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Oct. 9, 2013 - Art Bell

03:04:54

Dark Matter with Art Bell - Dr. Andrew Karam - Fukushima Reactor and Yucca Mountain

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	Oh, here's Art.
	Extra-terrestrial radio, actually.
	Hello everybody, I am Art Bell.
	Boy, I have had a terrible day today.
	Terrible.
	I'm gonna tell you all about it, too.
	Have fun doing it.
	It's raining here in the desert.
	Rain's coming down like crazy.
	In more ways than one.
	Earlier today, while I was prepping for the show, I was on my computer at home, And I'm pretty careful, normally, about these things.
	But... I'm gonna tell you about this so it doesn't happen to you.
	In the lower right-hand corner, up pops a little pop-up that says, Adobe Flash Update.
	High definition.
	Required.
	If that pops up, don't click on it!
	Don't click on it.
	Immediately go and run some sort of spam program and be rid of it.
	It's, uh... It's death on a stick.
	So I spent... Oh, I'm gonna guess... What?
	Three or four hours... Working on my computer today inside the registry.
	Getting rid of five million different references to Conduit, the...
	Virus sucker that carried this.
	I'm telling you, you don't want to do that.
	Beware, beware, beware.
	Adobe Flash Update.
	It says HD required.
	And if you do that, you're dead meat.
	And I mean that.
	Dead meat.
	In other words, you'll bring up a browser and it will be stuck on some stupid sweet something or another search engine that you'll never be able to get rid of.
	This is a bad one, folks.
	So after, I don't know, three or four hours in the registry and, you know, in the program files, I think I probably have rid of it.
	But I would like to meet whoever wrote this thing in person.
	And if I could meet you, know this.
	I would put my fair-sized hands around your throat, get you on the floor, and choke you while I watch your body twitch.
	Not only that, but I will choke you and watch the light drain from your eyes, the life drain from your very eyes, and I will smile down at you as you pass to the other world.
	Otherwise, it was a great day.
	Be careful.
	We've got a ghost picture contest going on.
	The grand prize, if you're the winner, to be judged by all of you, is a brand new satellite radio and a one-year subscription to Sirius XM.
	That's right, a brand new radio, Sirius XM radio, and a one-year subscription.
	That's not small potatoes.
	So if you have a ghost photograph and you think it would be a winner, all you've got to do is send it off to Webmaster at ArtBell.com.
	People put it up on the site.
	It'll be judged.
	If you're the winner, you get the radio and the subscription.
	Webmaster at ArtBell.com.
	And, of course, our ghost stories for Spooky Matter.
	Send them to me, please, if you've got a ghost story.
	It's simple.
	You know, just send a little paragraph summary of it.
	Include your phone number and send it to me personally.
	I'm Art Bell at ArtBell.com.
	artbill.com.
	And don't forget arts parts.
	Very important.
	T-shirts, mugs, caps, all with dark matter.
	And they've got to have my signature on it.
	For them to be authentic, they've got to have my signature.
	And why do I say that?
	Because, again, the net, right?
	Everybody's putting up other sites and trying to market stuff.
	Well, it's not the real thing unless it's got my signature on it.
	And if that happens, and they copy my signature, then legal cement shoes.
	Tomorrow we've got open lines.
	I want to remind you, anything goes.
	Well, anything except bad language.
	That will get zapped along with you right away.
	But, open lines means exactly that.
	I'm not going to have them screened.
	Oh, I have thought of a fix for some of our phone troubles.
	My board op back in D.C.
	land of the the truck drive-in I think next couple days two days I will take your name and put your name up there so that way I can say hey Richard you're on the air and hopefully there's only one Richard on the lines we've got quite a few and that might work it will not work for tomorrow night tomorrow night you you can just let the phone ring until I answer and that way you'll know because you'll be the only one you know I'll just slam a line and say hey there You're on the air.
	You, sir, you'll know.
	But time travelers are welcome.
	Those who are convinced they are the Antichrist.
	And you know what?
	There are a lot of people who are convinced they are the Antichrist are welcome.
	But basically, anything goes.
	Anything at all.
	Well, looking very briefly at the news, Congress now has a 5% approval rating.
	I believe that's an all-time low.
	Five percent.
	Government's still closed.
	Five percent approval rating.
	and cnn actually said earlier they suggested it possibly
	maybe lower than the approval radio uh... rating in in america del quedo
	policy A charity, this is sad, is now having to pay military death benefits and they will continue to do so until government resumes.
	Which hopefully will be shortly.
	We're cutting aid to Egypt.
	Well, we can use the money.
	Right?
	We can apply it toward whatever's going on right now.
	NASA's Jupiter-bound spacecraft was going around the Earth, slingshotting around the Earth, actually, headed toward Jupiter.
	And, you know, you gain speed by slingshotting around a planet, in this case, Earth.
	But as she came around the bend, She went into safe mode, and that's what you do when there's a problem on board.
