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Dec. 18, 2004 - Art Bell

02:52:35

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

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52:55

dr charles till

01:07:51

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art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is the weekend edition.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We've got so much going on tonight that's going to interest you.
unidentified		You know, we almost lost Anne's breathing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		She had 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 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 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.
		Well, 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'd 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 and 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 Anne Streeber.
	in a moment that story or and 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 Streeber, 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, Ann'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 Streeber.
	Whitley?
unidentified		Hi, Arch.
		And 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 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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's so frightening.
		God.
		I can't even imagine.
unidentified		And you know, the astonishing and deeply sobering thing is it came out of nowhere.
unidentified		She was perfectly fine five seconds before it happened.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that is the nature of something happening in your brain.
		Whitley, the long story told short, what happened to Anne, 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?
unidentified		Well, she had an undiagnosed aneurysm in her brain, which is a swelling in one of the blood vessels.
unidentified		It had probably been there all of her life.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's like a time bomb.
unidentified		Like a time bomb.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it just goes that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, the vein becomes like a balloon, and then like a balloon overblown, it finally bursts.
unidentified		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 in jeopardy with this.
		Never.
		And she had no symptoms.
		Sometimes people do have symptoms of this.
		They have headaches or double vision or other symptoms that suggest this.
		But she didn't have any symptoms.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, again, long story short, you got her to the hospital.
		We began to get reports.
		And, of course, we had people do a mass prayer.
		And also, I guess there was some actual medical assistance as a result of your being on the program, right?
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My understanding is, Woodley, 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.
		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?
unidentified		Well, what happened was first, at Chrysapermanente, they increased the pressure of her spinal fluid, the fluid around her brain, so that The bleeding would stop, leaving the aneurysm kind of hanging there.
		And it could have burst, and 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.
		40 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		I won't give it, but 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?
unidentified		Art, that email, and the lady who, 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 positions.
		He is a neurosurgeon himself, has now retired, but in practice for many years.
		And every step of the way, I was able to call Miles and find out from him where we were, what was going on.
		And time and time again, it turned out that our doctors had anticipated a possible problem and headed it off at the past.
		So what we are looking at here now, and what I'm sitting here looking at right now, is a real miracle.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		She's home, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, she's right there with you.
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Usually there's a paralysis, physical paralysis.
unidentified		Well, not necessarily physical paralysis in this case.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or mental problem.
unidentified		A lot of cognitive problems.
		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 streamer.
		It's absolutely astonishing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		I just want to say one thing about her more.
		She's also a novelist.
		Her first novel, The Invisible Woman, is just out.
		Ann Invisible Woman is just out.
		And I'll let her talk about that and everything else.
		Here she is.
		All right.
		Hey, Arch.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hey, Ann.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Welcome back to the world.
unidentified		Oh, thank you.
unidentified		Thank you very much.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When this occurred to you, there was nothing, as Whitley said, there was nothing beforehand, no headaches, no warning, nothing.
		It just, what happened?
		You just started suddenly feeling dizzy or what?
unidentified		Well, I tell you the truth, I don't really know what happened, since I don't remember any of it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, all of that's a blank, huh?
unidentified		Yes, yes, it is.
unidentified		I mean, I have a few vague memories, but basically I don't remember it, and I probably never will.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
unidentified		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.
		And they have decided, most scientists have decided that there's a legitimate power to it.
		They don't know why.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
unidentified		But they do know that people who are prayed for get better.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		And that is now proven statistically.
		That's all there is to it.
		Sure.
unidentified		Yeah.
		And 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're very welcome.
		As I told Witt, I was kind of hypertensive over the whole thing.
		Ramona and I both were.
		And, 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.
unidentified		There's a whole series of miracles, Art, a 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, he was not only brave, but he was directed, Anne.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, like a laser beam, he was on exactly what had to be done.
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
unidentified		Well, it wasn't your traditional near-death experience with the white light and things like that.
		You know, I have been reading a book recently that was basically a book of interviews of a different shaman.
		And it was saying that one thing every single shaman who has ever lived has in common is the choice, they make a conscious choice to enter the land of the dead or to have a near-death experience.
		And so not that I'm a shaman, I'm not.
		I don't have the wisdom for it.
		But it's just interesting to me.
		This has happened to me, too.
		It was funny.
		We had this crazy cat, Ko, this Siamese cat.
		And Ko was a cat with no instincts.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Flox says we have to do that.
		Ann Streeber 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, Co.
		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.
unidentified		Get out.
		Get out.
		Some velvet morning when I'm straight.
		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
		A velvet morning when I'm straight Flowers going on a hill Driving flies and daffodils Learn from us very much
		Look at us but do not touch Phaedra is my name To talk with Art Bell.
		Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
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 mysteries of our life.
		if you want a little hints about what might be it's coming up in just a moment with them streeper and and and and
		Ann Streeber 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?
unidentified		Well, I was talking a little about Ko, and the funny thing about Co was that he was cat with attitude.
		I remember 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 Ko comes out and he yawns as if he's just been woken up when obviously he's the one who did it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Like, whoa, I have no idea what that was.
unidentified		Yeah, yeah.
		And I thought, that cat lied to me.
		That cat lied.
		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's what it was.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It was a concocted, well-thought-out, presented lie.
unidentified		And another time he got out in the middle of the winter, escaped, you know, from our country house.
		And he was out all night.
		we 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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		He used the cat box.
