beginning of the show that you recommend not taking potassium iodine right now, the high dosage capsules. But for those of us that want to be preventive and be ahead of the game, one idea is to do low doses on a daily or a weekly basis to saturate the thyroid just to keep it healthy and to make sure that radioactive iodine is not absorbed if and when we are exposed. And I think last show you agreed, that is something you do and it's a good idea.

Arnie Gundersen: My naturopath says take it because your body needs it in low concentrations. But the pills are for a different issue. But yes, I take it routinely, because my naturopath says your body needs iodine.

Tom Ritter: Certainly over in Japan, I would be definitely doing iodine and boron and xeolite, I would be doing all kinds of things to try to chelate, to try to minimize the effects of radiation. Arnie, you know what, let's get into the civil disobedience aspect of what is going on over there. Rarely do the Japanese people stand up to their government, but right now, especially the women are really standing up and saying, we have had this situation happen, and it does not seem like you are addressing it properly, and now you are wanting to flip the switch back on. Did they go live last night?

Arnie Gundersen: Every Friday for the last 3 weeks, there has been a rally in front of the Prime Minister's residence. Two Fridays ago, the police would say 10,000 and the activists would say 30,000. But there were tens of thousands of people. Last week there was 45,000 by the low estimate, and this week there was an excess of 100,000 surrounding the Prime Minister's house on Friday. While they protest, they are very respectful. The protest started at exactly 6 and ended at exactly 8 and everything was clean afterward and it was almost as if nothing had happened. We are talking about a culture that even hollering at the top of your lungs for 2 hours is not something that is normally done. But then something fascinating happened yesterday. Last night tens of thousands of people surrounded the prime minister's residence again and were beating drums and screaming and hollering last night. What is driving it is Japan has no operating nuclear reactors right now. They had 54 before Fukushima and the odds are 10 of them are so damaged, or they have discovered they are so likely to be damaged, that they will not start up. There are still about 40 plants that the government would like to start up. So what the Japanese Government has proposed, is to fire up a 2 unit plant. It is spelled O I, and I have heard it is pronounced "oy", the Oi Units. That has just galvanized public opinion against the restart. And I think we have to put ourselves in the shoes of the Japanese. They had Hiroshima and Nagasaki and unlike any other population on the planet, yet they sort of forgave and said OK, we trust our authorities, it cannot happen again. Now they had the most serious nuclear accident in 30 years. So the trust between the government and it's people is just shattered. They had 7 million people sign a petition requesting that the nuclear plants not be started up. That is about 5% of Japanese signed it. I am not saying that 95% were on the other side of the argument. But they were able to get 7 million people to sign a petition to congress, they call it the Diet. So the trust is broken between the Japanese people and their government. Especially with the women, like you said and especially with the young women. The men seem to be more stoic and they are saying, my government right or wrong. Whereas the women are actually packing up their families and leaving Fukushima Prefecture. And their husbands are saying my government says it is safe. And their wives are saying I do not care, you can trust the government or you can come with me but I am taking the kids and I am getting out of here. They call it Fukushima divorce.

Tom Ritter: Yes, I was just going to say, I have heard the term Nuclear Divorce and I had never heard that one, but it is very similar. The same thing happened in the Viet Nam War here in the United States. I believe it was the women, I was not around at the time to experience it, but from reading reports, the women actually stood up and said we are not going to send our babies off to war anymore. Maybe the women need to stand up and change the world for us, because the men sure are not getting the job done.

Arnie Gundersen: You are right, you are absolutely right. In Japan there is a glass ceiling even more so than in the United States. Where you will see women in low level management roles but never in high level management or in executive roles. It just does not happen. So for culturally them to be stepping up is a big deal.

Tom Ritter: I want to backtrack a little bit, one of the reasons we know that the radiation in the air filters in Japan. . . the signature is the cesium 134 and 137. And that is how Arnie and others can tell that it is actually coming from that event over there.

(-Break-)

Tom Ritter: Welcome back to Capitol Forum. You are listening to Capitol Forum and today is July 1st, 2012. We are visiting with Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds. You can check out his audio videos. Arnie, do you have a video coming out today? I heard in another interview that you are releasing a video that might help explain some things that are going on in the world.

Arnie Gundersen: Yes, we just put it up as of midnight. And it is actually aimed for all audiences, but this one was at the request of the Tokyo Film Festival. They asked me to come over, and of course coming over for a 15 minute speech does not make a lot of sense, so they allowed us to put a video together. Basically, it says that there are alternatives. In the 20th century, it made sense to have these large central station power plants. But in the 21st century, we can have smart grids, we can have distributed generation. And what that means is you can have small power plants close to where the load is. You know, like in my town we have 35 ,000 people and we have got a wood-burning power plant that fulfills the needs for the entire town. You can do that and even at a smaller scale, we do not necessarily need to put all our eggs in one basket. The example I use is, what does Mother Nature do? When we look at a tree, the tree does not have 3 or 4 really big leaves on it, the tree has a couple of hundred small leaves on it. And that is an example of distributed generation.

