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Dec. 18, 2004 - Art Bell

02:52:34

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Dr. Charles Till - Nuclear Reactors

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	So, I'm going to go ahead and get started. I'm going to go ahead and start the video.
	From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good
	afternoon, good morning, I don't know, whatever time it is and whatever time zone you reside
	in, every single one of them covered in one way or the other by this incredible program
	called Coast to Coast AM.
	Bam.
	This is the Weekend Edition and I'm Mark Bell.
	Howdy.
	We've got so much going on tonight that's going to interest you.
	As you know, we almost lost Ann Striever.
	She had one heck of a near-death experience, and it involves her cat.
	So it's a really interesting one, the only one like this that I have ever heard, ever.
	And so we'll get to Anne.
	Anne's going to actually be on the air with us here in a moment.
	A few station-keeping items.
	One, the predictions this year for the year 2005 are going to begin tomorrow night.
	That's right.
	Tomorrow night I have exactly... I'm going to be off Christmas weekend.
	I'm going to have that weekend off and enjoy Christmas with Ramona and family and so the predictions therefore are going to be tomorrow night and then on December 31st I will indeed be here to escort you all into the new year.
	I think that's a Friday night, Saturday morning if I'm not mistaken.
	I think it is.
	And so, as we have done traditionally, we'll do two days of predictions.
	Those days will be tomorrow night, Sunday, and then December 31st.
	We'll finish them off.
	Now, I'd like to take a moment to do what I think is worth doing, and that is tomorrow night, when I begin the predictions, and I'll, of course, pull the predictions made last year for 2004 from the Bell Family Vault.
	In fact, actually, I have them right here.
	One of them on the first page is astounding.
	I mean, it's right on the mark.
	Just absolutely astounding.
	You'll have to wait till tomorrow night to find out about that one.
	We'll read those and take them.
	Now, I want you to do your very darn level best, please, to not just call me for the sake of getting on the air and hearing your voice on the air.
	I really want those of you who have a given gift for making predictions To use the time between now and tomorrow night to concentrate on what you really feel will occur in the year 2005.
	And so give it a little thought.
	Don't just sort of make a snap and dial judgment.
	Really give it a little thought, those of you who have talent for such.
	And let's bring our average up.
	So that'll begin tomorrow night.
	That's item one.
	Item two is, so many times he makes my webcam.
	Well, tonight he's done it again.
	That's my cat, or one of my four cats, our four cats.
	This one's name is Yeti, and the photograph you're going to see represents something that happened last night.
	It shouldn't be possible.
	It should not be possible.
	However, last night this cat made a seven and one half foot jump into the most incredible little area this is an area between our bedroom and our bathroom and there's this little tiny narrow area I suppose for air or whatever above the bathroom doors and the door was open he was in the bathroom the door was open so he didn't have to make this jump this was a volunteer jump that you're you're witnessing
	I was laying on the bed petting another cat, which may have led him to do this, to show off a little, to get attention.
	I don't know.
	Whatever the reason, he decided he was going to make what I consider to be one of the most incredible cat jumps ever made by a cat.
	Now, I don't know if you can make it out in the photograph that's on my webcam, but this area between the top of the ridge there and the ceiling is about as big as a cat.
	That's it.
	In other words, his little hump of a back is about on the ceiling.
	And the whole area is, it's only a cat width wide.
	So to have jumped seven and a half feet and to have landed where he did is one of the more outstanding feats I've ever seen a cat perform.
	So I ran and got the camera and took a picture and there it is.
	That's Yeti.
	Seven and a half feet.
	Straight up into an area that, I mean the whole jump is just, in my mind, impossible.
	So that's on the webcam tonight.
	Item three, and last item before we launch here.
	Actually, there's a fourth.
	You know, Showtime, I've heard rumors that Showtime is going to cancel Dead Like Me.
	What the hell is up with that?
	That happens to be one of my favorite programs, and they haven't given it long enough to catch on properly because it's a little bit different.
	Well, okay, a lot different.
	It's a wonderful television program, and Showtime, if it's true, shame on you!
	And you need to change your mind and put it back on.
	George needs to be on Showtime.
	And if not, then I hope HBO grabs it out from under you.
	That would be my wish.
	And then the only item, the news item, worth mentioning is this incredible story.
	You know, the woman charged with killing An expectant mother cutting the baby from her womb was showing the child off to people at a cafe and to her pastor hours before she was arrested, residents said Saturday.
	Lisa M. Montgomery, 36 years of age, charged with kidnapping resulting in murder and was expected to appear in federal court Monday.
	The baby, whose mother had been eight months pregnant, was in good condition.
	And that's the king of the shake-your-head stories of the horrible things that happen in the world.
	Something not quite so horrible, something wonderful has happened with Ann Streber.
	In a moment, that story.
	By the way, in the hour coming up, the next hour, we're going to have Dr. Charles Till here who designed the
	first Canadian reactor, nuclear reactor.
	I said the first Canadian nuclear reactor, then came down here and helped us set up, and he's got a lot of thoughts on what ought to be done about energy in America, nuclear power, and all the rest of it.
	That's going to be really good.
	But right now, you know, it doesn't seem like very long ago, or does it?
	That I called Whitley Strieber, who was about to come on the air with me on this program, and I called him about, I don't know, 10 minutes before the show, and he said, oh my God, Art.
	And then I heard this rustling on the line, and it hung up, and I called back immediately, and Whitley just said, Anne's collapsed.
	I've got to go, and hung up.
	And what a story from there.
	Ladies and gentlemen, one of my best friends, My co-author here is Whitley Streber.
	Whitley?
	Hi Art.
	It was a remarkable moment that you would call just at the second, literally, that it was happening.
	We had just in that moment walked into the apartment and suddenly Ann walking in front of me said, Whitley, I need your help.
	And her knees were buckling.
	And I took her down to the floor.
	You called.
	I said what I just said you called back I explained she'd collapsed and the next moment I realized that astonishingly enough she was having first I thought perhaps a hyper she was in hyperglycemic shock because we hadn't eaten all day but then I could see she was having a seizure and it was obvious that it was a brain bleed and I knew what I was up against that I had Perhaps half an hour to get her to the hospital.
	And that at this moment, my wife's life was in jeopardy.
	It was a 50-50 chance of surviving that half hour.
	Those were the statistics.
	I knew all of this because it happened to my sister about 30 years ago.
	That's so frightening.
	God, I can't even imagine.
	And you know the astonishing and deeply sobering thing is, it came out of nowhere.
	She was perfectly fine five seconds before it happened.
	That is the nature of something happening in your brain.
	Whitley, the long story told short, what happened to Ann?
	And of course, there were different reports at the beginning, as there always are in an incident like this, until the final word came in.
	But what had actually happened?
	Well, she had an undiagnosed aneurysm in her brain, which is a swelling in one of the blood vessels.
	It had probably been there all of her life.
	Well, that's like a time bomb.
	Like a time bomb.
	It's like a balloon.
	In other words, the vein becomes like a balloon, and then like a balloon, overblown, it finally bursts.
	Right.
	And it was simply an accident waiting to happen.
	And the irony of it was that it had happened to my sister.
	So I was very aware of this danger in people.
	But it never crossed either of our minds that Annie might be Well, again, long story short, you got her to the hospital.
	no symptoms sometimes people do have symptoms of this they have headaches or
	something double vision or or other symptoms that suggest this
	we didn't she didn't have any symptoms uh... again long story short you got her to the hospital uh...
	we began to get reports and of course we have people do a mass prayer
	uh...
	and and and also i guess there was some actual medical assistance as a result of
	through being on the program, right?
	Well, that's right, Art.
	And that's one of the reasons we're here tonight, is both of us want to thank you and the listeners.
	Because, first of all, there were two nurses.
	We made a desperate appeal on that night, I did, for help because here we were in the middle of Los Angeles, a city we don't really know very well, at a strange hospital with no knowledge of how it worked and I knew only that my wife was in tremendous jeopardy and I got on the air and, God love them, two crucially important nurses heard this, threw their clothes on, and came over to the hospital and acted as ombudsman
	for us all through that night and helped us in every way and a wonderful doctor.
	The hospital was the Kaiser Permanente on sunset and I have to tell you that they performed superbly well in stabilizing Ann and getting her out of immediate danger.
	Throughout the whole thing, the medical care we've received in Los Angeles has been fantastic.
	My understanding is, uh, Whitley, correct me if I'm wrong, but they put something into her leg, guided it all the way through a blood vessel to her brain, and then put something in there.
	Yes.
	You know, I mean, once the blood vessels burst, then you're going to bleed and bleed and bleed unless they do something.
	So they put something in there, right?
	Well, what happened was, first, Kaiser Permanente, they increased the pressure of her of her spinal fluid around her brain so that the bleeding would stop, leaving the aneurysm kind of hanging there.
	It could have gotten worse and we spent about 18 hours struggling to find a doctor who could put something called a coil in it because it was a very, very difficult one to reach.
	Finally it turned out that the doctor who developed the process was at UCLA Medical Center and so down there she went in an ambulance and the next night, Sunday night, she was coiled and they put this thing in her leg and went all the way up through her body's circulatory system into this tiny little blood vein in her brain put this coil in and the doctor before he started he said
	it's going to be very challenging and expect to be waiting about three hours.
	Forty minutes later he called and said it's done and it's stable and you have nothing further to
	worry about.
	And I said doctor are you running out of challenges? I hope not.
	Hey I'm curious about something Whitley. I remember that I was hypertensive about the whole thing and I got an
	email from somebody and for some reason the email struck me as
	really important.
	There was a doctor's name in the email, and they wanted this passed on to you, so I called you and passed it on to you.
	Where did that fit into all this?
	Art, that email, and the lady, I hope she's listening tonight, who sent that, we've had correspondence since, it was crucial.
	That email introduced me to a wonderful man, Dr. Miles Saunders, who has become a close friend, who functioned as a consultant throughout this, who helped us through the process of getting her into UCLA Medical Center, which is not easy to do because they have lots of people trying to get in there all the time.
	It's one of the leading places in the world for this type of surgery.
	Getting her to the right physicians, He is a neurosurgeon himself.
	He's now retired but in practice for many years.
	Every step of the way, I was able to call Miles and find out from him where we were, what was going on.
	Time and time again, it turned out that our doctors had anticipated a possible problem and headed it off at the past.
	What we're looking at here now What I'm sitting here looking at right now is a real miracle.
	She's home, right?
	I mean, she's right there with you.
	Right there with me.
	A miracle of two things.
	Modern medicine and, in my opinion, prayer.
	The prayer of many people who are listening to this now.
	Because modern medicine told me It would take six months to a year for Annie to fully recover.
	Sure.
	Usually there's a paralysis, physical paralysis.
	Well not necessarily physical paralysis in this case.
	Or mental problems.
	A lot of cognitive problems.
	Of course.
	But now here sitting across from me, not a year later or six months later, but eight days after she walked out of the hospital, is a normal Ann Streep.
	This is absolutely astonishing.
	It is astonishing.
	And of course, then what happened to her that we only learned about fairly, or I only learned
	about fairly recently, is also absolutely astonishing.
	So why don't you go ahead and put Ann on with us and we'll start this story.
	I just want to say one thing about her more.
	She's also a novelist.
	Her first novel, The Invisible Woman, is just out.
	And Invisible Woman is just out.
	And I'll let her talk about that and everything else.
	Here she is.
	All right.
	Hey, Art.
	Hey, Anne.
	Welcome back to the world.
	Oh, thank you.
	Thank you very much.
	When this occurred to you, there was nothing, as Whitley said, there was nothing beforehand.
	No headaches.
	No warning.
	Nothing.
	What happened?
	You just started suddenly feeling dizzy or what?
	Well, to tell you the truth, I don't really know what happened since I don't remember any of it.
	Oh.
	All of that's a blank, huh?
	Yes.
	Yes, it is.
	I mean, I have a few vague memories, but basically I don't remember it and I probably never will.
	And what was the last thing you do remember?
	I mean, do you remember the night, the evening, then coming home?
	Where did you lose it?
	Well, I don't remember coming home and collapsing.
	I remember we went to a movie.
	Okay.
	But I did want to say real quick, you know, science has been studying the power of prayer.
	Most scientists have decided that there's a legitimate power to it.
	They don't know why.
	Oh yes.