		Well, at least he used the box.
		I mean, this cat had so few instincts, he couldn't pee in the woods.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, and here's what I've said on the air, and what I feel I have for cats, as you know, and they all have.
		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.
		Okay, that's an important thing, a sense of self.
		And 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, as same as humans.
		In other words, all these crucial things that, to me, add up to what we call a personality or a soul.
unidentified		They really do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
unidentified		Well, 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.
unidentified		And, of course, you know what that meant.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, of course.
		Did you...
		For example, at that moment, Anne, did you know the situation you were in?
unidentified		No.
unidentified		No, I didn't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Did you know that you were hanging between life and death?
unidentified		No, I didn't.
		No.
		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, which is very odd.
		But it turns out he was standing by the bed, and I said to him, Andrew, guess what?
		Coe is here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Coe, your cat.
unidentified		No, yes.
		I was so surprised.
		I said, this isn't Coe is here, Andrew.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is Coe still alive, Anne?
unidentified		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 a Co.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
unidentified		Because my mother committed suicide when I was seven.
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But she wasn't there.
unidentified		No, it was Co.
unidentified		It was good old Co.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you specifically, I guess, understand that that statement or that statement, you can stay or you can go on, came from Ko?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Was there any questions?
unidentified		No, no, no, that didn't come from Ko.
unidentified		It was just like a voice.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It was just a voice.
unidentified		It was just a voice saying, you can keep going if you want to.
unidentified		And, of course, I knew that that meant that if I wanted to die, I could go ahead and do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then you felt the presence of Ko or I saw him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, you saw Ko.
unidentified		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 just feel that coming off him.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you think he brought you back?
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you recall, I mean, that was a statement to you that you could stay or you could progress.
		You could keep going.
		Do you recall making a conscious decision?
unidentified		Yes, I do.
unidentified		I recall making a conscious decision not to die.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Huh.
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		Was there a draw on that side?
		Do you remember the feeling?
unidentified		No, there wasn't.
		No.
		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 Cody'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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		Yeah, I saw people, and I think I had former substance.
unidentified		It seemed like to me I did, and Coe certainly did.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		this is an incredible story I have never talk to anybody who has had a near-death experience and met Did you have a really close love relationship with Coe?
unidentified		Well, Co 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.
		And I remember he kept Coe alive so I could say goodbye to him.
		And I went in, and he was lying on the operating table.
		And he'd 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then your love relationship with that cat was enormous then.
unidentified		Oh, I was crazy about Coe.
unidentified		And 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's an interesting thought to have had.
unidentified		is remarkable and so It's very funny.
unidentified		I saw Ko, and I thought to myself, it's that Damn cat.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you still had a sense of humor then.
unidentified		I really did.
		I remember thinking that.
		I remember thinking, it's that damn cat.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		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 and 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.
		And I always promised myself I would never do that to my son, no matter how bad things got.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		And when you...
		I know what that is, yes.
unidentified		Yeah, it used to be called manic depressive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 co-gone?
		And were you back among the living or what?
unidentified		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.
		And I don't mean that he was, you know, cold or, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that would be us humans.
		We're plenty random, aren't we?
		This free will thing has us all over the board.
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		that's the next big question.
		Has this changed in any way your...
		There's no question about it.
		Has it changed the way you feel?
unidentified		I don't think so.
		I don't think so.
		I've met many people who say, I'm not afraid of death anymore.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
unidentified		I'm not sure if I am or not, really.
		I'm really not sure.
		I was just so grateful to be brought back.
		And it was such an adventure to be brought back by Coe, I think that really I didn't have time to stop and think about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that means cats have souls, animals have souls?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that what that means?
unidentified		Well, I really don't know.
unidentified		I would be kind of surprised if they didn't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So would I. And I think it does.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But what an unusual near-death experience to have.
unidentified		Yeah, it was, wasn't it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you recall then telling, who did you tell about it, and how quickly were you able to?
unidentified		I told Andrew almost immediately.
		Of course, he heard me say that about Coe.
		I mean, he was standing right there, and I said that.
		And later he told me I'd said that, and I did remember saying it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's very important.
		I mean, that's a little bit of additional evidence.
		So this came out of your mouth.
unidentified		Oh, yes.
		No, I said that.
		I said, Andrew, Coe is here.
		Guess what?
		Coe is here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
unidentified		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 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.
		I heard you say that.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you said that out loud as well.
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is really something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And then I guess you finally got to tell Witt, huh?
unidentified		Yep, yep.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How are you feeling now?
unidentified		Well, I tell you, it's interesting.
		I am, 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, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm told that this sort of thing following what happened to you will fade and you will return to 100% normal.
unidentified		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 I used to, you know, religion, all those things I used to love to talk about.
		So don't ask me why that is, because I really do not know.
		I mean, I can sit down and talk to you about philosophy or anything like that, even though maybe I can't, you know, don't remember where the bathroom is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		You wrote all of this in Ann's diary, which is on unknowncountry.com.
		It's still there, isn't it, Anne?
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		Yes, it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, a wonderful piece.
		I recommend it to everybody.
		And now you've written a book.
		Is that right?
unidentified		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 kills him and who killed him.
		And what's interesting about this, at least to me, is I became invisible.
		This really happened to me.
		Oh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry.
		I don't mean to interrupt.
		Ann, anything's 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.
unidentified		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 know, you do them on foot in New York City.
		You know, 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.