	So they're trying to figure that out right now.
	Hopefully, it's going to be all right.
	You don't want to hear about a spacecraft that costs, well, big bucks.
	Speaking of that, there is this, what is it, 45-pound, 45-ton spacecraft that's going to re-enter the atmosphere, or something like that.
	It's pretty big.
	We've got a picture of it at artbill.com, along with a whole bunch of other new stuff you want to take a look at.
	And don't forget the telekinetic coffee shop.
	If you haven't seen that yet, it's about the funniest thing I've ever seen.
	It's hilarious.
	You're going to want to see it.
	Anyway, this is such a good-looking spacecraft.
	The one that's going to re-enter and burn up and, you know, possibly hit somebody on the head.
	A 40-ton, that's it.
	Junk satellite, it's called.
	But it's beautiful!
	This thing is really gorgeous!
	If you could get this down on, you know, in one piece, try and imagine what it would fetch on eBay.
	Oh, man.
	You know, I'd pay a pretty penny for that thing.
	All right, coming up in a few moments, we're going to talk about Fukushima.
	We've got a scientist with us.
	I think you'll appreciate that.
	I know I do.
	His name is Andrew Karam.
	I hope that's right.
	Karam or Karam, we'll find out.
	But PhD, CHP, he's worked on nuclear subs and it's going to be very, very, very, very interesting.
	It's kind of like my daughter who says every time when I leave for work and I'm in the house next door so that you know, there I gave it away.
	I do the show from our guest house, actually.
	And the reason I do that is because I otherwise would be in the room next to my daughter and I would wake her up.
	Because I like loud music.
	Very loud music.
	Listen, transmit audio to any nearby radio you'd like to with the FM transmitter 2 from Sea Crane.
	What is this little guy?
	It's about the most fun you can have in this lifetime.
	It's an FM transmitter.
	That's right.
	An FM transmitter.
	Not receiver.
	Transmitter from 88.3 to 107 on the FM band.
	So any audio you put into it, XM radio audio.
	How about computer audio?
	If you're listening to this program on your computer, you just take the audio output, plug it into the C crane transmitter, and then you can listen to me on any radio in the house.
	Cause this guy will cover every radio in the house.
	So, You can play around with it a little bit.
	For example, you're never supposed to attach a 30-inch wire to it for improved distance, as in the whole house.
	Or look on the internet, see what, you know, things you can do there.
	$49.95.
	It's a remarkable, remarkable price for an FM transmitter.
	It's stereo.
	It's awesome.
	Call Sea Crane right now if you want to get one on the way.
	People are commenting on this and they love it.
	The number is 800-522-8863.
	That's 800-522-8863.
	It'll operate, by the way, on batteries or you can plug it in.
	It comes with an AC adapter.
	You know, a full FM transmitter.
	Totally, totally cool stuff.
	All right, we're going to take a break here.
	That included nearly four years on a nuclear attack sub.
	How cool is that?
	Since then, he's held a number of positions in various aspects of radiation safety, including his stance as a professor, a consultant, and environmental remediation.
	In the last several years, his work has concentrated on matters related to radiological emergency response.
	Lots of work for him, most recently traveling to Japan in the aftermath of the Fukushima reactor accident.
	In addition to his work, Andrew has earned a doctorate in environmental science, author of a number of books on various science-related topics, and nearly two dozen scientific and technical papers, and he has given over 100 scientific presentations on his research and his work.
	And here he is.
	Andrew, welcome to the program.
	Hi, thank you.
	Help me pronounce your last name.
	You were close.
	I think you got it right half the time.
	It's pronounced Terram.
	Terram, OK.
	And I'm told that that's an Americanized mispronunciation of the original, but it works for us.
	OK, welcome.
	It's so nice to have you on the air.
	I have been talking a very great deal, actually, about Fukushima, and it seems Should I address you as, you really are a doctor, so how about doctor?
	To be honest with you, I prefer Andy.
	My great-uncle was a doctor.
	He delivered babies and everything, and I usually just bore my students and my kids.
	Yeah, I know, but a Ph.D.
	is a Ph.D.
	It deserves respect.
	Well, I appreciate that, but Andy really works better for me.
	Okay, Andy.
	Andy it is.
	I keep getting this cascading amount of bad news about Fukushima.
	You know what?
	What's it like to work in a nuclear sub?
	Well, I've got to tell you, there were times that we would be out there, and this was even after I'd been doing it for a couple of years, and I'd be thinking, like, boy, how cool was this?
	There were parts of it, to be honest with you, the military life, there were parts of it that just aren't that much fun.
	But even with those parts of it, I was sitting there thinking, at the time I was 25 or 26, I hadn't finished college.
	I was just thinking, how many people are there out there my age who are supervising the operation of a nuclear reactor plant while spying on the Soviets?
	Oh, that's what you were doing.
	You were actually the plant supervisor.
	Yeah, I was an enlisted guy.