	But they do know that people who are prayed for get better.
	That's right.
	I mean, that is now proven.
	It's proven statistically.
	That's all there is to it.
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	So I wanted to thank people who prayed for me because, I mean, I know there's a real power to it and I appreciate those prayers so much.
	I appreciate what you did so much.
	You're very welcome.
	As I told Whit, I was kind of hyper-tensive over the whole thing.
	Ramona and I both were.
	You know, if you look at, as we have so closely, because I guess we're so close to it, I mean, there were a remarkable number of almost miracles and coincidences that occurred in connection with this whole thing.
	The whole series of miracles, right, the whole series.
	Starting off with the fact that my husband was so brave, he saved my life.
	I mean, that's just flat out the way it is.
	He just saved my life.
	You know, he was not only brave, but he was directed, Anne.
	In other words, like a laser beam, he was on exactly what had to be done.
	Yes, he was, and it was just miraculous.
	I don't know, I mean, I don't know where he got the insight and strength, but thank goodness he did.
	But now I wonder if you are interested in hearing about my trip to the land of the dead.
	Oh, absolutely.
	I am interested.
	That's sort of half the reason you're here, if not the biggest reason you're here tonight, is you did apparently experience, I don't know, was it a, would you call it a near-death experience?
	Well, it wasn't a traditional near-death experience with the white light and things like that.
	I had been reading a book recently that was basically a book of interviews with different shamans and it was saying that one thing every single shaman who has ever lived has in common is they make a conscious choice to enter the land of the dead or to have a near-death experience.
	Not that I'm a shaman.
	I'm not.
	I don't have the wisdom for it.
	It's just interesting to me that this happened to me too.
	It was funny.
	We had this crazy cat coat, a Siamese cat.
	Call us a cat with no instincts.
	All right, this is a very important story, and we're at the bottom of the hour, so we'll just leave everybody hanging.
	That's what we do in talk radios.
	We let people hang when the really important part's coming.
	So hang away.
	The clock says we have to do that.
	Ann Streber is my guest right now.
	She is a miracle.
	You're listening to a miracle.
	The fact that she is here is absolutely a miracle, and the nature of the near-death experience she had...
	Well, you heard her mention her cat, Coe.
	And we have discussed cats, and dogs, and animals, and souls, and near-death a lot.
	Well, we're going to wrap it all into one here in a moment.
	Get out.
	Oh, my God.
	Oh, my God.
	I'm gonna open up your gate And maybe tell you about Phaedra And how she gave me life And how she made it in Some velvet morning when I'm stray
	Flowers growing on our hill Drowning flies and apodills
	Learn from us very much Look at us but do not touch
	Fedra is my name Do talk with Art Bell. Call the wild card line at area code
	7.
	The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
	The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
	To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
	From west of the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
	International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country Sprint Access number, pressing Option 5 and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
	From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	The existence of God, life, death, Our souls, whether there is a physical attachment of something that detaches when we die, and whether in fact there's an afterlife, all of this, these are the greatest, greatest mysteries of our life.
	If you want a little hint about what might be, it's coming up in just a moment with Ann Strieber.
	Ann Strieber is back and I don't even begin to know how to ask Ann about her experience.
	So I really don't, Ann.
	I mean, there's no way to just jump into this.
	What happened?
	Well, I was talking a little about Coe, and the funny thing about Coe was that he was a cat with attitude.
	One time I was in the living room and I heard this huge crash and I ran over to my son's bedroom where the crash had come from.
	And Coke comes out and he yawns as if he's just been woken up, when obviously he's the one who did it.
	Like, whoa, I have no idea what that was.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I thought, that cat lied to me.
	That cat lied!
	Yes.
	Well, that's what it was.
	It was a concocted, well thought out, presented lie.
	And another time he got out in the middle of the winter, escaped from our country house, and He was out all night, we were worried to death, and our son was away at school, and we thought, oh God, he's going to come home and there'll be no cat.
	You know, his pet is gone.
	And finally, he came back, and of course, you know the first thing he did when he came home, don't you?
	Yes?
	He used the cat box.
	Well, at least he used the box.
	I mean, this cat had so few instincts, he couldn't even pee in the woods.
	Well, Anne, here's what I've said on the air and what I feel I have forecast, as you know.
	I've watched them so carefully.
	They have a sense of themselves.
	I've got one that admires himself in the mirror and practices looking cute.
	That's an important thing, a sense of self.
	They have distinct personalities.
	They're as different as two people's personalities could be from each other.
	They have every emotion.
	It seems like, same as humans, in other words, all these crucial things that to me add up to what we call a personality or a soul.
	I think we really do.
	I'm not sure what the Bible says about this, but from my point of view, they're as full of soul as we are.
	Now, go ahead.
	What happened?
	What happened was, I was in a room all of a sudden, and There were people with shopping bags and suitcases, and I heard a voice saying to me, you can keep going if you want to.
	Of course, you know what that meant.
	Yes, of course.
	Now I've got some questions.
	For example, at that moment, Anne, did you know the situation you were in?
	No.
	No, I didn't.
	Did you know that you were hanging between life and death?
	No, I didn't.
	But I knew I was in the world of the dead.
	That sounds odd, but I did.
	I knew it.
	I knew I was in the world of the dead, and my son was standing by my bed, but I thought I was talking to him on a cell phone.
	This is very odd, but it turns out he was standing by the bed, and I said to him, Andrew, guess what?
	Coe is here.
	Coe your cat.
	Yes.
	I was so surprised.
	I said, this isn't Coe.
	Coe is here, Andrew.
	Is Coe still alive, Ann?
	No.
	Coe had cancer.
	But here's the odd thing.
	I said, when I was talking to Andrew, who was standing by my bed, but I thought I was talking to him on the cell phone, I said, I thought it would be my mother.
	I thought it would be my dead mother, but it's Coe.
	Wow.
	Because my mother committed suicide when I was seven.
	I've always thought that if I ever got near a place like the World of the Dead, I'd be able to ask her some questions.
	But she wasn't there.
	No, it was Coe.
	It was good old Coe.
	Do you specifically, I guess, understand that that statement or that Yeah, a statement.
	You can stay or you can go on.
	Came from Coe.
	Was there any question?
	No, no, no.
	That didn't come from Coe.
	It was just like a voice.
	It was just a voice?
	It was just a voice saying you can keep going if you want to.
	And of course I knew that if I wanted to die, I could go ahead and do it.
	Then you felt the presence of Coe?
	I saw him.
	You saw Coe?
	Oh yeah, I saw him right there.
	And he kind of had this attitude like, oh, these stupid humans, they can't even find a world of the dead on their own.
	You know what I mean?
	I mean, I just feel that coming off it.
	You know, I mean, he was always like this.
	But, you know, we went to the world of the dead and he showed it to me.
	And I think he brought me back from it.
	Oh, you think he brought you back?
	Oh yes, I do.
	Do you recall, I mean, that was a statement to you that you could stay or you could keep going.
	Do you recall making a conscious decision?
	Yes, I do.
	I recall making a conscious decision not to die.
	Although, you know, when you're in a certain position in life, it can be very tempting.
	It can seem very restful.
	I've known people who have had near-death experiences who said they didn't want to come back.
	They didn't want to live.
	They were very happy.
	That's right.
	Was there a draw on that side?
	Do you remember the feeling?
	No.
	No, there wasn't.
	No.
	Uh-uh.
	I wasn't appalled or anything or frightened even, but I just decided that I didn't want to die now.
	But it wasn't Code's voice I was hearing.
	It was kind of like a universal voice or a God voice or whatever telling me that I could keep going if I wanted to.
	Right, right.
	And you were conscious as you are now.
	In other words, recognizing... Did you have form and substance?
	You said you saw people.
	Yeah, I saw people and I think I had form and substance.
	It seemed like to me I did and Coe certainly did.
	This is an incredible story.
	I have never talked to anybody who has had a near-death experience and met Were you really close?
	Did you have a really close love relationship with Coe?
	Well, Coe was great.
	I remember when he finally died, he had cancer.
	We took him to a surgeon and the surgeon just couldn't fix him up.
	I remember he kept Coe alive so I could say goodbye to him.
	I went in and he was lying on the operating table.
	He's got his lungs inflated so he could still breathe and I remember putting my face in his fur and just weeping.
	And then I was weeping on that poor man's shoulder and I remember thinking to myself, this poor vet, all he does all day is probably try to take cancer out of cats and then people weep on his shoulder.
	Then your love relationship with that cat was enormous then.
	Oh, I was crazy about Cohen.
	I remember thinking to myself when I saw him again, I remember thinking to myself, well, you know, maybe all those years of changing the litter and feeding him does pay off.
	That's an interesting thought to have had.
	This is remarkable.
	And so... You know what else I thought?
	It's very funny.
	I saw Coe and I thought to myself, it's that damn cat.
	Well, you still have a sense of humor then.
	But I remember thinking, I remember thinking, it's that damn cat!
	I guess then the intensity of the love that you had for Ko was perhaps closer to the top of the ladder than what you remembered of your mom because of the early suicide?
	And that's why Ko was there?
	I don't know.
	I don't know at all.
	I mean, you know, I really, when you're abandoned by your mother, which is what it seems like when that happens, It's very strange.
	It's a very strange experience.
	It feels like abandonment.
	You know, if you've ever been a motherless child, then you're a motherless child forever.
	And I can even spot them.
	I can spot adults who lost their mothers early.
	I've always said I can, and I think I can, because we're all motherless.
	We're forever motherless.
	I always promised myself I would never do that to my son, no matter how bad things got.
	Sure, and when you... My mother was what's called bipolar.
	I know what that is, yes.
	Yeah, it used to be called manic depressive.
	Yes, very tough periods of very being almost hyper up and then hyper down and not much in between.
	Yeah.
	Pretty tough.
	Okay.
	When you made the decision to live, did you then, I mean, did anything then happen?
	Were you suddenly out of that area?
	Was Ko gone and were you back among the living or what?
	Trying to remember.
	It seems like I was.
	But it wasn't really zippy.
	It wasn't like zoom, zoom, zoom.
	I do think I saw God.
	Oh?
	But you know, I think that when we see God, we see The God that we, I don't want to say believe in, but are interested in, and I'm very interested in quantum physics, so I saw a God who was kind of like a random number generator.
	I don't mean that he was cold, but I just mean that it was kind of like the explanation he was giving me for who he is.
	It was kind of like someone who controls randomness.
	Well, that would be us humans.
	We're plenty random, aren't we?
	This free will thing has us all over the board, so... Yeah, well, yes, but I think that... You know, it's interesting, you were talking about God a little earlier, and it is Christmas and everything, and I was thinking to myself, you know, I think that Jesus was a shaman who came down and voluntarily had a near-death experience so that we would all know that we didn't have to be afraid of death.
	And that's the next big question.
	Has this changed you in any way?
	I mean, humans have a fear of their own mortality.
	There's no question about it.
	Has it changed the way you feel?
	I don't think so.
	I don't think so.
	I've met many people Who said, I'm not afraid of death anymore.
	That's right.
	I'm not sure if I am or not really.
	I'm really not sure.
	I was just so grateful to be brought back.
	It was such an invention to be brought back by Ko.
	I think that really I didn't have time to stop and think about that.
	Do you think that means cats have souls, animals have souls?
	Is that what that means?
	I really don't know.
	I would be kind of surprised if they didn't.
	So would I. And I think it does.
	But what an unusual near-death experience to have.
	Yeah, it was, wasn't it?
	Do you recall then, who'd you tell about it and how quickly were you able to?
	I told Andrew almost immediately.
	Of course, he heard me say that about Coe.
	He was standing right there and I said that.
	And later he told me I'd said that, and I did remember saying it.
	Oh, that's very important.
	I mean, that's a little bit of additional evidence.
	So this came out of your mouth?
	Oh, yes.
	No, I said that.
	I said, Andrew, Coe is here.
	Guess what?
	Coe is here.
	Wow.
	Yeah, and while he was standing right there, I thought I was talking to him on a cell phone.
	Why I thought that, I don't know, because I can barely work my cell phone.
	But, um, but he remembers me saying it and he was standing by, he said, no mom, no, I was standing right by your bed and you said that and I heard you say that and I thought that was so odd.
	And he said, and you also said, I thought it would be my dead mother.
	He remembers the whole thing.
	Oh, you said that out loud as well?