		I mean, it was just, and I kept saying to myself, what's going on?
		And Whitley was actually scared because every time I'd go out, I'd get 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you were in New York.
unidentified		Yeah, well, nobody.
unidentified		This never had happened to me before in New York.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I see.
unidentified		I mean, people may not be terribly polite, but I mean, you know, they're not.
		And it was all men.
		It was always kind of, it was always men doing it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they have a very hurried lifestyle.
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that makes us sound so terrible, Anne.
unidentified		No, no, 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 got to kick him right in the shin.
		And then the lawyer said to me, Ann, please don't kick people in the deli.
		But it 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 to 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 then I'll report back to you later.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, we're out of time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		End of the story is they did.
unidentified		They did, and I reported back.
unidentified		I was a spy in my own life.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Welcome back, Ann.
unidentified		Thanks.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's been a pleasure having you on.
		Tell Witt I'll talk to him shortly.
		And again, welcome back to the world, my dear.
unidentified		Thanks a lot.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good night.
unidentified		Good night.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's Ann Streeper.
		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.
unidentified		I'm Art Bell.
		I'm Art Bell.
		Can I eat cold?
		My whole life spins into a friend's hand To talk with Art Bell.
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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 of 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.
		Well, all right then, here we go.
		Welcome, Dr. Charles Till.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's great to have you with us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dr. Till, where are you?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I'm in Idaho Falls on a very pleasant night at midnight here in Idaho, I would say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Excellent.
		So a little bit then about yourself.
		How does one, particularly early on like that, get into the nuclear power field?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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, 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's rather like introducing fire through TNT.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, in that way, though, the world's people understood the power involved.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's important, all right.
		Very important.
		So you helped put together Canada's first nuclear reactor, is that correct?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, you gave me a little bit too much credit in the very early thing 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you all then weren't thinking too much about the waste aspect of it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		No.
		That 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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 Toronto, Nevada.
		That's where I live, in Peronto, Nevada.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		That is significant.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.?
unidentified		Were they double shielded?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Double-contained?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		No.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no kidding.
		Now, wow.
		So when you designed this, Doctor, did you anticipate in your mind that everything was going to be so backed up and it was going to be done so carefully that nothing could go wrong?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 the Canadian heavy water reactors that way was that although things could go wrong, that nothing of a nature to really threaten the fuel integrity.
		If the fuel stays intact, there is no accident.
		We can get into that a little bit, but 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 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 would affect the fuel to fail the fuel.
		And over the years, that has turned out to be so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Has it?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I think it was a pretty good argument.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In Canada or worldwide?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		No, in Canada.
		In that specific kind of reactor.
		The Canadian kind of reactor is specialized to Canada.
		It's built one or two other places, but it's fundamentally a Canadian development.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, what's different between a Canadian reactor, for example, and a U.S. reactor or a Russian reactor?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, the principal reactor that took over the world's generation of electricity is the American Light Water Reactor, so-called.
		And it is a reactor that is fundamentally the submarine, the reactor that was developed by Admiral Reykovan for the submarine.
		It's basically that reactor built large.
		And 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.
		And in natural uranium, that's present only in perhaps three-quarters of 1%.
		The rest is inert.
		So in the U.S. reactors, in 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 operate on the natural uranium, the uranium with just three-quarters of 1% U-235 content.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you don't need to enrich it.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		So you don't need, and what that involved was a rather difficult process to use what is called heavy water.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		A form of water, looks like ordinary water, but does not absorb neutrons like the ordinary water does.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I believe heavy water is used to store spent fuel rods, is it not?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		No, no.
		You would never use it for that.
		It's far too expensive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		It has to be created through a rather special process.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I would guess not a lot when you added it all up.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		But I don't think in this country, do you, that we will ever build reactors without heavy containment?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I don't think.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In fact, I'm not even sure about continuing to build reactors, period, without any kind of containment.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 turnable and that was one of the most primitive early forms of a reactor.
		It would work, but in my view, it should never have been built as a power-producing reactor.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How many of these kinds of reactors are still being operated in Russia?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you know?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Of the order of a dozen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so the original danger is still there times 12, huh?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think the better way, perhaps, of putting it is that if those reactors are operated with some common sense, they'll probably be all right.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		There have been changes made in them to make them less touchy than they were in 1986 when the Chernobyl tragedy happened.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The whole Chernobyl thing is incredible.
		I had a 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, and it's just incredible.
		Taking that little picture tour of what this young lady saw riding through the Chernobyl area, it was just chilling.
		The whole thing was big-time chilling.
		How much land is unusable now?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It was just revolting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, a lot of the world thought no such thing could really ever happen until that moment.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I suppose it was, you know, there was some science fiction talk about it, but you know, the graphite reactor has 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, while we're on the subject of Chernobyl, where is Chernobyl today?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, they put this giant casket thing over it of concrete, right?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So what's going on?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you know?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Do you find that?
		I haven't really followed it in recent years.
		My guess 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 is needed in that area.
		My guess is that's where it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I had heard, I think I saw a 60 Minutes piece in which they said the sarcophagus is not at all stable.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, it certainly, what I do know is that that was always true of it and it needed to be reinforced, etc., etc.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		For how long will these protections have to be in place, assuming they hold?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Oh, a very long time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you mean by a very long time?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I would guess unless there is a superhuman effort to clean it up, which was certainly possible.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		But if it's left the way it is, you'd have to leave it there for thousands of years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thousands of years.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Dr. Charles Till, hold tight.