	I was responsible for the division, the group of guys that controlled reactor water chemistry and boiler water chemistry and did the radiation safety on the sub.
	But I would also stand watch, supervising the operation of the propulsion plant.
	And, you know, like I said, there were times that I just really didn't like what I was doing, but I was still aware of the fact that it was just kind of cool.
	Well, I suppose to some degree it's like being the Maytag repair guy, because If something does go wrong with the reactor, suddenly you're really, really, really busy.
	And I guess your job is to make sure nothing goes wrong, right?
	Yeah, and to be ready when it does.
	And just as one example, there were a lot of times, most of the time when I was on watch, for example, I would just be sitting there asking myself questions the whole time.
	What if this happens?
	What am I going to do?
	What if that happens?
	What am I going to say?
	How will I respond and everything?
	And to be honest with you, that carries over now.
	There's times when I'm driving down the highway and I'm just looking at the truck next to me thinking like, okay, so if his tire blows out and he swerves this way, what am I going to do?
	You know, I understand there are things you can't talk about.
	When I get to them, be sure and tell me.
	Did anything ever go wrong?
	Yeah, but never seriously so.
	And just as one example, we had probably 30 or 40 fires during the time I was on board.
	Fires?
	But most of them were just really minor electrical fires where you hit it with a little shot of CO2 and trip the circuit breaker to cut off the power, and it's over.
	Out of those 30 or 40, we had maybe three that had the potential to become serious.
	Well, actually four.
	But those were things that, you know, we were basically trained so that when something happens, you deal with it, and then you worry about feeling scared or worried or nervous or whatever after everything calms down.
	I want to ask this.
	What's it like?
	Um, inside something like a nuclear, one of our nukes, um, that has the power to destroy a very large part of the world, um, all contained within one, one ship.
	Well, I can give a partial answer to that because I was on an attack sub and in the Navy, I think the rule is that anything over a certain length is called a ship.
	But all submarines are called boats.
	The boat that I was on had two tactical nuclear weapons, so we were not one of the missile subs.
	I remember once when we were offloading the nuclear weapons, and my reactor water chemistry lab was right where they lifted the things out from.
	And it was just kind of a Dr. Strangelove moment once I opened up the door to my lab and it was just sitting there while they were pulling it off with a warhead section about eye level.
	And I just looked at the guards and said, OK, make it go away.
	And I shut the door and five minutes later opened it up and it was gone.
	It was one of those things most of the time we really didn't think about it too much.
	They were just there in the torpedo room along with along with the harpoon missiles and the torpedoes.
	But every now and again, I would just find myself looking at it thinking like, Okay, yeah, that really is a nuclear weapon.
	And it was just so... You were kind of like a hunter-killer.
	In other words, if you were pressed into service, God forbid, you'd be looking for the enemy and with nuclear-tipped whatevers.
	Exactly.
	And using those would have been a very last resort.
	You know, we didn't even carry them lightly, let alone use them.
	But yeah, our job, if we were going through the ocean, and once a year we performed an intel mission.
	I was in during the Cold War, so we were off the Soviet Union.
	But once a year, basically, we went out to sea to gather whatever intelligence we could.
	The biggest difference between the fast attack boats and the ballistic missile boats was that if we got a sonar contact, we would turn towards it to try to figure out what it was.
	We'd get a fire control solution on it and, you know, just being prepared.
	And the ballistic missile boats, their job was to not be found.
	And so they would turn the other way and just try to get as far away from it as possible.
	Their biggest weapon was just the fact that nobody knew where they were.
	All right.
	This is just an opinion question, so I think you can probably answer it.
	But the world thinks that the Cold War is over.
	I think that there was news that we have aimed our nuclear weapons at the ocean, and the Soviets, now the Russians, have aimed what they have at the ocean, and all this danger of a worldwide mess is done.
	In your opinion, is that true?
	Yeah, that's a tough one.
	That's a hard question.
	First, things are not on the hair trigger that they were, but there's still a trigger there, and we could still end up, I think we're probably less likely to end up with an accidental nuclear war than we were in the past, but there's still the chance that something could happen that, you know, whether, I don't know what I want to say, and let me back up a little bit.
	I think that the chance of a nuclear exchange between us and the Soviets or us and the Chinese is much less than it was in the past.
	It's still a possibility, but much less.
	I think that the possibility of a nuclear war is still quite possible, but it would probably be between India and Pakistan or something like that.
	And I think that the possibility of a nuclear detonation, you know, whether a terrorist attack or again, India, Pakistan, North Korea or whatever, I think that there's still a chance of that.
	But the civilization ending all-out nuclear war that we used to think about, you know, back when I was a kid, and now from the sound of it, probably when you were a kid, too.
	You bet.
	You know, the chance of that, I think, is much less than it has been any time since the Soviets developed nuclear weapons.
	Thank goodness.