	Yes, oh yes, I said it all out loud and he remembers the whole thing very clearly.
	In fact, he's the one who told me about the dead mother part.
	I had forgotten that.
	Well, this is really something.
	And then I guess you finally got to tell Wit, huh?
	Yep, yep.
	How are you feeling now?
	Well, I tell you, it's interesting.
	Right now I'm a person who... I would say I have some essential confusion.
	I mean, it takes me a while to remember what day it is, what date it is, what year it is.
	You know, where the bathroom is.
	And I have to use cues for that.
	I have to use, like, therapy.
	I have to make sure I look at the paper and see what the date is.
	And then I have to remember, oh, so-and-so was here on Tuesday, so it must be Wednesday.
	I mean, you know, it's the basic things take a lot more work than they used to.
	Well, I'm told that this sort of thing, following what happened to you, will fade and you will return to 100% normal.
	Yeah, well I'm pretty normal now actually.
	The funny thing is, it seems to have affected my small brains, I mean the brains that kind of function in an everyday way, but it didn't affect my big brains at all.
	I'm still very able to talk about philosophy, quantum physics, All those things they used to love to talk about.
	Don't ask me why that is.
	I really do not know.
	I could talk to you about philosophy or anything like that, even though maybe I don't remember where the bathroom is.
	Alright, you wrote all of this in Ann's diary, which is on unknowncountry.com.
	It's still there, isn't it Ann?
	Yeah, yes it is.
	Okay, a wonderful piece.
	I recommend it to everybody.
	And now you've written a book, is that right?
	I've written a book called An Invisible Woman.
	It's in bookstores right now.
	It's being published by Tor.
	And it's a thriller about a woman whose husband is murdered.
	And she sets out to discover who killed him.
	And what's interesting about this, at least to me, is that I became invisible.
	This really happened to me.
	I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt.
	Anne, anything is likely to occur now when something as traumatic as what happened to you happens to somebody.
	They occasionally come back with insights and abilities that last for a period of time and then fade, but some very unusual abilities following these near-death things.
	Well, this all happened to me before I had this accident.
	What happened to me is, we were living in New York at the time, and I would go out to do chores, because you do them on foot in New York City.
	You walk from here to there.
	And I kept getting in these horrible fights with strange men in stores, because they would step in front of me, right in front of me, when I was standing in line at the deli.
	They would step right in front of me when I was trying to catch a cab.
	And I kept saying to myself, what's going on?
	I was actually scared, because every time I'd go out again, I'd get in a big fight with somebody.
	And then I kicked this one man in the deli who stepped in front of me and he called the police.
	Well, you were in New York.
	Well, nobody... This never happened before in New York.
	Oh, I see.
	I mean, people may not be terribly polite, but I mean, you know, they're not... And it was all men.
	It was always men doing it.
	Well, they have a very hurried lifestyle.
	But I think it was more than that, Art.
	I have to tell you.
	And then I found out that there's actually a scientific reason for this.
	And what it is, is that we all have these sex hormones or signals that we're sending out called pheromones.
	And as a woman gets older, these start to diminish.
	And so what happens is you are literally off the male radar.
	They literally cannot see you.
	Oh.
	Oh, that makes it sound so terrible, Ann.
	I really don't mean that.
	I really don't mean that.
	But it was an interesting realization because, I mean, it just kept happening to me.
	And I remember we finally had to get our lawyer after that man called the police.
	And I kicked him right in the shin.
	And then the lawyer said to me, Ann, please don't kick people in the belly.
	But it's really happened to me.
	Here's another example that happened to me.
	We were going out to dinner with some movie people.
	And Whitley was saying, I wish I knew what they really thought about my project.
	And I said to him, well why don't you just excuse yourself and go to the men's room and I'll just sit there and they'll all talk about it right in front of me and I'll report back to you later.
	Okay, we're out of time.
	End of the story is, they did?
	They did and I reported back.
	I was a spy in my own life.
	Welcome back Anne.
	Thanks.
	It's been a pleasure having you on.
	Tell Whit I'll talk to him shortly, and again, welcome back to the world, my dear.
	Thanks a lot.
	Good night.
	Good night.
	That's Ann Streber.
	That's got to be one of the more unusual near-death experiences you've ever heard.
	Certainly true for me.
	In a moment, we're going to talk about what's headed toward my backyard.
	I'm Art Bell.
	It's 2 a.m.
	We've been here this long.
	It's 2 a.m.
	I'm not here. It's 2am.
	It's 2am.
	I'm here.
	It's 2am.
	The sun's still up.
	That's it.
	Yeah, there's a storm on the loose.
	Sirens in my head.
	As I'm inside, and saw circuits in the sand.
	Where do we go?
	My whole life spins into a frantic.
	To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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	Art Bell.
	Raging across America and the world, and America and the world.
	Desperately need energy.
	And I mean desperately.
	A lot of controversy about peak oil.
	You know what peak oil means?
	It means we've got as much as we're going to get, baby.
	And from here on in, it's going to be less and it's going to get expensive real fast.
	The world needs energy desperately.
	Coming up, Dr. Charles Till, who was an engineer, listen carefully, an engineer and a physicist when he left Canada to finish his technical education at the Imperial College, University of London.
	When he returned to Canada, he was given the job of starting up the first Canadian power reactor.
	He was just 26 years of age at the time, fresh out of school a couple years later.
	He accepted a position at Argonne National Laboratory out of Chicago, where civilian reactor development for the U.S.
	was then concentrated.
	He is now retired, but for almost 20 years, he led a large research and development program at one of our nation's great national laboratories.
	His goal?
	Nothing less than to develop a wholly new kind of nuclear reactor technology.
	He wanted that technology to solve the problems facing nuclear power, to allow nuclear power to take its place in a long-term solution for our nation's energy needs, and they are desperate indeed.
	With our nation facing very serious problems because of our increasing dependence upon oil and with sober predictions of a coming peak oil in production in the next decade or so and then a slow and I might add painful and expensive decline.
	The story of Dr. Till's work is one well worth telling and one well worth your rapt attention.
	in a moment alright then here we go
	arm Welcome, Dr. Charles Till.
	Well, thank you.
	It's great to have you with us.
	Dr. Till, where are you?
	I'm in Idaho Falls on a very pleasant night, at midnight here in Idaho, I would say.
	Okay, excellent.
	So, a little bit then about yourself.
	How does one, particularly early on like that, get into the nuclear power field?
	Well, you must remember the time.
	A long time ago, the 1950s, nuclear energy was the way of the future.
	It was accepted by pretty much everyone, the professionals, scientists, public.
	In fact, I think too much was expected of it, if anything.
	Nuclear power was supposed to... Save us.
	Save us, yeah.
	It'd be an endless source of electricity.
	Famously, electricity too cheap to meter.
	The public was very supportive.
	You know, heaven knows the introduction of nuclear couldn't have been more dramatic in the form of the bomb, but it was rather like introducing fire through TNT.
	Well, in that way, though, the world's people understood the power involved.
	Yes, but I think very early the understanding of what the potential was was correctly publicized.
	You know, the first time that I was conscious of it, I was 11 years old.
	And in school, I gave a little talk on the benefits of nuclear power, which, by the way, I cribbed out of the Saturday Evening Post, and I was most worried about whether I'd memorized it properly than anything else.
	But still, it gives an idea of the sort of popularity of it at the time.
	Later on, when I'd gone into engineering and then into physics, it was the In a sense, idealistic.
	One had a chance to do something important.
	Oh, that's important, alright.
	Very important.
	So, you helped put together Canada's first nuclear reactor, is that correct?
	Well, you gave me a little bit too much credit in the very early things you said.
	The designer of the Canadian reactor was a wonderful scientist and engineer, W.B.
	Lewis.
	My job was to After I came out of school, to come back to Canada was to study that reactor, which was under construction, and then be the physicist in charge of bringing the thing into operation.
	That's pretty serious.
	Well, it was a challenge for a kid my age, and I learned a lot from it.
	Today, or even a decade after that, you would never have given Essentially a young man like that to that kind of responsibility.
	Doctor, that early in all of this, even at that stage, were you as a physicist concerned with what you were doing?
	In other words, not just the fact that you could create the power and you could cause a chain reaction and do what you were supposed to do, but did you begin thinking at that early stage?
	I've always wondered about this.
	About the consequences of it and about the byproducts of it and all the rest of that that we're going to have to talk about.
	Did any of that occur to you that early on?
	The principal thing, of course, that bothered one was the use of it as a weapon.
	It wasn't the waste.
	It wasn't even that you couldn't solve perfectly adequately the safety of it.
	Of a power reactor.
	If you had a crisis of conscience, it was strictly the weapons aspect of it.
	But you all then weren't thinking too much about the waste aspect of it?
	No.
	Was in fact one of the, as we will get on I'm sure later in the program, that was one of the principal weaknesses in the way nuclear, civilian nuclear, was developed.
	In that the, it was assumed that if one could make the reactor itself economic, that was the big step.
	And that the rest that must come along, the Processing of the spent fuel and the disposing of the waste, that would come in good time.
	Plenty of time.
	No hurry with that.
	That turned out to be a bad misjudgment.
	Yes, do you recall early in the interview, a few moments ago, I asked you where you were and you told me, now let me tell you where I am.
	I'm in Pahrump, Nevada.
	That's where I live in Toronto.
	Rather significant.
	So tonight's program is of a fair amount of importance to me.
	I'm just over the hill and over the dale from Yucca Mountain.
	Correct.
	And so I guess we'll get to all of that.
	Nevertheless, what a wonderful job you would have had to be making sure that this thing was going to work.
	In Canada, Were you building reactors the way we built them here in the U.S.?
	Were they double shielded?
	Double contained?
	Yes.
	No.
	Really?
	Really.
	There is a containment of a kind on the Canadian reactors, but it isn't the one that will take large overpressures that we have on our water reactors here.
	Oh, no kidding?
	Wow, so when you designed this, Doctor, was it in your mind that everything was going to be so backed up and was going to be done so carefully that nothing could go wrong?
	Well, again, let me stress that the Canadian design was done by basically W.B.
	Lewis and a lot of very good people.
	It wasn't my responsibility, although I would have been proud to have done it.
	The principal argument for building Canadian heavy water reactors that way Was that although things could go wrong, that nothing of a nature to really threaten the fuel integrity.
	You know, if the fuel doesn't, if the fuel stays intact, there is no accident.
	We can get into that a little bit.
	But, you know, the fuel is in rods in the reactor, and it's in either steel or some Inert material metal like that.
	And as long as the the steel clad or the metal clad stays intact, of course, there is no accident.
	No serious accident, no release of radioactivity.
	And so the principal arguments that the Canadians made and make is that there is no accident that is credible that that would affect the fuel to fail the fuel.
	And over the years, that has turned out to be so.
	Has it?
	I think it was a pretty good idea.
	In Canada or worldwide?
	No, in Canada.
	In that specific kind of reactor.
	A Canadian kind of reactor is specialized to Canada.
	It's built one or two other places, but it's fundamentally a Canadian development.
	Alright, what's different between a Canadian reactor, for example, and a U.S.
	reactor, or a Russian reactor?
	Well, the principal reactor that took over the world's generation of electricity is the
	American light water reactor, so-called.
	It is a reactor that is fundamentally the submarine, the reactor that was developed
	by Admiral Rickover for the submarine.
	It's basically that reactor built large.
	It has enriched fuel, that is to say that the fissionable material in these reactors
	starts out to be, in any case, uranium-235, the fissionable isotope of uranium.
	In natural uranium, that's present only in perhaps three quarters of one percent.
	The rest is inert.
	In the U.S.
	reactors and the submarine reactors, the enrichment can be 3%, 4%, something like that.
	The point in mentioning that is that in order to build those reactors, you have to have the ability to enrich.
	Precisely what Iran is arguing about right now.
	And in Canada, there was no wish to build an enrichment plant so that they designed reactors that would Would operate on the natural uranium, the uranium with just three quarters of one percent U-235 content.
	So you don't need to enrich it?
	So you don't need, and what that involved was a rather difficult process to use what is called heavy water.
	A form of water that looks like ordinary water, but does not absorb neutrons like Like the ordinary water.
	I believe heavy water is used to store spent fuel rods, is it not?
	No.
	You would never use it for that.
	It's far too expensive.
	Oh.