		We're at the bottom of the hour.
		Or 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.
		I'm Art Bell.
unidentified		This is me in the middle of a dry spell.
		Jimmy Roger on the victor up high.
		Mama's dancing, baby, on her shoulder.
		It's time to set my molasses in the sky.
		The bucket's saying, what happened, everything.
		It starts to burn.
		And the warnings on them beer cans gonna be buried in them landvills.
		No deposit, no set, songs, and no return.
		Yeah, it's only gonna take about a minute or so till the factories blow the sun out.
		You're gonna have to turn your lights on just to see.
		And then the lights are gonna be neon saying, fly our jets to paradise.
		And the whole damn world's gonna be made of styrene.
		So listen, will my brothers.
		Will you hear the night when it's hot?
		And you see the wildness 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.
		There won't be no rock and roll.
		To charge with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 7757271295.
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art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, everybody.
		Dr. Charles Joe 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 for that matter i don't know which side dot kills on now but i guarantee you will find out you
		By the way, with respect to the kid of speed thing, you know, the motorcycle thing, whether or not it was a hoax, there are some who say it was a hoax, doesn't change the situation on the ground at Chernobyl.
		It's absolutely incredible.
		I mean, what has happened there is 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.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Was the U.S. sharing 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, they were king because how do you, in fact, make this nuclear fission work with the various materials?
		What are the probabilities of this, that, and the other thing?
		It was an exciting time.
		I bet.
		Because it was all new, all discoveries.
		You'd go to the national meetings, as I did, and new discoveries, new directions.
		It was a marvelous time.
		And that lasted from the mid-60s.
		In the mid-60s, in the U.S., it 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 10% of the whole electrical capacity of the United States at that time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So the world was hot for it.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Very much, though.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		The utilities wanted it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor, in retrospect, I mean, for example, right now, 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 all of it?
		Should that have been done?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think there's no question, or at least there's none in my mind, that in that second period of a rush to build, that all that happened far, far too quickly.
		That 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 generation after generation until finally you perfect.
		And there simply wasn't time for that.
		I think the reactors, well I know the reactors today, at least in my view, 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 were saying, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How did the price per kilowatt hour, for example, of nuclear power compare to that produced by conventional fuels?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, it had to compete, and it did.
		But that brings me to the next period, which really was from 74 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 it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It was not a good economic bet any longer, huh?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 hundred 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then the lawsuits and all of that, even today, remain the reason why more are not being built.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that fair?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		The fear of that, yes.
		But let me also say, and it will bring 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that results in a very great deal of waste.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So who has a reactor that meets all that criteria?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		That was the Integral Fast Reactor project at Argonne that I led.
		That was what we were trying to do.
		We had it's really rather simple.
		We had for 10 years, we had a very successful project.
		It involved 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So why isn't it currently the reactor being produced in use all over the world?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		When the Clinton administration came in, it was announced in the State of the Union Address that unnecessary programs are going to be canceled, and in particular, any programs on advanced nuclear energy would be canceled.
		It took two years for them to be able to do that, because Congress, and a Democrat Congress, I might say, was supportive of the project for the reasons that you can imagine.
		But in the end, and the details of it are really kind of interesting for historical reasons.
		Put it this way, I have no um uh illusions about uh the Integral Fast Reactor project being resurrected.
		Uh that was then the uh skilled people who were leading the various parts of it are now gone.
		Uh the facilities that we used are to do the development uh now scattered, gone, shut down.
		And uh and so I the the principal purpose of us talking about it today is the lessons that are there and and to say the kinds of things that are possible, in fact, with nuclear that are not possible in present nuclear.
		And we went a long way towards showing what was possible.
		In the end, the politics ruled and that was ten years ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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, and not produce waste.
		I mean that's a big concept, Doctor.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Why didn't I administration or one of the other Well the Reagan let me try to describe that as objectively as I can.
		The Reagan administration was pro-nuclear, pro-nuclear power, but not wildly so.
		The budgets that they provided were probably 10 or 20% of what they'd been 10 years before.
		And the prevailing mood in the country was still very much the anti-nuclear, in some sense, 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-80s, I've always been thankful for that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 canceled in 94, I mean, just aside, it was canceled in September of 94.
		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 that supported us in Congress, obviously, because we'd had 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 that support those programs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Probably.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		But in my view.
		Look, 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 to service those needs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I feel as I listen to you that you do feel that that is possible.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		It is possible.
		There is no question about that.
		But in order to, in my mind, there's no question about it.
		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.
		So none of those things are there, in my view, in the present small Department of Energy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 will be right back you done till you return lining the
unidentified		blackboard and watching you burn now it begins day after day my life she
		it don't count easy no it don't count easy it don't count easy you know it don't count easy
		you don't count easy you don't count easy you want to see the blues you don't count easy you don't count easy you don't count easy you can even play them easy We'll play them easy Get up out the past And all your sorrow If the future won't
		last It will soon be yours tomorrow I don't ask the bugs I only want to trust And no, it don't come easy To talk with Arfell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
		The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Arfel from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
		From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
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		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		So All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think it would be useful at this point to find out whether Dr. 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 see down the tunnel a little ways where it is.
		Peak oil meaning we're pumping as much as we're ever going to be pumping, and we're going to pump at that level, or it's going to 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 for access to what little is left, that sort of thing.