	The Chinese, so far, don't seem to be um... adventures and particularly a very historically have
	never been so i'm not saying there can be trouble because there's a spratly
	is another areas of conflict that you never know about
	taiwan i suppose that kind of thing but i mean that chinese have never been
	come like the soviets were yeah but to be honest with you the nations that worry me
	the most are the ones that don't have the extensive history of
	nuclear testing that
	the US, the Soviets, the Brits, the French, and the Chinese have.
	You know, there's a big difference.
	And I should say, I am not advocating that we should resume atmospheric nuclear testing.
	You know, I think it's good that we stopped doing that.
	But there's a big difference between seeing video footage of a house blasted apart by a nuclear test and seeing squiggles on a seismograph that show the yield of your latest test a half mile underground.
	And I just don't know that the leaders of India, Pakistan, North Korea, I don't know that they have that same visceral feel for what a nuclear weapon could really do that we have, having seen, we know exactly what they can do.
	I was here during nuclear testing.
	In fact, I was on the radio in Las Vegas warning people on, you know, buildings to get in a safe place and all the rest of it, and then we'd rock and roll for a while and it would be over.
	Do you think that we would be better off still... I mean, we haven't tested in a long, long time.
	Are we really sure that everything still works?
	Yes and no.
	And the yes part of it is that between the computer simulations and our experience, and some of the other just testing as in examining, The weapons, there's no reason to believe that they would not.
	But the no part of it, or maybe I'm not quite sure would be a better way to put it, is that I could say the same thing about my car after it's been in the garage for a year and a half.
	That's right.
	But until I go out and actually try it, it's theoretically workable, but I don't know for sure until the engine cranks over.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	Alright.
	I may come back to all this because it's so fascinating to me, but let's move on.
	How bad, how really bad, Andy, was Fukushima?
	Or is Fukushima?
	Excuse the wrong tense.
	I can give you answers on that from two separate perspectives.
	From the perspective of what happened to the reactors and the nuclear accident part of it, it was bad.
	There were three reactors that melted down and a fourth one that they had some serious problems with as well.
	The spent fuel pool, if I remember right, that emptied and there was a fire there.
	To be most prosaic, that's an awful lot of money down the drain to replace those reactors and to replace the energy that they're not producing now, not to mention the cleanup and everything else.
	And when I was there, it was in, I think it was in April, so about a month after the accident, but they were feeling the pinch in Tokyo and in the areas up around the reactors just from losing that amount of energy.
	So from that perspective, it was pretty bad.
	From the perspective of the impact on human health and on the environmental health, the environment in that area, I would have to say Not great.
	You never want to be dumping a lot of radioactivity into the environment.
	But I don't think that it's quite as dire as a lot of the things that we've read.
	I think 160,000 people had to relocate, right?
	Yeah, and I don't want to sound like I'm minimizing it.
	People did die as a result of Fukushima, but nobody died from radiation from Fukushima.
	The people that died, died because they were evacuated.
	And just as one example, Well, and I should say, too, I can't forget some of the workers died from the explosions, but they died from the medical injuries, not from the radiation sickness or anything like that.
	Did you read the story today?
	Six workers at Japan's crippled nuclear power plant have been accidentally doused with highly radioactive water.
	I did not see that one.
	But I did meet with the doctor when we were there who treated the two gentlemen who got beta burns or beta radiation burned their skin when they were wading through the water that had pooled up in the basement.
	They have leaky boots and the water got against their skin or came in contact and they got skin burns from that.
	But there's a difference.
	Beta radiation only penetrates about half an inch into the body.
	So you can get skin burns from it, but you cannot get stomach cancer or liver cancer because the radiation just doesn't reach that deep.
	I guess it's kind of like beauty.
	Beta radiation is only skin deep.
	So those gentlemen had some severe burns on their legs, but that radiation goes to their whole body was not all that great.
	So it's kind of like burning yourself in a fire.
	You don't necessarily expect to get skin cancer or to Or to have children that come out badly afterwards as a result of burning your hand or your feet in a fire.
	So nobody has died from radiation yet?
	Correct.
	Do you think it's a possibility before this is over, whenever it's going to be?
	It's going to be years and years and years, right?
	At best.
	Yeah, the possibility that somebody would die of radiation sickness, those days are long past.
	Because it's only during the emergency that you really have to throw people in and say, you know, just go take care of this problem and we'll worry about the dose later.
	That's only during the emergency itself.
	Once the emergency is over, when the fires are out, when people have been rescued and all of that, that's when you've got the luxury, if you want to call it that, of sitting back and kind of saying, okay, so what have we got now and how do we address that without putting anybody else at risk?
	So the fact that nobody's gotten radiation sickness yet means that nobody's going to.
	And I suppose I should back up again too a bit.
	Radiation sickness is what happens when you're exposed to a blast of radiation in a short period of time.
	Cancer is what happens when you're exposed to radiation over a prolonged period of time.
	So there is no longer any reason why anybody should have to get radiation sickness because of responding to Fukushima.