	It has to be created through a rather special process.
	Okay.
	And so to try to pin down the difference then between Those two kinds of reactors, and then the Russian reactor on the third peg.
	Let me think for a minute.
	The Canadian reactors operate, as I said, on natural uranium, and they have a methodology of continuously fueling the thing.
	Whereas the American reactors operate, as I said, with slightly enriched fuel, and they are shut down to refuel.
	And the Canadian reactors rely on the arguments for safety that we just said.
	The American reactors have heavy containment.
	What is the difference in safety when you talk about the Canadian design versus the American?
	What's the difference?
	How much difference in safety factor is there?
	I would guess not a lot when you added it all up.
	But I don't think in this country, do you, that we will ever build reactors without heavy containment?
	No, I don't think.
	In fact, I'm not even sure about continuing to build reactors, period.
	I don't think any kind of containment.
	Yeah.
	Well, the point is, if you don't, then what alternatives do you have, I guess?
	And that was the point you were making earlier.
	But it does depend on what kind of reactors that one builds, obviously, as well.
	The Russian reactors were of two types, and are of two types.
	One is very similar to our water reactor.
	The other is a graphite reactor.
	That was churnable.
	And that was one of the most primitive early forms of How many of these kinds of reactors are still being operated in Russia?
	Do you know?
	Of the order of a dozen.
	Oh my God.
	of the power produced on how many of these
	kinds of reactors are still being operated in russia do you know
	uh... on the order of a dozen oh my god
	and so the the original danger uh... is still there times twelve huh
	well i i think that the uh... better way perhaps of uh...
	putting it is that if those reactors are operated with
	common sense they'll probably be all right
	There have been changes made in them to make them less touchy than they were in 86 when the Chernobyl tragedy happened.
	The whole Chernobyl thing is incredible.
	Somebody sent me a link once of this young lady who took a motorcycle ride or something through the Chernobyl area.
	This was fairly recent.
	And the amount of land now useless, the amount of abandoned homes, it's just incredible.
	Taking that little picture tour of what this young lady Yes, I don't know the answer to that.
	A lot.
	Yes, a lot.
	But what you had was the worst possible reactor accident.
	thing was big time chilling. How much land is unusable now?
	Yes, I don't know the answer to that, but what you had, yes a lot, but what you had
	was the worst possible reactor accident. You had the thing wide open to the sky and burning
	for days on end. It was just revolting.
	And, well, a lot of the world thought no such thing could really ever happen until that moment.
	I mean, I suppose it was, you know, there was some science fiction talk about it, but... Well, you know, the graphite reactor had its own safety problem.
	The graphite reactors were built in the earliest days because the materials were cheap and it was fairly simple to do.
	And, you know, to me, they're sort of like the Stanley Steamer.
	Well, they would work, but there's a lot better ways of making cars.
	Well, while we're on the subject of Chernobyl, where is Chernobyl today?
	I mean, they put this giant casket thing over it of concrete, right?
	Yes.
	So what's going on?
	Do you know?
	Do you keep up?
	I haven't really followed it in recent years.
	is for what it's worth is that efforts still continue to make sure that the sarcophagus, as it's called, is stable and that the other reactors on the site are operated to provide the power that It was needed in that area.
	My guess is that's where it is.
	I had heard, I think I saw a 60 Minutes piece in which they said the sarcophagus is not at all stable.
	Well, certainly what I do know is that that was always true of it and that needed to be, you know, reinforced, etc, etc.
	For how long will these protections have to be in place, assuming they hold?
	Oh, a very long time.
	What do you mean by a very long time?
	I would guess, unless there is a superhuman effort to clean it up, which is certainly possible, but if it's left the way it is, you'd have to leave it there for thousands of years.
	Thousands of years?
	Yes.
	Alright, Dr. Charles Till, hold tight, we're at the bottom of the hour.
	He is, rather, my guest, and he designed, helped design, or at least get working, from a physics point of view, the first reactor in the world, in Canada.
	Mark Felt.
	I'm a virgin on the victor up high. I was dancing with baby on my shoulder. The sun was setting like molasses in the
	sky. What it seemed like I remembered everything.
	I'm a virgin on the victor up high. I was dancing with baby on my shoulder. What it seemed like I remembered everything.
	So listen, will my brothers, when you hear the night winds sigh,
	and you see the waffles flying through the great polluted sky,
	there won't be no country music, there won't be no rock and roll,
	cause when they take away our country, they'll take away our soul.
	Yes, do talk with Art Bell, call the wild card line at every...
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	number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
	From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell.
	Good morning, everybody.
	Dr. Charles Till is my guest, and we're talking about nuclear power.
	He was the physicist responsible for, I guess, making sure that everything ran well in the first Canadian reactor ever to be built.
	So, he's quite a man to talk to about where we are in the world with nuclear power.
	And by the way, I should tell you that I'm not Anti-nuclear, exactly, nor am I pro-nuclear.
	I'm thoughtful on the whole matter.
	I understand that our nation, the world, really desperately needs a clean source of power.
	We desperately need it, and what looms ahead if we don't get it is horrible.
	I mean, what's going to happen with the price of oil and the price of energy in general is going to promote nothing but discontent, war, and death if we don't find an answer it's a big problem facing the whole world right now and and
	for that matter i don't know of which side doctor tillers on now but i
	guarantee you will find out
	by the way with respect to the kid of speed thing you know the motorcycle
	thing uh... whether or not was a whole series on the sales of some change the
	situation on the ground at uh...
	It's absolutely incredible.
	I mean, what has happened there is...
	It's very sobering indeed.
	If you see a report on it, and I've seen various reports on the sarcophagus and the troubles they're having and what their expectations are and the heat building.
	Oh God, what a nightmare.
	A total nightmare.
	At any rate, when first creating this reactor in Canada, Dr. Till, there was apparently sort of three periods involved.
	One of creativity, I don't know.
	Was the U.S.
	sharing?
	Oh, yes.
	Let me just go on with that, because it's a good way to think about it.
	In fact, the U.S.
	is central, always, in the early days of nuclear development.
	Every nation looked to the U.S., Canada, the U.K., the European nations, and in fact, if the truth were told, the Soviet Union as well, through espionage.
	But the point really is that for the first 20 years, there was no decision made as to what kind of reactor would be pursued as the main power generator.
	It was a period when the physicists, to begin with, were sort of in charge, and they were king, because how do you in fact make nuclear fission work with the various materials?
	What are the probabilities of this, that, and the other thing?
	It was an exciting time.
	I'll bet.
	Because it was all new, all discoveries.
	You'd go to the national meetings, as I did, and and new discoveries, new directions.
	It was a marvelous time.
	It lasted basically into the mid-60s.
	And that lasted basically into the mid-60s.
	In the mid-60s, in the U.S., that was the first commercial reactor that was offered
	by a vendor at a guaranteed price that would produce electrical power at an economical
	price.
	When that happened, the second phase of nuclear development, that signaled the second phase And that was one, basically, of a rush to build, particularly in the U.S.
	And that lasted from, let's say, 65, 66, somewhere there, to 1974.
	There were just tremendous numbers of these very large water reactors ordered.
	One year, the peak year, 40 of them were ordered in one year, and that was, if one did the calculation roughly ten percent of the
	whole electrical capacity of the united states at that time so the world was hot for it
	there very much so the utilities wanted it doctor and in retrospect i mean for example right now uh...
	we're always having fights over standards
	Whether it's fighting over standards for high-definition television or whatever it is, we're always having these big fights over standards.
	In retrospect, was the whole nuclear thing done too quickly?
	Should there have been some world forum at which there was a standard agreed and accepted and, you know, all of it?
	Should that have been done?
	Well, I think there's no question, or at least there's none in my mind, that in that second period, the rush to build, that all that happened far, far too quickly.
	Apart from the kind of standards that you're alluding to, which may have been a good idea, But the way I think of it is that the way you develop any technology is you build, you try, you learn, you build on the basis of that learning and so on.
	You have a generation, after a generation, after a generation until finally you perfect.
	Wasn't time for that.
	I think the reactors well.
	I know the reactors today at least in my view are Are perfectly adequately safe there are some hundred of them as you may know around the United States at the moment?
	Producing something like 20% of the power, but the other electrical power, but the other thing that must be said is that at the time in the 70s when those reactors were being built, nuclear power, while convenient, perhaps, wasn't needed in the sense that you're describing how it may be needed in the future.
	You know, there's plenty of oil then.
	Yes.
	Plenty of alternative then.
	Yes.
	How did the price per kilowatt hour, for example, of nuclear power compare to that produced by conventional fuels?
	Well, it had to compete, and it did.
	But that brings me to the next period, which really was from 1974 onward, when there were no more orders, because the Organized opposition to nuclear simply became too strong, and the opponents were able to, through lawsuits and other stratagems, to drive the price of particularly the building of a nuclear plant high enough that no utility would gamble on
	Well, it wasn't because the construction was never able to proceed without being held up by suits and so on.
	The reactors that were built, however, were economical, produced power economically, as I say, those hundreds of them.
	And today, of course, because the cost of the building of them has all been Amortized.
	And it's only the operation and the cost of the fuel, which is small.
	I mean, they're tremendous cash generators today.
	Then the lawsuits and all of that, even today, remain the reason why more are not being built.
	Is that fair?
	The fear of that, yes.
	But let me also say, And it's bringing me to the central point that I feel strongly about, and that is that these reactors do not use their fuel efficiently at all.
	They use less than 1%, closer to half a percent of the uranium that's actually mined from the ground.
	And that results in a very great deal of A waste.
	Yes, it results in what you were referring to in your hometown there.
	The reactor development that it became clear to me and I imagine others.
	But I was in the center of it at Argonne.
	I'll come to that, perhaps, if you like, in the next while.
	But it came to me that there were several different characteristics that a successful reactor for the future must have.
	And they're very simple, very common sense.
	The first is that you have to have A reactor that uses its fuel efficiently enough that it's worthwhile developing it, that it's going to be the answer for the future.
	And the second one is that you better have a form of safety that doesn't rely on human operators, because we all make mistakes.
	And the third is that you better have a form of the waste product that isn't so very long-lived, and that people Just instinctively rebel against the thought of that you've created something that's a danger for an unimaginably long time.
	So who has a reactor that meets all that criteria?
	That was the integral fast reactor project at Argonne that I led.
	That was what we were trying to do.
	And we had... Why has it not been done then?
	We had...
	It's really rather simple.
	We had, for 10 years, we had a very successful project.
	It involved, you know, developing the new fuel, developing the whole thing.
	The new fuel, the form of safety, a new process that would allow the fuel to be recycled without increasing the danger of proliferation from processing.
	And a shorter-lived waste product.
	We've gone a long way along all those paths.
	So why isn't it currently the reactor being produced in use all over the world?
	The whole thing was cancelled precipitously in 1994.
	When the Clinton administration came in, it was announced in the State of the Union Address That unnecessary programs are going to be cancelled, and in particular any programs on advanced nuclear energy would be cancelled.
	It took two years for them to be able to do that, because Congress, under Democrat Congress I might say, was supportive of the project for the reasons that you can imagine.
	But in the end, the details of it are really kind of interesting for historical reasons.
	Put it this way, I have no illusions about the Integral Fast Reactor Project being resurrected.
	That was then.
	The skilled people who were leading the various parts of it are now.
	Gone.
	The facilities that we used to do the development are now scattered, gone, shut down.
	And so the principal purpose of us talking about it today is the lessons that are there and to say the kinds of things that are possible, in fact, with nuclear And it's remained that way ever since.
	wasn't nuclear, and we went a long way toward showing what was possible. In the end, the
	politics ruled and that was ten years ago.
	And it's remained that way ever since. Well, there have been, though, other administrations
	that would have been much more friendly to such an obviously important concept as a reactor
	that would efficiently burn, be economically feasible.
	feasible and not produce waste i mean that's a concept doctor
	it why why didn't i don't know the reagan administration or one of the
	other well the reagan and let let let me uh...
	tried to uh...
	described that as objectively they can't the the reagan administration was uh... pro nuclear pro
	nuclear yes
	but not Not wildly so. They...
	The budgets that they provided were probably 10 or 20 percent of what they'd been 10 years before.
	And the prevailing mood in the country was still very much the anti-nuclear in some senses, actually for large technologies, anti-technology.