		That's the future that I see as a probable one.
		How do you read it?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm not even sure it's not happening right now.
		But 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's 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?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		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
		the amount of energy at the output.
		I see various people who propose 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There is none.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		It would still only be a dent.
		And whether, you know, it depends on what one's idea 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 just is a hard way to go.
		I would certainly support any development along those lines.
		One isn't going to make a dent in the requirement.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Well, that's the overall important point.
		However, 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?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Of course I do.
		Or any other realistic alternative.
		You know, and the people talk about the tides and this 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 that is fairly where the original energy from the sun has been gathered.
		And that's in coal, for example, and oil and gas, in 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's go back to that for one second.
		As I mentioned, I live in Peru, 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?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		If I had the power to do that, I suppose I would have the funds in order to implement it.
		Look, the suspension in the 70s of reprocessing was part of the effort to close down nuclear power.
		Reprocessing 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 live waste.
		And more than that, you wouldn't be burying a material that 99%, well, in the material you're burying, it's more like 96% of it is still perfectly useful for energy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What have, could have, that's done.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Right, what would I do now?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's the question.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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.
		It can't stay in the storage pools around the reactors forever.
		So like many other things in our lives, the decisions made 30 years ago were paying for.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How long will we have to be careful stewards of that material once we get it buried wherever it's going?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, the long-lived Elements in there are the so-called man-made elements, not the fission products.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		And the long-lived ones, and the reason that you're one's concerned about them principally is that in addition to being very long-lived, they can, if the water drainage is suitable to it, you can contaminate water supplies in some distant time.
unidentified		How long, doctor?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How long, doctor?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Hundreds of thousands of years, basically.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hundreds of thousands of years?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, these things are very long-lived.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		My point is that they should not really be buried.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I got that, but you also said we have no choice.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, there is no such program, and there's no prospect of a program.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Doctor, I once saw a Good Morning America, and they had this most remarkable demonstration.
		I'm sure you've 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 what normally would have a half-life of, as you just mentioned, longer than we can imagine.
		It just knocked down the radiation, apparently, so quickly.
		It was on Good Morning America.
		Did you ever hear about that?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I never saw that, and I can't fathom what would have been done.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've always wondered, because I never heard anything after that demonstration that I thought was incredible.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, it is incredible.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		It, again, isn't possible in the way we're thinking about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, in other words, again.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 then with the shorter-lived ones in a repository that you would have every confidence that would last the few tens or hundreds of years that would be required before they decayed away to levels similar
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		to the original uranium.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, man has never done anything for hundreds of thousands of years.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		No, no, of course not.
		Hundreds of years, yes.
		Churches, all kinds of things, but of course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hundreds of thousands of years.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Of course, I mean, it's unimaginable, isn't it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 a rock from space that would
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, the result would be one that you 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-lived stuff has to be ingested as you would ingest arsenic or something else, heavy metal like that, that would harm you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You see, that's why I was asking about water tables.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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, I don't know, 100, 200, 300 years, something like that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Which I don't think is generally appreciated.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure how important that is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's certainly important to me.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		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 waste.
		The waste we wanted to have simply fission product.
		Simply the fission product.
		And what that meant was, as I said, in perhaps 300 years, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can IFR be restarted?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can it, I mean, today, for example, could that whole process begin and we could start building reactors?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		The short answer is no.
		The short answer is no because, as I said, the facilities, the people, have been scattered to the winds since.
		But you can say there are other people, other facilities.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But ideas don't die.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Ideas don't die.
		People know, people don't 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, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just shutting them off.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Just shutting them off.
		And letting the reactor and no control rods going in, nothing.
		And letting the materials that the reactor was made of.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And in the IFR test reactor, what happened?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 gradually working up to that and by calculation.
		But it was a remarkable demonstration.
		Those were the two accidents.
		One had happened before, one happened after we did those tests.
		It was kind of interesting.
		There was a science reporter in the Wall Street Journal, Bishop, Jerry Bishop, who had experience 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		All right, Doctor, hold it right there.
		We're here at the bottom of the hour.
		Dr. 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.
unidentified		This will be your night to be able to ask questions of somebody who does know the real story.
		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 to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		It is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My guest is Dr. Charles Till, who did the physics part of the first Canadian reactor, nuclear reactor.
		And 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.
		right where you are.
		All right, once again, Dr. Charles Till.
		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 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 and the experimentation going on.
		What would fusion be as compared to what we have now?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, first of all, the principal difference in my mind between fusion and fission reactors is that we know how to build the fission reactors.
		The fusion work is still in the RD 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 as people, clean of radioactivity as people might think just offhand.
		The material that the fuel material is tritium, which is an interestingly radioactive material itself, and 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 and most certainly should continue on it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let's take some questions from the audience.
		First time caller align, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		How are you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fine.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is your first name?
unidentified		I did Chris.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Chris, what's up?
unidentified		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 Mark Cody.
		I'm not sure if I got the right name, but he built a huge energy source.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I think you mean Tesla.
unidentified		Tesla, right.
		And he did this huge energy experience, but he couldn't control it, so he was 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 answer the first part of it very honestly and very directly, and that is that I know so little about it that any comment I might make would be perfectly, would not be useful.
		good answer the second part of it hydrogen hydrogen I think is more straightforward something that to again I'm I'm not an expert on but I you know people that a to alright well the Bush administration is pretty much the forwarded the concept of hydrogen as the rather immediate answer to our problems.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They're proceeding along a hydrogen path.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good idea or not?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's a good idea, but for the immediate future, no.