	So what we're worried about now is whether or not in five or ten or twenty years people are going to start coming down with leukemia or other cancers.
	And that's a lot harder question to answer.
	Alright Andy, you were there.
	You went to Japan.
	Why did you go to Japan?
	I was there at the request of a New York City based non-governmental organization or NGO and they had sent some people over there immediately after the accident to find out what the Japanese needed.
	The Japanese NGO called the Tokushukai Medical Assistance Team, they said basically what we need are some people to come over here and teach us how to work with patients who are from these radiological areas.
	How to keep ourselves safe, how to recognize if they have radiation sickness, and how to take care of them.
	So TMAT through the New York City Medics got in touch with me and two of my colleagues and asked if we would go over there to help.
	I see.
	So what we did was we insisted that we had to spend at least a couple of days in the area that was affected by the earthquake, the tsunami, and the reactor accident, because there's just no substitute for saying this is what I saw when I was there, as opposed to this is what I saw online from other people who were there.
	Of course.
	So we spent some time in the area.
	We met with some of the mayors of some of the affected cities.
	We visited some of the shelters that were there.
	I made radiation dose measurements all over the place.
	And we just tried to get a feel for what conditions were like there.
	What did you find?
	You measured radiation, you said, right?
	Yeah, I had a couple of different instruments with me.
	One identified the radioactive nuclides that were present.
	You know, we all hear about like the radioactive iodines or the radioactive cesiums or whatever.
	And I measured there was definitely some of the nuclides of iodine that were present.
	And some of cesium, specifically iodine-131, which we also use for nuclear medicine, and then cesium-137, which we use for industrial and medical purposes, and cesium-134, which we normally don't use all that much.
	But they were definitely there.
	How long will cesium-137 last?
	That's around for a while.
	It's got a half-life of 30 years.
	As a rough rule of thumb, we assume that after ten half-lives, the radiation is effectively gone.
	That takes it down to one-tenth of one percent of what you started off with.
	So, if we wait for it all to decay away, it's going to take a couple centuries.
	A couple of centuries?
	Yeah, so longer than I can wait.
	Alright, so a lot of this 137, I hear, is in the water.
	The water that they're continually dumping on these reactors and trying somewhat unsuccessfully to store.
	And they've got them now in these gigantic, monstrous containers, Andy.
	And one wonders what's going to happen if a pretty good-sized typhoon hits the area.
	An awful lot of that 137 water is going to go into the ocean.
	In fact, a lot of it's already going into the ocean.
	So how serious is that?
	I mean, there are fish there.
	Yeah, and interestingly, there have been a couple reports over the last few years of tuna being caught in various parts of the Pacific that had detectable cesium-137 in them.
	And one of the things that I did, I contacted the scientist who made these measurements just to get copies of his data.
	I looked, read through copies of the scientific papers that were written, and I was doing some of my own calculations just to kind of satisfy my own curiosity about it.
	Yeah, I guess it's kind of like the same thing Reagan said during the arms reduction talks, trust but verify.
	Sure.
	And I mean, first of all, yeah, there was detectable cesium in the tuna, but something that a lot of people don't realize is there's detectable radioactive potassium in the tuna also.
	And for that matter, I've got instruments at home that I can measure radioactive potassium in bananas or salt substitute.
	So there's just a hundredth of a percent of potassium is naturally radioactive.
	It's been on earth ever since the earth first formed.
	So the question is not, is the radioactivity there, but is it enough to cause any problems?
	Exactly.
	I guess as one example, I take a baby aspirin every day because heart disease runs in my family and taking an aspirin a day hopefully will help to stave that off.
	But I also know that if I swallow a whole bottle of aspirin at once, it'll kill me.
	So, radioactivity, well, I don't know about the beneficial effects.
	I don't know if there's any or not.
	Some people think that there are, I'm agnostic on that one.
	But if the radioactivity levels from the artificial radioactivity are lower than what's naturally there, what I can say is that you're not getting very much additional radiation dose from eating the tuna.
	And then the question is, well, okay, not much, but is it enough to be serious?
	And in that one, my opinion is that it probably is not.
	And the reason I say probably is because I'm a scientist and I'm trying to speak with scientific caution.
	But if you take a look and do the calculations as far as the extra risk goes, it comes out to far, far less than the risk just from driving.
	All right.
	And, you know, in answer to the question so far, I'm going to judge that you are a proponent of nuclear energy.
	Would that be a fair assessment?
	I'd have to say that's something else I'm kind of agnostic about.
	I think that nuclear power has its place, but I don't think that it would be appropriate for us to generate 100% of our energy from nuclear power.
	And just as one example, I spent some time as a professor at the American University in Kosovo, and one of the people there, one of my students, asked me if I thought that they should start up nuclear reactors in Kosovo.