	The Reagan administration had many different fish to fry and they were supportive enough that I was able to get this program started in 1985, which in its way was a miracle because a very large program is needed if you're going to be successful and to be able to get that started In the mid-eighties, I've always been thankful.
	But even after it was killed, I mean, now a lot of years have gone by, Doctor, and other administrations have come and gone, and the energy crisis is very apparent today.
	So if there is a way to have a safe, productive reactor, then why are we not doing it today?
	Well it should be done.
	There's no question in my mind that it should be done.
	And my point really was that we went far enough to show that it probably can be done.
	But when that was cancelled in 1994, I mean just aside, It was cancelled in September of 1994.
	Two months later, the Republicans swept the power in both houses, and there's no question they would have supported it to completion, which would have taken another two or three years.
	There were plenty of Democrats, though, that supported this in Congress, obviously, because we'd have Democrat Congresses through the ten years of it.
	But then, in the remaining years of the Clinton administration, and that runs us right through to the year 2000, There was no advanced reactor work being done at all.
	And then in the present administration, some advanced reactor studies are being done, but again, in my view, they're not well-directed.
	So I recognize I'll get an argument with the people who support those programs.
	My argument is an extremely simple one.
	Unless you can develop a form of electrical power that has essentially infinite fuel, nuclear is a very difficult technology and it probably isn't worthwhile unless it can take a very Large portion of the nation and the world's energy needs service those needs is that You know, I I feel as I listen to you that you do feel that that is it is possible.
	I mean it's possible There is no question about that But in order to in my mind, there's no question But in order to develop that you have to have the right I mean if you're going to develop anything Successfully, you have to have the right goals to begin with, and then a very informed notion as to what kind of technology will meet those goals, and then the will, in fact, to push on and do it.
	None of those things are there in my view in the present small.
	Well, time marches on, Doctor.
	We're going to break here at the top of the hour.
	And we're getting more desperate all the time, so... We'll be right back.
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	It is.
	My guest is Dr. Charles Till, the physicist responsible for the physics part of the first reactor.
	Built in Canada.
	So he's a man who knows an awful lot about atomic energy.
	And I have quite a number of questions for him.
	stay right where you are alright i i think it would be useful at this point find out
	uh... whether but tell and i agree with regard to the world's current
	situation In other words, Dr. Tell, right now, we seem to be at a sort of a juncture
	perhaps already at that peak oil point or if we're not at it then we're close
	to it and we can we can see down the tunnel a little ways where it is
	peak oil meaning you know we're pumping as much as we're ever gonna be pumping
	and we're gonna pump at that level or it's gonna begin to decline and it seems
	to me that as we decline awful things are going to begin to happen like oh gee
	I don't know the price of gasoline rising to the point that people can't go
	to work anymore wars will occur or for access to what little is left that sort
	That's the future that I see as a probable one.
	How do you read it?
	I can't see any reason to think otherwise.
	The only question is, of course, when does that peak come?
	I think the more frightening thing, as you said, than the price of gasoline going up
	is the absolute certainty of warfare over the remaining resources.
	If it comes to that, unless there is an alternative, unless there are realistic alternatives.
	I'm not even sure it's not happening right now.
	That issue aside for a second, I've had for years doing this kind of program, Doctor, I've had emails, communications from people, people making claims that they've got some box, some technological development that they've made, that some magic black box, and you put in a little bit of power and out comes a lot of power.
	In other words, free energy or something very close to free energy.
	As a physicist, I'm sure that you've looked at a lot of these things and I would like to tap your knowledge and just know if you are aware of anything out there that even approaches reality in this area.
	Is there any black box out there or technology you're aware of that will come along and save us?
	I was in charge of the reactor program at Argonne.
	There were some 2,000 people there for, as you said, 20 years.
	I would guess every month for those 20 years I had at least one, sometimes half a dozen, proposals sent to me to comment on and hopefully support for everything from perpetual motion to the kind of magic
	device that would take energy and without any further input of energy increase
	increase the amount of energy at the output. I various people who proposed to have
	by radio waves reduce the radioactivity of substance and so on.
	All of these just defeat the laws of physics.
	And just flatly, the answer to your question is no, there is none.
	There is none.
	There is none.
	Look, energy is a big industrial commodity.
	It has to meet the common sense criterion.
	And oil today carries such a heavy load.
	Now in the United States, and I imagine it's true in any developed country, the split in the way energy is used is roughly one-third, one-third, one-third.
	One-third goes to electricity, one-third goes to transportation, one-third goes to heating and industrial processes.
	So there is some, and there is some, ability to substitute back and forth across those lines.
	But if you're going to really make any kind of an impact on oil and gas, you have to install
	huge amounts of electrical capacity.
	Electricity will substitute for almost anything.
	And so that's the way to go.
	But there aren't alternatives.
	You know, wind, small amount.
	Solar, small amount.
	Would you continue to maintain small amount even if there was a gigantic effort made and giant wind farms were placed and solar farms here in the southwest where all of those commodities are readily available is still only a dent?
	It would still only be a dent.
	And whether, you know, it depends on what one's idea of a of an attractive landscape is.
	But take wind, for example.
	It's unreliable.
	It's unsightly.
	It produces only small amounts of power per unit, requiring lots and lots and lots of land.
	It's a hard way to go.
	I would certainly support any development along those lines, but one isn't going to make a dent in the requirement.
	Here in the American Southwest, we have a great deal of unused BLM government land, which is not going to turn anybody's head because of the ugly wind generators or the solar panels that might be pointed toward the sky.
	I mean, there is a lot of farming that could be done out here, and I'm sure you support at least that being done, don't you?
	Of course I do.
	Or any other realistic alternative.
	You know, and the people talk about the tides and the other thing, but one thing one must keep in mind in any of this as an engineer, in order to produce large amounts of energy, you have to have a source of energy where the original energy from the sun has been gathered.
	And that's in coal, for example, and oil and gas and the fossil things.
	It's gathered there.
	It's concentrated.
	The engineer can get it released in large amounts with fairly simple processes.
	With nuclear, it's even more concentrated.
	Let's go back to that for one second.
	As I mentioned, I live in Pahrump, Nevada now.
	It's great to wish that your project had gotten off the ground.
	We'd built many of those reactors, but it didn't happen.
	And we are faced today with a reality because of the kind of reactors that we have in this country.
	And that reality is all of this waste material, high-level waste material, that I understand tens of thousands of years will pass and we'll have to store it safely.
	In Yucca Mountain or wherever it is we end up putting it.
	If you were the man in charge here in the U.S.
	of the problem of nuclear waste, what would you do?
	Assuming you could just issue an edict as a physicist and say, here's what we're going to do, what would you do?
	If I had the power to do that, I suppose I would have the funds in order to implement it.
	The suspension in the 70s of reprocessing was part of the effort to close down nuclear power.
	Would have given a waste form that would have been much more compact, much easier, and if the reprocessing was done properly, to have a lower lived waste.
	And more than that, you wouldn't be burying a material that 99 point, well, In the material you're bearing, it's more like 96% of it is still perfectly useful for energy.
	What would have could have that done?
	What would I do now?
	That's the question.
	In the present circumstance, there isn't any alternative.
	If you're going to have the nuclear power and you're not going to have processing, There is no alternative but to bury it in Yucca Mountain or somewhere else.
	I can't stay in the storage pools around the reactors forever.
	Like many other things in our lives, the decisions made 30 years ago We're paying for it.
	Yes.
	How long will we have to be careful stewards of that material once we get it buried wherever it's going?
	Well, the long-lived elements in there are the so-called man-made elements, not the fish and products.
	And the long-lived ones, and the reason that one's concerned about them, uh... principally is that uh... in addition to being very
	long-lived uh... they can
	uh... if there if the water
	green ages is uh...
	you know suitable to what you can contaminate water supplies
	some distant time uh...
	how how long doctor how long doctor
	Hundreds of thousands of years.
	Hundreds of thousands of years?
	Yeah.
	These things are very long-lived.
	My point is that they should not really be buried.
	I've got that, but you also said we have no choice.
	Well, there's no such program, and there's no prospect of a program. All right doctor I once saw a Good
	Morning America and they had this most remarkable demonstration on I'm sure you
	probably heard about it and they took some high-level waste or a little tiny bit of
	it and they in the period of 15 or 20 minutes did some process and reduced you
	know what normally would have a half-life of as you just mentioned
	longer than we can It just knocked down the radiation, apparently, so quickly.
	It was on Good Morning America.
	Did you ever hear about that?
	I never saw that, and I can't fathom what would have been done.
	I've always wondered, because I never heard anything after that demonstration that I thought was incredible.
	Well, it is incredible.
	It again isn't possible in the way we're thinking about it.
	So in other words, again... The thing you could do, of course, is have a simple process as we did with our IFR reactor to separate the long-lived ones from the shorter-lived ones and just deal in with the shorter-lived ones in a repository that you would Well, man has never done anything for hundreds of thousands of years.
	No, no, of course not.
	Hundreds of years, yes.
	that would be required before they decayed away to levels similar to the original uranium.
	Well, man has never done anything for hundreds of thousands of years.
	No, no, of course not. Hundreds of years, yes, churches, all kinds of things, but of course...
	I guess.
	Hundreds of thousands of years.
	I mean, it's unimaginable, isn't it?
	Yes.
	Yes, actually.
	Totally unimaginable.
	And if there's not an earthquake now, there will be one later.
	And if there's not some other form of tragedy now, there will be one later.
	There could be a rock from space that would... I mean, if all of this stuff that they're going to stuff in the ground, Doctor, got exposed, Either into a water table or got exposed to the air by accident.
	What would the likely results be?
	Well, the result would be one that you would... It would vary.
	Look, I've worked with a lot of radioactivity over the years, and when the...
	Let's talk about spent fuel.
	When the spent fuel first comes out of the reactor, it's very hot indeed, very radioactive.
	You don't want to be standing by it.
	But it doesn't take very many weeks before most of that dies away.
	The very long-lived material is not very radioactive.
	In other words, in order for it to harm a human, I mean, you can stand by it.
	In fact, you can pick it up in your hands.
	I've done that in experiments.
	The very long life stuff has to be ingested as you would ingest arsenic or something else, heavy metal like that, that would harm you.
	See, that's why I was asking about water tables.
	Yeah, and that is exactly right.
	It would have to be in the water or the air and you'd have to ingest it either in your lungs or whatever.
	Very similar to any other heavy metal.
	ingesting radium, ingesting and so on.
	But as far as the danger in standing by it is concerned, that's confined to the first
	100, 200, 300 years, something like that.
	I see.
	Which I don't think is generally appreciated.
	I'm not sure how important that is.
	It's certainly important to me, actually.
	Because that's what we tried to do with the IFR.
	And each of the things I mentioned, but let me stay to the waist.
	The waste, we wanted to have simply fish and product.
	Simply the fish and product.
	And what that meant was, as I said, in perhaps 300 years, or depending on one or two things, but in a few hundred
	years, 300, 500, 200, whatever, that the activity would have dropped to the same level as the original
	uranium when it was mined, which was just a criterion we used to say, well, that's pretty good.
	Yeah, that's pretty good.
	Can IFR be restarted?
	Can it?
	I mean, today, for example, could that whole process begin and we could start building reactors?
	We are.
	The answer, the short answer is no.
	The longer answer, the short answer is no, because, as I said, the facilities, the people have been scattered to the winds since.
	But ideas.
	You can say there are other people, other facilities.
	But ideas don't die.
	Ideas don't die.
	People move, people die.
	Will this kind of technology eventually be adopted?
	I don't think there's any doubt about it.
	But will it be done in this country?
	Not under the present environment.
	Let me talk about the safety for a second, just because we were talking a lot about Chernobyl.
	In the test reactor, the IFR test reactor that we operate here in Idaho, we carried out the same accident that about two or three weeks later.
	...happened at Chernobyl in our test reactor to show that it would shut itself down without humans doing anything or... That'd be loss of coolant.
	It was loss of coolant.
	It was shutting off the coolant pumps.
	Just shutting them off.
	Just shutting them off and letting the... and no control rods going in.
	Nothing.
	Just letting the materials that the reactor was made of... And in the IFR test reactor, what happened?
	Nothing.
	It just shut itself down.
	And in the afternoon, we started the reactor up again.
	And if you recall the Three Mile Island accident, what happened there was that the heat from the reactor was unable to be transferred to the electrical system.