		Look, the problems with hydrogen are fairly simple.
		And they are that it's difficult to store.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You don't gain energy by 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.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 burning in the sense that the combustion product is water.
		But you have had to expend energy to split the water to begin with into hydrogen.
		And then, of course, you use it, as I said, to produce the energy.
		And so the purpose of it is to make your electrical energy portable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, let me throw another big barb at you and see how you do with it.
		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 terms of warming it and melting the North Pole and the South Pole and affecting our climate.
		Do you have any thoughts on that?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, yes.
		Again, in the 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 and I studied their papers.
		What there is no question about in my mind is, 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.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		No, no, of course not.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		And the question is whether that's man-made.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What's your feeling?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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, you know, 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, little ice ages, and so on.
		And whether the current tendency toward warming is man-made, the link has not been shown in my mind.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I wonder if they'll discover and affirm that link any faster than they did the link between cancer and tobacco.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, of course, you make a good point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We stumbled over that one for a long time.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		When it was an absolutely direct link, in fact.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I do recall the cigarette CEOs sitting in front of a congressional or Senate inquiry saying, no, it's not addictive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no, it's not addicted.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 he could make that case yet myself.
		And I'm saying that as one who supports the use of nuclear power as broadly as is possible.
		And clearly using the thought that carbon dioxide in the air is going to be harmful to the climate makes the case, partially makes the case for nuclear.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Charles Till.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Yes, good morning, Art.
		This is Ahab listening on the Big 89 out of Chicago, calling South Bend.
		Well, Dr. Till, and first off, I just want to say I still have a big smile on my face.
		Thanks for the feedback on Ann because you put those prayers out there and sometimes you wonder what happens, you know?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there you are, sir.
unidentified		So I'm still smiling about that.
		I'm glad to hear the good news.
		Good.
		And, Doctor, I've got to say thank you for all the good work that you tried 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 and 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.
		And I mean, if they, you know, and I honest to God, I am maybe a terminal optimist, but I think that the work that you guys did, it will come to light sooner or later.
		You know, they're going to have to mothball.
		These things are all going to run their, you know, 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, you know, 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.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, I appreciate that.
unidentified		But my big question, I guess, for you is, I know coming from your background, you're thinking like big centralized production.
unidentified		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?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, I recognize the argument there, but the thing that one always fights against, of course, is that you do get tremendous economies with scale, as you well know.
		Right.
		Right.
unidentified		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.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Precisely so.
unidentified		But for the vast other sections of the energy that we use for heating and transportation, we don't need that centralized power.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Right?
unidentified		Right.
		I mean, that's by its nature the way we use it in our homes and in our vehicles and in transportation is all decentralized.
		And I can only, I guess in my mind, I think of all the brain power and all the huge financial resources that have been kind of thrown at the energy market in all sectors.
		And if just a fraction of even went into what, you know, 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.
		It's a safe standoff distance.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, and very diffuse, unfortunately.
		If you can stand outside, you know, the way I explained 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		What do you think?
		Have you looked at that at all?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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, well and good, collecting it there.
		How are you proposing to get huge amounts of power down to the Earth's surface?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Microwave.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		If you're going to do that that way, I wouldn't want to stand in front of the beam.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, wouldn't be advised?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wouldn't be advised.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		So these things may be possible.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I don't really know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Again, fair enough.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
		Hello.
unidentified		Good evening, or should I say good morning, Dr. Till, and good morning, Mark.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, sir.
		You're not too strong.
		You're going to have to yell at us a little.
unidentified		No problem.
unidentified		This is Greg from WABC in New York.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		And my question is about the use of nuclear power with military vehicles, in particular nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
		The world's first aircraft carrier, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, is due for decommission in 2013.
		Does Dr. Till have any idea as to some best practices to decommission a carrier that's as big as the Empire State Building and has eight carriers?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Interesting question.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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.
		No, I'm sorry.
		I just don't know.
unidentified		In your professional opinion, how do you feel about the use of reactors at sea going into war?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, there's an awfully good question, Doctor.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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, all right, but what happens if these surface vessels or submarine vessels are attacked and destroyed?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		And her rings like a bell through the night And when she loved and loved her Tastes through the sky like a bird is riding Who would greet her lover?
		What a life you've never seen Doing
		alright A little joddy on a Saturday night Come walk me I'm gonna die on the dead way
		Jenny was sweet She always smile for the people she meet On trouble and drive She had another way of making her life The moon's just
		blue The moon's just blue That's the way to get to you 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.
		From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
		International callers may recharge 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.
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.
		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?
unidentified		We'll be right back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		By the way, quick note for the audience, 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 could be itself blown up.
		And so the obvious question on behalf of those who live in the world would be, what effect would there be likely?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, and the answer I'm sure varies with whose nuclear navy we're talking about.
		Look, the nuclear navy, our own nuclear navy, is almost a nation to itself.
		And what the designs are of the reactors, how much shielding they have, and so on and so on, 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.
		The obvious question that the listener asks, I don't know the answer to.
		I would hope that they're extremely well shielded, but I simply don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but not published.
		Yes, 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?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		My own guess is that the nuclear explosion that caused the submarine would probably be the very much larger effect of the two.
		But you would add some, I suppose, some small amount.