	And it sure sounds like a good idea because right now they generate their
	power with this big brown coal power plant and you can see the smog from
	from thousands of feet up
	but at the same time costco doesn't really have the infrastructure to make use
	of nuclear power
	and in specific they don't have the right people there to design the things
	to build them to regulate them or to operate them
	it's something you've got to work your way into I'm not so sure that TEPCO does either
	well it does sound like they made some mistakes
	and this is one of those things
	In fact, I was logged on to a chat forum with a bunch of your friends, or a bunch of your fans.
	Well, probably friends, too.
	Well, you never know.
	Yeah, but I was logged on to that before going on the air, and one of the people there said that it sounded as though one of the key terms was trained professionals.
	And I replied, but yeah, that is one of the key things.
	But then I also pointed out that we rely on trained professionals everywhere.
	And the example I use is, I wouldn't want my son to cut my hair.
	Obviously, running a nuclear reactor takes a lot more training than cutting hair.
	But the thing is that pretty much every place we look, we're relying on trained professionals to do a good job, and in some cases to keep us safe.
	One of the other things that we rely on, and I Know that this kind of verges into politics, and I apologize for that, but we also need to have the trained regulators to make sure just to keep everybody on their toes.
	Kind of like in the Navy, we had inspections from time to time.
	You know, the captain didn't really care if my shoes were brightly shined, but he realized
	that if he checked out my uniform from time to time, he was at least satisfied that I
	had all the uniform pieces and that they were the right materials and everything.
	What I mean by that is that during a fire, if you're wearing, say, polyester shoes or
	pants or whatever, those can melt to your skin, and that's not good.
	So by having these inspections from time to time, he just made sure that we were doing
	everything appropriately.
	You know, the trained professionals part of it, I'm with you there.
	Now, if we're depending on our Congress, our Senators, to implement the right kind of checks and be sure that regulation is as it should be, I'm not with you at all, Andy.
	I mean, look what happened with the banks in 2008.
	These are the guys we're going to depend on to oversee any future nuclear plants that might be built or, you know, the regulation of the ones that exist right now.
	If that's the case, I'm not with you at all.
	Well, no, you got a good point, because your regulators have to know what they're doing, and we have to trust not only their competence... What did you say about trust and verify a little while ago?
	Oh, I know.
	For what it's worth category, I used to work for the state of Ohio.
	I did not do nuclear power plant inspections, but I looked at radioactively contaminated sites.
	And stuff like that.
	And I got to know a lot of the nuclear regulatory inspectors, the ones who did oversee the power plants.
	And most of them are ex-Navy nukes, or I shouldn't say most, but a large number of them are ex-Navy nukes.
	And the reason that's significant to me is, first of all, we had a lot of training.
	And second of all, Admiral Rickover was incredibly, I guess the polite way to put it would be detail-oriented.
	It's a culture that does not take kindly to mistakes or to incompetence.
	I know that there's always a temptation to let standards slide, and I also know that there's not as many ex-Navy nukes as there used to be, because the Navy's been downsizing, and that's another entirely different subject.
	Okay, well let's look at Japan for a second.
	Now, the Daiichi plant, It was in an interesting place.
	Now, I don't know what kind of oversight there was there during the, where are we going to put this nuclear plant talks, but obviously they didn't take into account, you know, an earthquake of the magnitude that they had and the resulting, you know, what would happen with the wave at all, because it got destroyed.
	You know, what happened to regulation there?
	I'll tell you, I would hate to be in the position of having to design something like that.
	Because, on the one hand, if you design the plant to withstand everything that can possibly happen, chances are, you know, and just to take one example, say you design the plant for a tsunami that's only likely to happen once every 10,000 years.
	If the plant lifetimes 100 years, there's maybe a 1% chance That you'll get a tsunami that size and a 99% chance that you'll have wasted money.
	And it's just a tough decision to make.
	Remember this argument when we get over to the Yucca Mountain talk.
	Oh, I will.
	And this is one of those things, too, that I thought about a lot on the submarine when I was on that, because our systems were ridiculously over-designed for routine operations.
	But if we were in a war, I would have been really depending on every single one of those additional safety factors to keep us safe when the depth charges or the torpedoes started going off.
	I hear you.
	All right, hold on a second.
	We're going to take a quick break.
	I became a pretty big proponent of nuclear power.
	Actually, the memories of Chernobyl had kind of, I don't know, they've become old.
	The need for power has become indeed great.
	All of that, and so I became a convert.
	I was pro-nuclear power because, well, I had bought into the idea that, look, Chernobyl was a single containment.
	It was built poorly.
	All those things, you know, I really, I realized how much we need power, and I had become a proponent of nuclear power.
	You may recall, perhaps you don't, but I certainly was.
	I said, let's do it right, let's build more nuclear power plants.
	Then Fukushima happened.
	And I've got to say, I've really done a turnaround.
	Andy, I don't see how we can build these things safely.
	Now, I understand that you're saying the right kind of oversight, the right kind of professionals on hand, but when you're talking about a nine point whatever Earthquake and tsunami, I guess you can't build for that.