	And so the reactor just heated itself up.
	We did exactly the same thing in the IFR test that afternoon.
	Once again, the reactor just shut itself down.
	We were sure it would by uh... gradually working up to that uh... and and by calculation but it it was a remarkable demonstration those were the two accident one that happened before one happened after we did those tests it was kind of interesting there was uh... a science report on the wall street journal uh... bishop jerry bishop who who had the experience of going back to the early days of nuclear and the kind of
	Press release that the Department of Energy put out, which was kind of opaque, Jerry was smart enough to realize what this was when Chernobyl happened.
	He realized that this was exactly the same as the Chernobyl thing.
	That we had done in Idaho about two weeks before.
	All right, all right.
	Doctor, hold it right there.
	We're here at the bottom of the hour.
	Doctor Charles Till is my guest, and I know to a lot of you, nuclear energy is sort of magic and you don't understand it.
	that this would be your night to be able to ask questions of somebody who does know the
	real story.
	I'm going to ask you a question.
	I'm going to ask you a question.
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	It is.
	My guest is Dr. Charles Till, who did the physics part of the first Canadian reactor, nuclear reactor.
	Nuclear power is one of those things that I think the average person has a fear of, an instilled fear of, possibly for some good reason, I might add, but doesn't understand very well.
	So this is your opportunity to ask anything you've always wanted to know about nuclear power.
	And so, we're going to open the phones in a moment.
	Stay right where you are.
	Alright, once again, Dr. Charles Tilde.
	Dr. Till, as I mentioned there, most Americans have sort of a vague fear, or maybe not so vague, of nuclear power, with some good cause, bearing in mind what's happened in the world with it.
	Although I understand that on the safety side of it, people can cite statistics of the number of kilowatt hours produced and all the rest of it, And we've only had one major accident and a few minor ones.
	But nevertheless, they have a kind of a fear of nuclear energy and don't understand a lot about it.
	So I'd like to be able to let them ask some questions.
	Ross of Minneapolis, Minnesota has a real good one that he blasted to me on the computer here.
	It says, ask the doctor please about fusion power.
	And where we are with fusion now.
	I've sort of vaguely heard things about it in the experimentation going on.
	What would fusion be as compared to what we have now?
	Well, first of all, there is a principal difference in my mind between fusion and fission reactors is that we know how to build the fission reactors.
	Fusion work is still in the R&D stage.
	I'm not skeptical about eventually being able to make fusion work, although magnetic fusion does require a very large facility with the knowledge we have today, and I doubt very much if the power would be close to economic.
	Fusion is not as clean of radioactivity as people might think just offhand.
	The fuel material is tritium, which is an interestingly radioactive material itself.
	All of the materials of construction get pretty heavily irradiated.
	So there is some element of waste to consider there, too.
	Not on the scale, of course, of fission.
	So I guess to summarize, where I think it is, is that it hasn't been proven, it isn't something that you could point to, to rely on, but work most certainly should continue on it.
	Alright, let's take some questions from the audience.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
	Hi.
	Hi, how are you?
	Fine, what is your first name?
	My name's Chris.
	Okay, Chris, what's up?
	Yeah, I had two questions, and I hope I got the right name right.
	In the 1920s there was a big experience done I think it was Marconi.
	I'm not sure if I got the right name, but he built a huge energy source.
	Okay, I think you mean Tesla.
	Tesla, right.
	And he did this huge energy experience, but he couldn't control it, so he shut down.
	And I was going to ask about that, and then also I was going to ask about what he thought about hydrogen power.
	All right, let's take both questions.
	Thank you very much.
	First of all, Tesla, you know, Doctor, there's all kinds of rumors and lore about what Tesla did and did not do.
	Have you ever looked into the life of Tesla?
	No, I haven't.
	I feel, I think, a little bit the way you describe it.
	It sounds like it's interesting, but it's kind of puzzling.
	I think I can, so I can answer the first part of it very honestly.
	Good answer.
	very directly and that is that i know so little about it that my car any comment
	i might make would be perfectly uh... would not be useful good answer
	the second part of the hydrogen hydrogen
	i think it's more straightforward uh... something that
	uh... again i'm i'm not an expert on but i uh...
	you know the people uh... that uh...
	all right well the bush administration is pretty much uh...
	forwarded the concept of hydrogen as the rather immediate answer to
	our problems.
	They're proceeding along a hydrogen path.
	Good idea or not?
	Well, it's a good idea, but for the immediate future, no.
	Look, the problems with hydrogen are fairly simple.
	And they are?
	They are that it's difficult to store.
	It's not.
	And the first thing that you worry about with hydrogen, of course, is getting some oxygen there and getting a very loud bang.
	But as an engineering matter, it takes energy to make hydrogen.
	The reason that you'd make hydrogen is to use it for transportation.
	Of course, you don't gain energy by Okay, that was the important question, and that's what I've heard others say, that you have to use energy to create and then to store the hydrogen, and so it's not like a net gain, it's not like the sort of free thing, or free is a bad word, but even close to free thing, or a replacement thing.
	Right.
	Well, look at it this way.
	Hydrogen is made from water, and the way the hydrogen is burned, it makes water back again.
	So it's clean and I mean clean burning in the sense that the combustion product is water, but you've had you haven't had to Expand energy to split the water to begin with into hydrogen and then And then of course you could you use it as I said to Produce the energy and so that the purpose of it is to to make your electrical energy portable All right, let me throw another big barb at you and see how you do with it.
	I Well, what we have been doing and are doing now is expending fossil fuels.
	In the process of expending fossil fuels, a great deal is ejected into the atmosphere by the cars we drive and the factories we run.
	And there are many who now feel that what's been ejected into the atmosphere is beginning to Affect our earth in in terms of warming it and melting the North Pole and the South Pole and Affecting our climate.
	Do you have any thoughts on that?
	Well, yes, I And again in my job I had I had all kinds of presentations of things and the early Studies on global warming by co2 I had presentations made there, both at the laboratory and the university, by the scientists that were doing it.
	I studied their papers.
	What there is no question about, in my mind, and the evidence is absolutely clear, the carbon dioxide component of the atmosphere is going up steadily year by year.
	What isn't as obvious is whether that really is having any effect on the temperatures around the world.
	Every climate environmentalist will say, well, we've had a half a degree in the last 50 years or something like that, which is, although those measurements are difficult to make, I accept them.
	On the other hand, in the previous 50 years, there was probably half a degree of cooling.
	So it isn't, in my view, as absolutely clear as the way it's being used in the political situation, particularly internationally.
	It is not clear in my mind.
	On the other hand, there are other things that are.
	Acid rain and so on and so on.
	Those things just have to be taken care of.
	Yes.
	What does seem clear, though, is that About 40% of the polar ice has gone in the last 50 years, you mentioned.
	And down south, we're getting a lot of calving.
	The Ross Ice Field may or may not be stable.
	There are indications now that it may not be as stable as they thought it was.
	And of course, that would be serious trouble because that ice is all on land.
	Should it melt or slide, why, the ocean levels would get very unacceptably high with Not good results?
	No, of course not.
	And the question is whether that's man-made.
	Yes, that is.
	What's your feeling?
	Well, I feel that the models, having looked at the papers, the computer models that they use are very sensitive to their assumptions, and I would find it hard to really accept the results.
	My own reading about this over the Last several centuries, as you know from your very informed comment there, that there are large swings in the average temperature over the years simply due to the effects of sun and sunspots and so on, ice ages, brittle ice ages, and so on.
	And whether the current tendency toward warming is man-made, that is, the link has not been shown to me, in my mind.
	Well, I wonder if they'll discover and affirm that link any faster than they did the link between cancer and tobacco.
	Well, of course, you make a good point.
	We stumbled over that one for a long time.
	When it was an absolutely direct link, in fact.
	Well, I do recall the cigarette CEOs sitting in front of a congressional or Senate inquiry saying, no, it's not a dictator.
	No, no, no, it's not a dictator.
	But by the mid-70s, it was clear it was not just a statistical, it was a direct link.
	In the case of carbon dioxide, I don't think you could make that case.
	I'm saying that as one who supports the use of nuclear power as broadly as is possible.
	Clearly, using the thought that carbon dioxide in the air is going to be harmful to the climate partially makes the case for nuclear.
	Mm-hmm.
	That's right.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Charles Till.
	Good morning.
	Yes, good morning, Art.
	This is Ahab, listening in on the Big 89 out of Chicago called South Bend.
	Well, Dr. Till, first off, I just want to say I still have a big smile on my face.
	Thanks for the feedback on Ann, because, you know, you put those prayers out there and sometimes you wonder what happens, you know?
	Well, there you are, sir.
	So I'm still smiling about that.
	I'm glad to hear the good news.
	Good.
	And doctor, I got to say, Thank you for all the good work that you try to do and enlightening people about the truth about nuclear industry.
	I mean, most people don't understand the history of the marketplace and what happened, how, you know, with the oil crisis kind of fueled that rush to market, you know, with the second and third generation designs that really became like the industry standard when they never should have been.
	And it's kind of soured everybody on the entire industry.
	I mean, honestly, God, I'm maybe a terminal optimist, but I think that the work that you guys did, it will come to light sooner or later.
	They're going to have to mothball.
	These things are all going to run their life cycle, and sooner or later, we can't just write off 20% of our electrical generating power capacity.
	They're going to have to go back and re-examine the work you did.
	It will come back to light.
	It's just a matter of time, and thank you for that.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	But my big question I guess for you is, I know coming from your background, you're thinking like big centralized production, but when you look at the alternatives and maybe the other uses of nuclear energy, don't you think that the real answers are all in decentralized power production?
	Well, I recognize the argument there, but the thing that one always fights against,
	of course, is that you do get tremendous economies of scale, as you well know.
	Right, but for a certain percentage that we need to generate, we do need those economies
	of scale just because of the way we live and organize our society.
	Precisely so.
	But for the vast other sections of the energy that we use for heating and transportation,
	we don't need that centralized power.
	Right?
	Right.
	I mean, by its nature, the way we use it in our homes and in our vehicles and in transportation
	is all decentralized.
	I guess in my mind I think of all the brain power and all the huge financial resources
	that have been thrown at the energy market in all sectors.
	Just a fraction of even what went into oil exploration or nuclear research had gone into
	somehow figuring out how to make use of that big bad nuclear reactor in the sky that's
	perfectly decentralized, utterly predictable, and a safe standoff distance.
	And very diffuse, unfortunately.
	If you can stand outside, the way I explained it to my kids was that if you can stand outside
	and turn your palm up to the sky and simply feel the heat of the sun, that means that
	you're going to have a considerable amount of effort gathering up enough of that heat
	to really be useful.
	Clearly you can heat homes, particularly in the south.
	Clearly you can dry grain, all of these things.
	Clearly you can produce some electricity, but it's a difficult business.
	Dr. Till, let me take a leap forward in this area.
	The sun, sure, it all comes one way or the other from the sun.
	And as you point out, it's concentrated in the fossil fuels.
	But there is this new idea that people are churning around, that in combination with nanotechnology, A gathering place in space, in orbit, could be achieved and power could be collected very efficiently in a geosynchronous sort of orbit, I guess, and then transferred to Earth stations by satellite.
	Have you looked at that at all?
	No, I haven't.
	I've had those kinds of suggestions made, of course.
	The sort of common sense reaction that I generally have is, well and good, collecting it there.
	How are you proposing to get huge amounts of power down to the Earth's surface?
	Microwave.
	If you're going to do that that way, I wouldn't want to stand in front of a beam.
	No, wouldn't be advised.
	So, these things may be possible.
	I don't really know.
	Okay.
	Again, fair enough.
	Ease to the Rockies.
	You're on the air with Dr. Till.
	Hello.
	Good evening, or should I say good morning?
	Dr. Till, good morning.
	Good morning, sir.
	You're not too strong.
	You're going to have to yell at us a little.
	No problem.
	This is Greg from WABC in New York.
	Yes, sir.
	And my question is about the use of nuclear power with military vehicles, in particular nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
	World's first aircraft carrier, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, is due for decommission in 2013.
	Does Dr. Till have any ideas as to some best practices to decommission a carrier that's as big as the Empire State Building and has eight reactors?
	Yeah, interesting question.
	It is an interesting question.
	And again, my short answer is no, that's not anything that I've ever looked at.