Tom Ritter: And the same thing for giving off seeds. If you are going to replicate life, you need to have the decentralized thing, because in Mother Nature, God designed it, where it has a redundancy and that is not what we are seeing. I made this point on the last show. That is the problem with most things in our world. Everything is becoming centralized. Whether it is governments or whether it is banking or what have you, corporations, everything is leading to one centralized source, which becomes very problematic, especially in agriculture, when you have monoculture, then you enter in diseases and all kinds of pests and it is just hideous. And like you say, we need to decentralize. If you wanted to stay with the radiation, you can actually take radiation waste and use radioisotope thermoelectric generators. And you can use that decaying plutonium with thermocouples and actually generate electricity at a very large or very small scale, can't you Arnie?

Arnie Gundersen: Well, that is how the probe that is now out beyond Pluto, the Voyager probes have plutonium generators in them. They use the heat from the decaying plutonium and run the electricity. On the other hand, I do not think we want plutonium in everybody's back yard because it is, one, you can make bombs from it, and two, it is extraordinarily lethal. But you are right, you just need a source that creates heat and a then a source that is colder. They talked about using the Gulf Stream as an example. The Gulf Stream floats across the top of the Pacific (Atlantic- correction) and it is very warm and down below it is very cold. If you connect those two, it is just a fact of physics, you are going to get electric flow. There are many alternatives out there to us. In the States, though the first thing is being more efficient with how we use our power. Some studies have said that we would not need a single new power plant if we just were as efficient as the Europeans are, for something like 30 years. So the Europeans use power much more efficiently than we do. They can learn lessons from us; we can learn lessons from them.

Tom Ritter: And for the first time in history, solar is very affordable right now. I have been off the grid for quite some time now and I am helping some other people get off the grid and that is something that everyone needs to be looking towards, you know, once again decentralized, have your own home power station, put some solar panels on your roof or in your back yard, what have you. You can get into solar so cheap now and there is Federal assistance in that and a lot of the electric companies offer incentives to go green because they get tax incentives from the government and they I guess by statute, they have to get a certain percentage of their energy from solar and alternate energy sources. Right now, if everybody installed solar panels, at least get started to supply your basic needs, it would be a great step towards being more energy independent.

Arnie Gundersen: You know it makes economic sense for the utilities too. Let's say they buy it from you at 6 cents. But at the peak on the hottest days of the summer, like you guys are getting right now, they are having to buy at the peak of the market at somewhere around 15 or 16 cents. So it basically reduces their costs to have a whole bunch of people on distributed solar feeding back into the grid because when the day is hottest, their replacement costs are highest and they can pick it up from you what you are not generating for yourself. It makes sense all around. And I do agree with this comment about too big to fail. The Japanese are putting 6 nuclear power plants in a row. The big banks, on and on. We have gone into your monoculture. It is frightening. Diversification is definitely the way to go.

Tom Ritter: And it is not even just the power plants, it is all those spent fuels that are sitting on top of these power plants which is just insanity to begin with. When you are on a fault line or on a coast, and like you are saying, there are 23 of these things ready to do their dirty deeds any chance they get here in the United States. So it is not an isolated situation in Japan at all.

Arnie Gundersen: No, you are absolutely right. It is interesting though, the French are handling this entirely differently than the rest of the world. They actually believe an accident might happen and are spending accordingly. Something on the order of 20 billion dollars they are shelling out, in emergency planning and in different safety features that they had thought might have been a good idea, but in retrospect, now they are saying, we have to spend. An accident cannot happen. Whereas here in the States, the power companies are saying it does not make economic sense to spend this money. Of course we know the lessons of Fukushima as a result.

Tom Ritter: Exactly. And now I have heard and read that France actually regenerates their spent fuel, is that correct? Instead of just going into a waste dump, they actually reuse it. Is that true?

Arnie Gundersen: That is one of the myths of the French experience. They do reprocess some of the uranium and plutonium. > But in the process, they do not have a solution for the waste that they have generated. They do not have an ultimate waste disposal and it is sitting in tanks that are incredibly radioactive. They also have a problem in the process. And a lot of their radioactive waste that they do not want to talk about, they send to Siberia. So a lot of it is sitting in Russia and they are claiming that they are clean and green, when, in fact they have just moved the problem to an area were they can throw money at it and nobody seems to be interested.