	So if you can't build for that, and it's going to have such profound implications when it goes wrong, I'm not so much of a proponent anymore.
	So I was in your camp, but I'm not anymore.
	Yeah, and it gets back a little bit to what we were talking about before the break.
	Well, and just to take one of the things that you said, we can build a nuclear reactor that would survive a magnitude 9 earthquake, but it wouldn't make any sense to build one to those standards in, say, Ohio, which is where I grew up.
	You know, in Japan, it may make more sense, or it makes more sense there.
	Similarly, it doesn't make sense to tsunami-proof a reactor in Ohio.
	It makes more sense to do that along the coast also.
	So the question isn't really so much, can we make a reactor that can resist whatever the challenge is that we're thinking about.
	But does it make sense to design one that will resist that much?
	Or, you know, basically, where do we draw the line?
	And can we afford to build one that will resist all that?
	Exactly.
	You know, that's like I could drive to work in a tank, and that'll probably protect me against pretty much anything that'll happen on the road.
	But most of the time, I'm not going to need that level of protection.
	So, you know, with respect to nuclear power, the risks from it, and everything else, I cannot tell you that it's risk-free.
	Well, that's obvious.
	You don't have to tell me that.
	It's obvious.
	And I would not even try to claim that it was.
	But what I can tell you is that even the accidents that we've had, you know, Chernobyl, which was pretty bad, and Fukushima, which was pretty bad also, they haven't caused that many deaths.
	And the World Health Organization did a 20-year summary in 2006 of the health effects from the Chernobyl accident.
	And they were able to find fewer than a hundred people whose deaths could be directly linked to the Chernobyl accident, and that includes cancers.
	And that's far lower than the hundreds of thousands that a lot of people believed.
	What I thought was the most... Well, does that include now, you know, I remember nuclear I remember radiation going all over the place after Chernobyl.
	Oh, it did.
	It was in milk, it was in all kinds of things, right?
	And so, you know, you mentioned 137.
	We don't really know, over the lifetime of the people that were exposed, how many cancers we can really attribute or not attribute to Chernobyl, do we?
	The World Health Organization estimated Somewhere between 4,000 and 9,000 cancers could occur from Chernobyl over 50 years post-accident.
	And there's no way that we can say that that's trivial or that that's a low number.
	That's a significant number.
	But what they also found out was that, and I can't remember the exact number, but it was in the thousands, People who were evacuated from the area have died as a result of substance abuse or depression, anxiety, suicide, and things like that.
	Basically, they felt that the mental stress from the accident was just as great, if not greater, than the actual cancers caused by the radiation.
	What I thought was the most appalling statistic from that was that significantly over a hundred thousand women All right.
	unnecessarily because they were exposed to radiation from the accident, not enough to
	cause any reproductive problems.
	But their doctors didn't know enough to say, no, you don't have to worry about it.
	And I think from that perspective, we can say that misinformation and unwarranted fears
	were far more deadly than the accident itself.
	All right.
	Back to Japan.
	How far did radioactive contamination spread from the site itself?
	Measurable contamination pretty much spread throughout the northern hemisphere.
	We were able to measure some here in New York, they measured it in Europe, but there's a big difference between measurable contamination and significant contamination.
	And when I say significant, I mean significant enough to give a radiation dose comparable to say And an x-ray or a couple hours in an airplane or something like that.
	And incidentally, I took a dosimeter with me, one that I could read myself.
	I picked up more radiation on the airplane over and back than I picked up in 10 days on the ground in Japan, three of which were spent in fairly close proximity to the reactor plants.
	But as far as significant contamination goes, there are several hundred square miles or maybe a couple thousand square miles.
	I don't know the exact number.
	But a fairly sizable area in Japan where the contamination is heavy enough that people really, they're not allowed to live there.
	Okay, right now I'm hearing that they don't, the cores are melted and they don't really know where the cores are.
	I mean that's from Depco.
	They don't know where the cores are.
	Yeah, they're somewhere on site but They can't really get close enough to figure out exactly where.
	And actually, that sounded a little bit more flippant and uncertain than I intended it to.
	They know that they're there, they're just not sure if they're in the first sub-basement, the second sub-basement, or that sort of thing.
	But they have not been flushed out to sea.
	Oh, that's good.
	Certainly, that's a good thing.
	Should they get flushed out to sea, what would the implications of that be?
	Probably not something that I would want to be around.
	The... I mean... Can you elaborate on that?
	Yeah, I was just trying to think, because we've got a number of nuclear reactors that are at sea right now.
	You know, the remains of the two U.S.
	submarines and I think nine Soviet nuclear submarines that sank.
	Right, but not necessarily with the exposed cores.
	Yeah, they're intact, so that's not really a good comparison.
	I mean, if all the radioactivity that were in the cores were to get dumped into the bay right there by Fukushima, it would be bad for the environment, you know, and it would give off deadly levels of radiation.