	And I want to try to be a little bit careful about what I know and saying what I know and what I don't know.
	I'm sorry, I just don't know.
	In your professional opinion, how do you feel about the use of reactors at sea going into war?
	Oh, there's an awfully good question, Doctor.
	Well, we have a very considerable submarine fleet, as you well know.
	Nuclear-powered, yes.
	Submarine fleet.
	I suppose the question is directed at, well, alright, but what happens if these Surface vessels or submarine vessels are attacked and destroyed.
	I'll tell you what, Doctor.
	Hold that thought.
	But reactors going into battle is a very, very interesting question.
	My guest is Dr. Charles Till, and we'll jump right on that one when we get back.
	I'm Mark Bell.
	Doing alright, a little jodging on a Saturday night Come walk with me, run it down the dead way
	Jenny was sweet, she always smiled for the people she'd meet
	On troubled strides, she had another way of making life Music blew, the music blew, I still ain't got to you
	To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area codes 775-727-1295. The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
	To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
	From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
	International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country Sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll free, 800-893-0903.
	From coast to coast, and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM.
	With Art Bell.
	It is, and my guest, Dr. Charles Till.
	He's got a website, by the way, and we've got a link up there.
	It's a long URL, so go to coastcoastam.com and follow the link if you wish to know more.
	In a moment, we're going to ask about reactors going to war.
	Reactors and aircraft carriers, reactors and submarines.
	Lots and lots of reactors going to war, where they could get Well, blown up, right?
	we'll be right back by the way quick note for the audience uh...
	Tomorrow night begins a unique process that we do once a year.
	In which we allow the audience, particularly the talented members of the audience, to make a prediction for the year upcoming, in this case 2005.
	Now, I have the list, the carefully protected list of numbered predictions.
	It's the only time of the year we allow this, and we actually number the predictions as you make them.
	And I'm asking that my audience, as I did last year, with good effect I might add, Actually, not just dial and call, but take a moment between now and tomorrow night and then again on the 31st I'm going to be off for the Christmas holiday.
	So we'll have two nights.
	That would be tomorrow night and the 31st for you to register your predictions.
	Don't do it lightly.
	Think very carefully about it and if you have a talent for Seeing the future, then use it between now and when you make your prediction.
	At any rate, we'll be up to that tomorrow night.
	Now, once again, Dr. Charles Till, and the question was with respect to reactors and going to war.
	Certainly in a war situation, it would be possible that a reactor on a nuclear sub or an aircraft carrier or wherever we use them in the military these days, Well, the answer, I'm sure, varies with whose nuclear navy we're talking about.
	up.
	So, the obvious question on behalf of those who live in the world would be, what effect
	would there be, likely?
	The answer, I'm sure, varies with whose nuclear navy we're talking about.
	Look, our own nuclear navy is almost a nation to itself.
	What the designs are of the reactors, how much shielding they have, and so on and so
	All of that is classified, and it isn't anything I've ever made a study of.
	The advantage, obviously, of using nuclear is that you can go literally years without going back to port for refueling.
	Take a nuclear submarine as an example.
	I don't know the answer to. I would hope that they're extremely well shielded, but I simply don't know.
	Yes, well, even that in mind, Doctor, take a nuclear submarine as an example.
	As well shielded as it may be, a nuclear submarine could, in a war, encounter a nuclear detonation close by,
	and close by enough to virtually vaporize the nuclear submarine.
	And so the question is, what environmental effect would we possibly realize should that opening occur?
	Sure.
	My own guess is that the nuclear explosion that caused the submarine to, it would probably be the very much larger effect of the tube.
	Okay.
	But you would add, I suppose, some small amount to it.
	What has happened with the Russian nuclear submarines, one or two, as you know, have been lost, so-called.
	And there are a lot of them in port that need the reactors removed.
	And those things are going on, again, with U.S.
	help.
	But the whole subject of the nuclear navy, the use of reactors, is not one that I specialize in at all.
	And it's all classified?
	And it's classified up and down the line, even the core designs are.
	Alright, well here's a good question for you.
	You're certainly familiar with when we and others built reactors early on.
	I think the psychology at that time Was, let's see if we can build a reactor that's economically feasible and safe.
	Correct.
	Now, when we were thinking about safe in those days, I don't think we were thinking a whole lot about a guy with a shoulder-fired armor-piercing missile in his hand shooting at one of the containments.
	But today we are thinking about that.
	Because we have no shortage of people apparently willing to give their lives in an effort to kill lots of us.
	So if a person had a shoulder-fired armor-piercing missile and was firing at a containment, what would the probable outcome be?
	Or would it just bounce off the containment?
	I don't know.
	I can tell you that in addition to the containment, once you're inside the containment, you're
	looking at at least seven feet of reinforced concrete between that and the reactor core.
	At least seven feet.
	Seven feet?
	Of it, yeah.
	That's just there for shielding purposes, but it is also an extremely strong structure.
	Something that could, for example, withstand a 747?
	Well, yes.
	The thing that you would worry about there is the engines.
	But again, the studies that were done while I was still reasonably active said that shielding Well, that may be the answer, then.
	You know, when 9-11 occurred, Doctor, it was said that the terrorists actually flew over a couple of nuclear power plants to get planes down to New York and the Pentagon.
	And that may be the answer to why they didn't do what people wondered why they didn't do.
	In other words, they knew they could not have done it.
	Well, I think I think they're far better off for the effect that they're wanting to achieve.
	Pleasant thing to say, but hitting the large buildings, they're a big target.
	And secondly, they're not protected like the core of a nuclear reactor.
	Okay, get good and close to the phone.
	It's getting a little tough to hear you.
	That was one additional point that I wanted to make on the IFR, on the waste part of it.
	Yes.
	And that is in addition to separating the usable material From the inert material, it makes up the bulk of the stuff that's going into yucca.
	In addition to that, you want to be able to, of course, get rid of the long life stuff.
	So you want a kind of reactor that will burn that up.
	Right.
	And that, again, is the kind of reactor that we were designing.
	It would use the americium, the neptunium, and curium.
	Well, you see, Doctor, I'm not a physicist and I sit here and I listen to you and you tell me about IFR and you virtually are telling me this is the answer, you know, to our problems and you really haven't offered me anything yet in terms of a reason why it's not being used right now except stupidity.
	No, but I would put it very directly.
	The IFR, in those ten years, while we were still at a point where it was not at all clear that we could achieve the kinds of things we were talking about, was not attacked by the organized anti-nuclear people.
	Another good point.
	When we got close enough, then the attack really started.
	I see.
	You know, with the best will in the world, when the Clinton administration came in, it brought in a lot of very nuclear folks whose life had been devoted to fighting it.
	And the IFR, obviously, is aimed at a long-term nuclear energy source, and that's exactly what they did not want.
	And so, you know, it's a case of saying, well, what was wrong with the technology?
	Well, I was about to ask that.
	What did the anti-nuclear people say was the hole in IFR?
	The principal argument was similar to the argument on reprocessing, and that is to say that it would add to the proliferation risk.
	My response is perfectly straightforward, and that is that none of the IFR processes would allow you to even approach pure enough plutonium to, with any facility, make any kind of a nuclear weapon.
	That's not the way Any fledgling nation, any terrorist group or anything, would go.
	They would go the way that it is guessed that Iran is trying to go, and that is through the enrichment of uranium process, because those bombs are fairly easy to make.
	But to try to make a bomb out of material that is Composed of all the isotopes of plutonium, plus curium, plus neptunium, plus americium, one of our very sophisticated national laboratories in this country might be able to do it.
	That's the kind of expertise that it would be required.
	You've mentioned Iran a number of times.
	Is it your... Iran is saying very strongly that why they don't want a bomb and what they're doing is not headed in that direction.
	Are they lying?
	What would you guess?
	The point is that for a country that's sitting on a large fraction of the oil Reserve in the world.
	Why would you want a nuclear power plant?
	And in particular, why would you want a nuclear power plant that has along with it the enrichment processes that would be required if you were to fuel the plant yourself, but would also allow you to take the enrichments up to where They would be weapons usable.
	I mean, to me, the only reason that a nation that oil-rich would be looking at that would be if they have that at least in the back of their minds.
	That would have been my guess.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
	Hello.
	Hey, I'm just wondering.
	A quick history of plutonium.
	How was it discovered?
	Is it natural?
	Is it engineered?
	Plutonium.
	Plutonium?
	Oh yes, that's an easy one.
	Plutonium is a man-made in the sense that it's made in reactors by simply uranium absorbing a neutron and not fissioning it after short time that that product decays to plutonium and that's what you've got.
	The main isotope of plutonium has a half-life of about 25,000 years.
	The material itself looks like a metal like any other.
	I've, as I said to people lots of times, picked up over the years tons of it in gloved hands.
	It's not the main isotopes, not particularly radioactive, particularly dangerous.
	It's comparable maybe to radium and it's chemical toxicity.
	Like any other heavy metal, lead or arsenic or anything else, it's got chemical toxicity.
	But once you've made this stuff, it's not much different than any other heavy metal.
	As far as its appearance and properties are concerned.
	Oh, very.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, how could one not be?
	Yes.
	North Korea, it is said now, may have as many as three bombs or more and be producing more.
	Conceivable?
	Yes.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
	Good morning.
	Hello?
	Hello.
	Hi, I'm calling from Toronto, Canada.
	Yes, sir.
	I'd like to say that my family feels very comfortable.
	I grew up out in Rouge Hill and there's a couple of plants out there.
	The real estate value for an average starter home is like $320,000.
	We used to yacht out and swim, feeling very confident because they're fortresses and they're very secure environments.
	A plane could crash into it.
	It's got all kinds of shutdown systems, and it has cooling systems, and everyone's confident.
	I mean, I think that in a free world, in a democratic society, that we have no problem, or at least people that we can have faith in, to be able to govern such a An advancement in science and but you know we are concerned and you know as Canadians right we certainly wouldn't be involved or engaged with anyone that's questionable and you know I'm a proven you know like I swam in that water and you know as I say you know like it's a vibrant like we camp out there of course and you know we're very confident and we're you know I'm my old aunt
	uh... with chemical buyer for one of the uranium mines and she
	told me that she is very confident herself it so you know we're common
	that you know if our family of tons of real estate and you know we're confident investing in those areas and
	call you know i i'd like to say that i'm confident but on admitting that i don't
	know enough about it
	to be confident another words uh... even scientifically i i just i'm not aware
	of enough of it to feel confident and i i think a lot of americans and canadians
	share that point of view simply because they don't
	understand the process itself and frankly they've seen some mistakes
	And that has a way of undermining the confidence of people when they see a mistake made.
	Doctor, how do you react to that?
	Well, I react, I suppose, this way.
	I agree very much with the Canadian caller.
	I wouldn't mind living, you know, the rest of my lifetime or all of my lifetime right beside Either a Canadian or American, or any Western nation, nuclear plant.
	The accident, the sole accident that we've had in the kind of water reactors, either heavy or light water reactors, is the Three Mile Island accident.
	Right.
	And it's never been proven to my satisfaction that anyone was harmed from that.
	Well alright then, here's a counter argument.
	Some of that.
	And it comes from Don in Glendale who says, Why is the nuclear industry so damn secretive?
	Why don't they tell us the truth?
	Why hide meltdowns like the one, his words now, in 1958 in the mountains between Simi Valley and San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, was a total meltdown of a reactor.
	I don't know if that's true or not.
	I have no way of knowing.
	But the nuclear industry is somewhat secretive, Dr. Till, and that's another thing that sort of undermines some of the confidence.
	Well, I think that's a very justified criticism for the earlier days.
	I mean, I would make very much the same criticism for... Like you, I'm unfamiliar with the particular reactor That he's talking about it might have been the sodium graphite reactor.
	But there were so many reactors built in that period that was the research and development period the first 20 years.
	All different kinds.
	Try this out, try that out.
	And when one talks about Uh, melting the core of one of those small reactors.
	It's far, far different than, of course, an accident to a three mile island or a turnable size.
	There were, in those early days, there were many melt, melting, not meltdowns particularly, but melting of fuel in test reactors.
	There were some test reactors that were built expressly for that purpose.
	Well, I wouldn't agree with it today, but I do agree with it very much.