		What has happened with Russian nuclear submarines, there's 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 specialized in at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it's all classified.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		And it's classified up and down the line.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Even the core designs are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		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 bounce off the containment?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 of it, yeah.
		That's just there for shielding purposes, but it is also an extremely strong structure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Something that could, for example, withstand a 747 well, yes.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		The thing that you would worry about there is the engines.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		But again, the studies that were done while I was still reasonably active said that the shielding would hold withstand the Well, that may be the answer then.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 to 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.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think they're far better off for the effect that they're wanting to achieve hitting not a very pleasant thing to say, but hitting the large buildings.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		They're a big target, one thing, and secondly, they're still not protected like the core of a nuclear reactor.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, get good and close to the phone.
		It's getting a little tough to hear you.
		That's good, doesn't it?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		There 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 that 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		And that, again, is the kind of reactor that we were designing.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		It would use the americium, the neptunium, and curium equally well to plutonium or uranium-235, produce power, and be gone.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 to our problems.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		and you really haven't offered me anything yet in terms of a reason why it's not being used right now except stupidity uh...
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		is those are any The IFR, in those 10 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 anti-nuclear, organized anti-nuclear people.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		When we got close enough, then the attack really, really started.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		And with the best will in the world, when the Clinton administration came in, it brought in a lot of very anti-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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I was about to ask that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What did the anti-nuclear people say was the hole in IFR?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		They 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.
		But that's the kind of expertise that would be required.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You've mentioned Iran a number of times.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Is it your Iran is saying very strongly that why they don't on a large fraction of the oil reserves 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That would have been my guess.
		Sure.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
		Hello?
unidentified		Hey, I'm just wondering, a quick history of plutonium.
		How was it discovered?
		Is it natural?
		Is it engineered?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Plutonium.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Plutonium?
		Oh, yes, that's an easy one.
		Plutonium is man-made in the sense that it's made in reactors by simply uranium absorbing a neutron and not fissioning it.
		After a short time, 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, I've picked up over the years tons of it in gloved hands.
		The main isotope is not particularly radioactive, particularly dangerous.
		Oh, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How concerned are you about proliferation?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Oh, very.
		Absolutely.
		I mean, how could one not be?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		North Korea, it is said now, may have as many as three bombs or more and be producing more.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Conceivable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
		Good morning.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, I'm calling from Toronto, Canada.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		And I'd like to say that my family feel very comfortable.
		I grew up out in Rouge Hill, and there's a couple of plants out there.
		And, you know, the real estate value for an average starter home is like $320,000.
		We used to yacht out and swim and, you know, feeling very confident because, like, they're fortresses and they're very secure environments.
		Planes are, you know, a plane could crash into it.
		It's got all kinds of shutdown systems and it has cooling systems.
		Everyone's confident.
		I mean, I think that in a free world, in a democratic society, right, that, you know, we have no problem or at least people that we can have faith in, right, to be able to govern such a, you know, an advancement in science.
		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.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
unidentified		And, you know, we're very confident.
		And we're, you know, my old aunt was chemical buyer for one of the uranium mines.
		And she told me that she was very confident herself.
		So, you know, we're calm and, you know, like our family has tons of real estate.
		And, you know, we're confident investing in those areas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, Colin, you know, I'd like to say that I'm confident, but I'm admitting that I don't know enough about it to be confident.
		In other words, even scientifically, I just am not aware of enough of it to feel confident.
		And 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 made.
		And that has a way of undermining the confidence of people when they've seen mistakes made.
		Doctor, how do you react to that?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, I react, I suppose, this way.
		I agree very much with the Canadian caller.
		I wouldn't mind living 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.
		And it's never been proven, to my satisfaction, that anyone was harmed from that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right, then here's a counter argument to 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.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 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 melting, not meltdowns particularly, but melting of fuel in test reactors.
		There were some test reactors that were built expressly for that purpose, to test to see what would happen.
		How bad it was.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You do agree the industry is awfully secretive.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, I wouldn't agree with it today, but I do agree with it very much.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Like in Idaho here, there was a reactor in 1960, SL1 it was called.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hold the thought on SL1.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		at the bottom of the hour, and we'll be right back.
unidentified		Now, the mist across the window hides the light.
		Nothing past the color of the lights that shine.
		Electricity is so fine.
		Look and dry your eyes.
		Don't you feel it growing day by day?
		People are getting ready for the moon.
		Some are happy.
		Some are sad.
		Oh, we got a left to feel today.
		What the people need is a way to make them smile.
		It ain't so hard to do with you know how.
		I gotta give a message.
		Get it all through.
		Oh, my mama's gonna be happy.
		Why?
		Oh, oh, oh, oh.
		It's still a music.
		Oh, oh, oh.
		It's still a music.
		Oh, oh, oh.
		It's still a music.
		All the time.
		All the time.
		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 to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
		From west to the Rockies, call ART at 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach ArtVell by calling your in-country spread 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 byproduct 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.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And once again, Dr. Charles Till, and you were beginning to tell us about a reactor, I think, close to you.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it was in Idaho in the 1960s.
		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 the four workers at night.
		It was some evidence that, in fact, two workers were deadly enemies and one had used it as a method of, in essence, a murder-suicide.
		But the puzzling thing was why on earth not just say what it was?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		But today, it's different.
		I mean, you can, anybody that has access, and every library probably has them.
		The Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports, you can get every detail of the operation of present-day reactors, and that's been true for some 20, 25 years, probably.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 right on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border.