Tom Ritter: It is like taking the depleted uranium that was spent over in Kuwait from the Gulf War 1 to Idaho here in the United States. It makes zero sense. Or taking the contaminated material from Fukushima to Tokyo to burn it. The world has just gone mad, Arnie.

Arnie Gundersen: Yes. The French, and actually the Japanese bought into this. No one has really what we call closed the nuclear fuel cycle. The Japanese tried for years and spent trillions of yen or hundreds of billions of dollars in trying to reprocess fuel and it failed every time. My point is if we had spent that money on alternative energy sources, we would be much more likely to have a solution right at hand that is really cheap. And instead we put all our money on the wrong horse in this race.

Tom Ritter: Well Arnie, I typically, when I have personal conversations and then sometimes on the air, I try to ask paradigm shifting questions and one of my shifting questions on the solar alternate energy route is, "How much did you spend on your last new car?", and typically it might be $30,000 - $40,000. And I said, if you spent half of that, if you spent $20,000 on solar energy, you could be almost off the grid if you went to high efficiency appliances and your solar, you would be set for the rest of your life. You know you would be energy independent and on this Independence Day weekend, nothing more important could be, than energy independence. Why aren't people doing this? People around here who spend that kind of money on wood boilers or on geothermal heating and cooling, well guess what, you spend that amount of money on solar and you are almost energy independent.

Arnie Gundersen: Yes, I could not agree more. We seem to have our priorities misplaced. We forget the fact that the fuel, once you have spent the capital on all of these, on a solar system, the fuel is free forever. We do not seem to get that message. We had that opportunity to change the paradigm right after 911 and we did not. Basically the money we put into our gas tanks is funding, in some cases, the people that are trying to injure us. The sooner we get away from that source of power, you know you certainly weaken your opponent. The Department of Defense firmly believes that from a strategic standpoint, America should be cutting its reliance on oil. And one of the ways to do it is solar or wind or distributed generation of smart grids.

Tom Ritter: And we have so much natural gas up in Alaska and other places, that we could be using that and it is a much cleaner fuel. We do have options. The big deal is that centralized power, you know the oil companies, the military industrial complex, very much guides our government and that is a big part of the problem is that centralized power that we need to have our states stand up. We need to start, as you say, decentralizing and having local power generation and just start working toward that.

You have a book that you wrote in Japanese for the Japanese. We do have a lot of listeners from Japan. Can you . . . your book, and also, . . .

Arnie Gundersen: It is published by Shueisha, which is a Japanese publisher and it is available on Amazon.jp, the Japanese Amazon.

It is under $10. When Maggie and I wrote it, we wanted to keep it inexpensive so that more people could get it, as opposed to an expensive book that just a few people would read. In the States, if you are Japanese-American, in the States, there are also Japanese booksellers in the States that can sell it. It is called Fukushima Daiichi: The Truth and The Future. It talks about what really happened, which the Japanese really have not heard because their government and their news media have not really told them the truth. And the future, which is really what we have been talking about this hour, that they do have alternatives. And again, Tokyo Electric and the 9 big Japanese utilities have co-opted the government, between spending on the political process their regulators are blind to the fact that there are alternatives. And they are being driven by Tokyo Electric. We are out there letting the Japanese know that what Tokyo Electric is telling them through their regulators is not necessarily the whole picture. We are trying to present the fact that they have alternatives. And they have a chance, 1. to lead the world, and 2. to make some money. I mean, let's think like capitalists here. If the Japanese choose to figure this out, if they choose to have a country that works on renewables with all the things that go into that mix, they can sell that worldwide. So, there is a business opportunity here too.

Tom Ritter: Some of the most innovative people in the world, the Japanese, the Germans and the Americans and you are right, if they grabbed it by the head and steered us in the right direction, they could come out like bandits, otherwise they are headed down the wrong path if they keep going down the nuclear path.

And by the way, Maggie Gundersen and Arnie Gundersen's website is www.fairewinds.org, and everybody please check out the information in their book and also help donate.

A lot of your information has been disseminated over YouTube, and there are a lot of YouTubes that are putting out information about radiation and some of it is very suspect and some of it is, although very well meaning, is just not up to speed as you might be.

One of the things that surprised me is you have people worldwide that send you things that they suspect might be radioactive and we have had some private conversations about this. One of which really surprised me, and perhaps it should not have, but a common spice, turmeric which a lot of us take. I personally take it because it has great anti-cancer properties and anti-inflammation properties. But you had the source sent to you and did some testing. What were the results, Arnie?