	Like in Idaho here, there was a reactor in 1960, SL1 it was called.
	do agree the industry's awfully secretive well i'd i'd i wouldn't agree
	with it today but i do agree with it very much
	like like in idaho here there was a a reactor in nineteen sixty
	as hell one of the school hold the hold the thought on a cell one more at the bottom
	of the hour will be right
	the the
	Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh Oh
	To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
	The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
	To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
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	number.
	From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	It sure does seem like we are our own worst enemies sometimes, doesn't it?
	If IFR really would work, if this plan that he's talking about really would work, IFR,
	and it's safe and it doesn't produce byproducts and all the rest of that,
	and we're not doing it just because of politics and lawsuits and anti-nuclear people,
	then we're idiots.
	But then again, perhaps we are.
	I mean, we really are, at times, our own worst enemy, aren't we?
	more for dr till in a moment stay right there and once again dr charles to a new beginning tells about a
	reactor i think Yeah, I was in Idaho in 1960.
	It was, in fact, happened just after I got back from England, and I was in Canada.
	It was announced by the Atomic Energy Commission that there had been a chemical explosion on the reactor site out here, for reasons that I still feel puzzled about, because what it was was a small Army reactor that had Exploded, killed four of the four workers at night.
	I see.
	There was some evidence that, in fact, that two workers were deadly enemies and one had used it as a method of, in essence, a murder-suicide.
	I see.
	But the puzzling thing was, why on earth not just say what it was?
	Well, I don't know.
	But today, it's different.
	Anybody that has access in every library probably hasn't.
	Well, I'm going to be 60 years old this coming June, and I lived in a place called Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania.
	That's been true for some 20, 25 years probably.
	I'm going to be 60 years old this coming June.
	I lived in a place called Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania.
	That's right on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border.
	By golly, that's where I was when Three Mile Island happened.
	And of course, we were all totally freaked out.
	Sure.
	But I can tell you this, Doctor.
	The radio and television stations that were relaying information to us, those of us who were near the plant, or even relatively near the plant, were lying.
	Oh my goodness, were they lying.
	So the official word was an absolute lie.
	I mean, there was no significant problem.
	It was very minor, nothing to worry about.
	They were lying.
	See, that's what contributes to this, you know, this... There's two comments.
	Yes, I agree with you, and I'm in total sympathy with what you said, because I've watched it on television, too, just like you did, without the fear.
	Because I guess I wasn't close to it.
	But the first thing to be said is that they weren't sure.
	They didn't know what happened.
	And again, no excuse for that.
	They did not have the level of technical scientific knowledge present in that plant, and that's freely admitted today.
	And I can remember also just reading the minutes of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission meeting on that, and there was one of the commissioners who was technical, who was in fact the lead commissioner, and the others were, I don't know, lawyers, whatever they were, and one of them said, tell us what's happening, Joe.
	You know, the point is, it's a point I'm making earlier.
	And that is that I believe nuclear is absolutely as safe as any large power source can be if it's properly operated, properly designed, properly operated.
	But it's got to be operated with discernment.
	But what you just told us is that it wasn't That is correct.
	So that makes it a pretty big if or was that then and this is now and then it wasn't and now it is?
	Yes is the answer.
	Now is much different.
	Now the plants are generally speaking operated by Companies who have made it their business to operate them properly with a strong regulatory commission overlooking them and so on.
	I have no, you know, I have no fear of that kind of technical, that low technical judgment being exercised in our plants or Canadian plants or Western.
	All right.
	First time holder line, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
	Hi.
	Ah, good afternoon, or good morning, or something like that.
	First-time caller, long-time listener.
	Yes, sir.
	Good afternoon, Dr. Till.
	Good afternoon.
	Or good evening, something like that.
	My question, Dr. Till, is concerning recently with the media.
	They have had reports of, you know, there's been concern about dirty bombs, and they did a report from Petersburg, how easy it is to obtain nuclear materials.
	How much of a, I mean, how much, has anybody approached you about this, and how much of a threat is it to the general public?
	Okay, well, good question.
	Generally speaking, what they're talking about when they're talking about dirty bombs, I think, is the use of medical, you know, an explosive with medical isotopes that they've gathered up and used that to... Or worse.
	...to fear, but you can't, you know, getting back to Art's point earlier, What would happen to you if you stood next to a spent fuel element?
	A spent fuel element would be a very poor choice.
	It would very likely kill the person who's trying to deliver the bomb.
	They have lots of disposable people for that.
	They prove that on a daily basis.
	I really don't know.
	I don't take the dirty bomb scenario.
	I think there are much, much better ways.
	Oh, no doubt.
	I think the main point of a dirty bomb is psychological, not real.
	It would work.
	Oh, there'd be some, depending on what you have for your radioactive material.
	Because of what we're talking about this morning, since people don't understand what you understand about the nature of radioactive material, they would just hear bomb, and they'd hear nuclear, and that'd be that.
	There'd be absolute panic, and that's exactly what they'd be doing it for.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
	Hello.
	Good morning.
	I have a question about disposing of the nuclear waste.
	I don't know if it's feasible or not, and by no means am I a litterbug, but would it be feasible to put it on the moon or launch it to the sun?
	Yes, this is my favorite question, Dr. Till.
	People like this gentleman who think that perhaps it might be alright to load it all on a rocket and Launch it into the sun, or perhaps onto the moon, or whatever.
	Yeah, you hear that from time to time, don't you?
	But if it's not safe to bury in a mountain, why would it be safe to put on a rocket?
	And, occasionally, rockets seem to blow up.
	That's what I mean.
	Yes.
	Then you'd really have it.
	I mean, you'd have this real high-level waste, and you'd be launching it, and we'd get up into the atmosphere.
	You would have a classic dirty bomb, I think.
	No, I don't think it's a bad idea.
	East of the Rockies, you're on there with Dr. Till.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art.
	This is Bob in Houston again.
	Hello, Bob.
	I was curious about, I've heard about nuclear-powered lasers, especially satellite-based lasers.
	Oh, yes.
	And also satellite nuclear power plants, if you can explain those and perhaps the power limits of those things.
	Okay.
	Again, that's not my field.
	All right.
	I'd take a pass on it, if you don't mind.
	I've not studied.
	And have you studied at all the, you know, we have launched, I mean, Cassini and Some of these spacecraft we've launched with nuclear power plants on them for satellites for, you know, sensibly good purpose.
	But again, rockets occasionally blow up and the story they always give us is that it would be safe and that the nuclear power plant would fall safely back to ground and they would find it and that would be that.
	Do you think that's Well, today, these are not reactors.
	What they are is using an isotope of plutonium as a heat source.
	Fuel cells, sort of.
	Is it fuel cells?
	Right.
	The question is, should it detonate in the atmosphere?
	Well, from what you're thinking of it just ablating as it comes down through the atmosphere?
	There'd be no tendency for the thing to explode, put it that way.
	This is an isotope of plutonium that is not particularly fissionable.
	It is very radioactive, so it is a good heat source.
	But its radioactivity, again, is alpha particles that don't go more than an inch or two away from the surface of the...
	I see.
	So should something like that get scattered in the atmosphere in the worst case scenario, it wouldn't be a problem?
	That I don't think is a particular worry.
	Okay.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
	Hello?
	Thank you.
	Yes.
	Hello?
	Hello.
	I said at the beginning of the call, you're on the air with Dr. Chills.
	Thank you.
	I'm Bill from Salt Driving, a 300-year solution for disposal of spent nuclear fuel.
	And what is that solution?
	We separate by five nines, what we call it, 99.999%, and use that for new fuel in the
	balance.
	The fission waste becomes Class C in three years.
	three I think so.
	It's not different in concept than the IFR.
	I could mention names if it's alright.
	No, I'd rather you don't, actually.
	Let's ask Dr. Till if he's familiar with this process.
	I think so.
	It's not different in concept than the IFR.
	The idea of trying to get all the man-made materials out of the waste
	that you just left with the fission products is an excellent idea.
	I mean, it's more than just an idea.
	It should be done, in my view.
	And it simply depends on whether one has in hand a chemical process that will do that in the first place, and secondly, a reactor that will then burn up the man-made elements as we were proposing for the IFR.
	But in principle, obviously, it's a very In my mind, it's a very sound idea.
	All right.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
	Hello.
	Hello, hello, Art Bell.
	It's a pleasure to talk to you.
	I've been listening for many years, driving track.
	Thank you, my friend.
	Dr. Till, I was working for the state of Washington, and there were some professional people that would come in out of Hanford during the time when there was a fire over there.
	And I was privy to some conversations that talked about Radioactivity all over the place on the Geiger counters.
	But when it came out on the news, of course, everything was all fine.
	And I had the opportunity to talk to some people.
	The storage of radioactive material over there is just, well, it's got a lot of the tribal community, and it's still in an uproar over there in the Hanford area.
	So my concern, and maybe you could talk a little bit about it, is that some of these products last For what, 20,000 years or quite a while?
	What about that story?
	First of all, let me ask you, what time period was that?
	Within the last four years.
	Oh, okay.
	Well, I'm unfamiliar with it, but let me answer the part of the question to do with the long-lived activity.
	In order for there to be really long-lived activity, you have to be I have contaminated with americium, curium, neptunium, plutonium, basically those four elements.
	The only way that I could see that at the Hanford site that that could have been so is if the source of the contamination was the waste tanks there.
	Yeah, in fact, I think that's what it was with some of the waste tanks, and being close to the river and the fish and the community.
	Yeah, so anyway, that's, you know, Art was bringing up the question about the fear factor, I guess you might say.
	And, you know, when I hear things like that, and you hear the conversation, what the news media was saying to the public, and as I went to work and would listen to these conversations at the office by professional people that were, you know, talking behind closed doors, I just My attitude about it is that I don't have any trust in the process.
	Let me say something about those waste tanks.
	That's the principle worry at Hanford, and a very correct one it is, too.
	and i think that was talking about look let let me let me say something uh...
	about those waste tanks that's that's the principle uh...
	worry at hamford and and a very correct when it is too uh...
	i'd like to would be disturbed if i was living uh... what was done during wartime and shortly after in the
	rush to uh...
	to first of all when the war very commendable Secondly, to protect the country against the threats of the Soviet Union, very commendable.
	But once that was over, those tanks should have been cleaned up.
	I mean, there's no reason why they... a huge effort shouldn't have been made to clean those up, in my view.
	So I sympathize with the residents there who are saying, look, Those things are still there.
	So then, even though that was then and this is now, even now there are reasons to question, perhaps not the pure technology itself, but man's stewardship of it is not a great record.
	Well, of course not.
	You get dumb decisions in every field, and the decisions that have to do with how much money goes into the cleanup of the waste tanks and so on and so on are made in Washington, D.C.
	by bureaucrats, and the technical people, I can tell you from experience, have very little to say about it.
	Well, I hear you.
	You know, if they make a decision that's poor regarding some interstate highway, well then maybe there's something wrong with the road.
	So I'm trying to say the consequences... I quite agree with you.
	I mean, I more than quite agree.
	I totally agree with you.
	I spent a considerable part of my lifetime arguing with these people.
	Do you get calls from government people to testify, to talk about IFR, to talk about what could be done today if only we would resume?
	No.
	I testified for all of those years in front of all the relevant committees of Congress every year.
	I got to the point where I knew most of the committee members and certainly the chairman.
	I would say this, the IFR, talking about the politics of the IFR, the senator that led the floor fight against the IFR in 1994 was Senator John Kerry, and I must say at the time I had not heard of him.
	I confused him with the other Kerry.
	the other Kerry.
	So there is a real political element in all of this, and it hasn't worked to the benefit,
	I think, of a cool look at what the direction should be in advanced reactor development
	in this country, given, as we said earlier, the oil difficulties that we're undoubtedly
	approaching.
	Right.
	All right.
	You've got a website up.
	We're just out of time here, but you do have a website up, which we have a link to.
	What's on there?
	What's on there is a public television, WGBH Boston, who carried, who I'm a, who I was
	interviewed by a man who won the Pulitzer Prize for the history of the atomic bomb.
	Oh, and that interview is on the website?
	That interview is on that.
	All right, we've got the link up, folks.
	Dr. Till, we're out of time.
	Thank you so very much for being here.
	Thank you very much, Art, for your informed questions.
	Have a good night.
	That's Dr. Charles Till, tomorrow night.
	We look toward 2005.
	Think carefully before you predict.

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