		And by golly, that's where I was when Three Mile Island happened.
		And of course, we were all totally freaked out.
		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 a very minor nothing to worry about.
		They were lying.
		See, that's what contributes to this, you know, this.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		There's two comments.
		Yes, I agree with you, and I'm in total sympathy with what you said, because I 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.
unidentified		They didn't know what happened.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		And there's, 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 is 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 that 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But what you just told us is that it wasn't properly operated.
		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.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 fear of that kind of technical, that low technical judgment being exercised in our plants or Canadian plants or Western Europe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time calling the line, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
unidentified		Hi.
		Good afternoon, Nerd, or good morning or something like that.
		First time caller, long time listener.
		Good afternoon, Dr. Till.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Good afternoon.
unidentified		Good evening, something like that.
		My question, Dr. Till, to you, is concerning recently with the media, they have had reports of, you know, these, 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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, good question.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 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 as opposed to scattering it about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They have lots of disposable people for that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They proved that on a daily basis.
unidentified		Well, he wouldn't be able to drive the truck, I suppose.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		I really don't know.
		But I don't take the dirty bomb scenario.
		I think there are much, much better ways of.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no doubt.
		I think the main point of a dirty bomb is psychological, not real.
		And it would work.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it would be...
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Depending on what you have for your radioactive material.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
		Hello.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I have a question about disposing of the nuclear waste.
		I don't know if it's feasible or not.
		By no means am I a litter bug, but would it be feasible to put it on the moon or launch it to the sun?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The sun.
		Yes, this is my favorite question, Dr. Till.
		People like this gentleman who think that perhaps it might be all right to load it all on a rocket and launch it into the sun.
		Whatever.
		Perhaps onto the moon or whatever.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you hear that from time to time, don't you?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		But if it's not safe to bury in a mountain, why would it be safe to put on a rocket?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And occasionally, rockets seem to blow up.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		That's what I mean.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so if you're not safe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then you'd really have it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you'd have this real high-level waste, and you'd be launching it into the atmosphere.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		You would have a classic dirty bomb, I think.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I don't think it's an idea that you're going to be able to do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Got it.
		East of the Rockies, you're on there with Dr. Till.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
unidentified		This is Bob in Houston again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Bob.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		I was curious about, I've heard about nuclear-powered lasers, especially satellite-based lasers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
unidentified		And also satellite nuclear power plants, if you can explain those and perhaps the power limits of those things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Again, it's not my field.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I'll take a pass on it if you don't mind.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		have not studied bomb and have you studied at all the
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that's well, these are not today, these are not reactors.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		What they are is using an isotope of plutonium as a heat source.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fuel cells, sort of.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		As a fuel cell, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Should that, though, I mean, the question is, should it detonate in the atmosphere?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, from what you're thinking of it just ablating as it comes down through the atmosphere?
		There'd be no tendency of 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 it's radioactivity, again, is alpha particles that don't go more than an inch or two away from the surface of the...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So should something like that get scattered in the atmosphere in the worst case scenario, it wouldn't be a problem.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I wouldn't be particular.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		No, that I don't think is particular worry.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		West of the Rockies, you're on air with Dr. Till.
		Hello?
unidentified		Thank you.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Hello?
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I said at the beginning of the call you're on the air with Dr. Till.
unidentified		I'm Gill from Solving a 300-year solution for disposal of spent nuclear fuel.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And what is that solution?
unidentified		We separate by 5-9 is what we call it, 99.999%, and use that for new fuel.
		And the balance efficient waste becomes Class C in 300 years.
		I could mention names if it's all right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I'd rather you don't, actually.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But let's ask Dr. Till if he's familiar with this process, Dr. I think so.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		It's not different in concept than the IFR.
		The idea of trying to get all the man-made materials out of the waste so you're just left with efficient 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, a very sound idea.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		First Tom Caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Till.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello.
		Hello, Hart Bell.
		It's a pleasure to talk to you.
		I've been listening for many years driving truck.
		Thank you, Mike.
		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 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?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		What about that?
unidentified		What about that story?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		First of all, let me ask you, what time period was that?
unidentified		Within the last four years.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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 have contaminated with americium, curium, neptunium, plutonium, basically those four elements.
		And 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.
unidentified		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 communities.
		Yeah, so anyway, that's, you know, our 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, you know, my attitude about it is I don't have any trust in this process.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, see, there you are.
		There you are, Doctor.
		Exactly what I was talking about.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Look, let me say something about those waste tanks.
		That's the principal worry at Hanford, and a very correct one it is, too.
		I, too, would be disturbed if I was living there.
		What was done during wartime and shortly after in the rush to, first of all, win 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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then, you know, 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.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Well, of course not, Art.
		I mean, on the, you know, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 of it.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I more than quite agree.
		I totally agree with you.
		I spent a considerable part of my lifetime arguing with these people.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		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, they're 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, and I confused him with 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		What's on there is a public television, WGBH Boston, who carried, who I was interviewed by a man who won the Pulitzer Prize for the History of the Atomic Bomb.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, and that interview is on the link.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		That interview is on that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, we've got the link up, folks.
		Dr. Till, we're out of time.
		Thank you so very much for being here.
dr charles till ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much, Art, for your informed question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have a good night.
		That's Dr. Charles Till tomorrow night.
		We look toward 2005.
		Think carefully before you predict.

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