Arnie Gundersen: We had someone write to us and say, they had their Inspector and they were out and they bought some turmeric and they put it in front of their detector and it went crazy. We asked them to send the bottle to the lab and the lab tested it and it was loaded with naturally occurring Thorium. It came from India and a lot of areas in India are high in Thorium. So that the roots of the plant picked up the thorium and put it into the turmeric. So there is an example. It was highly radioactive, it was pegging the meter on the inspector. But there are other sources of turmeric that are not radioactive. That was an example. So what we advised this person, Maggie and I still use turmeric as a spice. But he was using it as a supplement in large quantities. But if you are going to use it as a supplement, check around for another source that does not have all the thorium in it. We have another person who was shopping in a west coast supermarket and got some seaweed, and brought it home and put it's Inspector up to it and it went crazy and we had them send the seaweed in. And it turns out that the seaweed was growing in a part of the ocean that was loaded with natural uranium. There was some sort of uranium deposit down where the seaweed was growing. So it had picked up naturally occurring uranium in large quantities. It is ubiquitous, not in the quantities in this turmeric or this seaweed, but in very small quantities naturally occurring radiation is everywhere.

That is not true for cesium. Cesium comes from nuclear power and is a muscle seeker and there is nothing on the planet that creates it. There is no natural cause for that. So your body does not have the defenses to prevent the issues related to the radioactive cesium or the radioactive strontium that we are seeing coming off of Fukushima.

Tom Ritter: And one of the reasons I wanted to point that out is there is radioactivity all around us from the nuclear tests that were done from just naturally occurring radiation. Just because it is radioactive, does not mean it came from Fukushima. Obviously it is not safe. So we need to keep our eyes and ears open all the time. And that turmeric was a bulk spice, it was not I do not think in capsules, somebody bought it in bulk. So we need to be a little bit cognizant of what we are doing and probably gets to a point where everybody needs an inspector type instrument to detect the radiation.

(-Break-)

Tom Ritter: Arnie we have not discussed this before, but I have got a show coming up the next hour with an EMP expert. In your opinion, what would happen with an EMP strike, whether it is solar, CME or whether it is from a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere, what would happen to our nuclear facilities, is that a concern of yours?

Arnie Gundersen: There are 2 types of EMP. There is the solar EMP, stands for electromagnetic pulse. We had a case up here in Quebec where about 10 years ago, there was a solar EMP that knocked out the grid in Quebec for a couple of days. There was one down in South Africa similarly. But the big one was called the Carrington Effect and it happened in 1859. A solar storm hit and at the time, we just had telegraph lines, but the telegraph lines were running without their batteries there was so much electricity being generated and sparks were jumping to the ground. If that happened in the States now, let's say on the east coast, the effect would be to knock out all of the transformers and these transformers are the size of a house and it takes years to repair them. It would create civil unrest and likely food riots and things like that because we could not supply the energy. And what happens at a nuclear plant at that point is the shape of the solar spike is such that it would stop at the transformer. And it would maybe wreck the transformer but it would not wreck the safety systems.

But a nuclear plant only has a week's worth of diesel fuel in order to keep it cool. So we would need to get diesel fuel to these nuclear plants in the middle of civil disobedience because people had lost their power. Now the government claims that they have a contingency plan where nuclear plants would continue to get diesel fuel for several years until the grid was repaired.

The worst one is the EMP from a nuclear weapon. That has a different shaped spike and it could wipe out the safety systems. Now we do not design for that and it would be some sort of a nuclear weapon deployed in space. The United States fired one off over Hawaii back in the 60's and it knocked out the grid in Hawaii. The shape of that pulse is different than a solar storm pulse and would knock out all the integrated circuits in a nuclear plant. So if we had a country that did not have our best interests in mind, like North Korea or Iran or something like that, they could in theory create a pulse that would cause the nuclear plants to fail. We just have to pray that our opponents do not want to destroy our society in the process.

Tom Ritter: Now once again Arnie, the reason that is critical for us non-nuclear scientists is those generators have to sustain the cooling pumps to keep not only the spent fuel cool, but also just the shut-down, because obviously the power plants would probably be hitting a shut down mode at that point so if they lose cooling then all chaos breaks out and then we have China Syndrome type events.

Arnie Gundersen: That is what happened at Fukushima. When a nuclear plant shuts down, it does not shut down, 95% of the power stops, but 5% continues and needs to be cooled for years. That is why we need those diesels.

Tom Ritter: Thanks again for sharing Arnie and I wish you the best. Hopefully, everything you and Maggie are doing is going to make a difference and make a more sane world for us all to live in. We appreciate your time and information.

Arnie Gundersen: Thank you for having me.