	Define bad.
	Well, killing things.
	Killing things.
	Yeah, the sea life, and you probably wouldn't want to swim in the water, although it would give a new meaning to the term hot tub.
	Well, the water is an ocean.
	Yeah, well, and I guess what I mean is if it were all put into the immediate vicinity, you know, like into the harbor, then the thing is, it's like anything else.
	The more it's spread out, the wider you can see it, but the less dangerous it is.
	So sort of if I dumped a ton of dirt on somebody, it would kill them.
	But if I were to spread that ton of dirt all throughout New York City, it would annoy a lot of people, but it wouldn't hurt anybody.
	Yeah, it's sort of the same thing with the radioactivity.
	We don't want to see it go into the ocean.
	We certainly don't want to see any more than necessary.
	But really, the wider it spreads, the less there is available in any one cubic centimeter of ocean to cause harm.
	When the accident happened, I was in the Philippines, living in Manila.
	And we were really afraid that it was coming our way.
	However, it really didn't.
	Interestingly, the prevailing winds apparently always carry it.
	Just like your airplane that went to Japan, the shortest route goes up near Alaska and then on down toward the American Northwest and the American Southwest, even where I am here in the desert.
	It's a nice little... I mean, if you look at the maps of the distribution, the way it occurs, we're talking about airborne here.
	It does come here, right?
	Yes.
	Yeah, and like I said, we did measure it in the air here in New York City.
	EPA had a website where they were displaying the results of air and rainwater samples for a couple months after the accident.
	But it was, and I know I keep on saying the same thing, there's a difference between what we can detect and what will actually cause harm.
	So what we measured here, even in the areas that were closest to Japan, were detectable but not harmful.
	Alright, I want to ask you a question about these melted cores.
	Is there any possibility that as the core is all melted together, that there could be certainly not any sort of atomic explosion, but could there be a reaction that would release a sudden burst of radiation?
	It's not really likely.
	And the reason for that is because the reactor cores are built with a very specific geometry.
	You've got long rods of fuel that are arranged in a grid.
	And there's water between those rods, and the reason that they're like that is that geometry is necessary in order to... the neutrons have to slow down in order to cause the fission, and they slow down by going through the water.
	So if you immerse the entire core in the water, it gives a chance for a neutron leaving one control rod to slow down before it enters the other, so it can cause fission.
	Oh, I hear you, but we don't know where the hell they are right now.
	So we don't know if the geometry is still what it was.
	In fact, a pretty good chance it's not.
	Yeah, chances are that it's not, but it's probably congealed in one big lump or mixed in with concrete and steel and other stuff that melted.
	But it almost certainly does not have that really precisely engineered geometry that lets you sustain a criticality.
	They did measure some bursts at one point.
	I disagree that I'm mentioning this.
	Yeah, I know that they've measured bursts of radioactivity, but that's more likely to be coming from the water entering a pocket of radioactivity and carrying some out.
	That's a more likely cause.
	And what I base that on is that I haven't seen reports of any of the short-lived radionuclides that you would expect to see if there was criticality occurring.
	So it's more the longer-lived stuff that, to me, seems to be more indicative that water is carrying away stuff that was always there, rather than new stuff being formed.
	Okay, here's another question for you.
	In number four, There are all these spent fuel things stored way up in the air, and they're talking about the possibility of that collapsing.
	In fact, I think they're perhaps expecting it to collapse.
	Probably wouldn't be good, would it?
	No.
	I mean, at the very least, the reason for keeping the spent fuel in a swimming pool type thing Part of it is that the water provides radiation shielding to reduce the radioactivity coming from the spent fuel.
	Another part of it is to keep it cool because that radioactivity, as those atoms decay away, they release energy and that causes it to heat up.
	If that were all collapsed, you would lose the water, which would mean that radiation levels would go up and they'd also lose the cooling.
	So yeah, that would not be good.
	You know, I'm thinking of the possibility of a typhoon.
	When you live in the Philippines, as I did, you think a lot about typhoons, and Japan gets hit by them all the time.
	So, my concern would be a typhoon comes along, and that thing collapses, and then we have all this airborne radiation.
	Or is that just a silly thing to worry about?
	No, that's a very real concern.
	I do not know what it is that they're doing about that.
	But the way that something like that could happen would be if it were to collapse, lose its cooling water, and before they could start to cool it again, if the temperature increased to the point where the spent fuel were to melt, then you could start releasing some of the more volatile radionuclides like the cesium-137 into the air.
	By now pretty much all the iodine has decayed away.
	But that's a plausible scenario.
	I'm sorry to hear that.
	Well, I don't know how likely it is, but it's something that could happen.
	Well, apparently the structure is not sound at all, because they keep saying they're worried about it collapsing, and as far as typhoons are concerned, they definitely come along.
	So, that's fairly plausible, actually, in my opinion.
	Yeah, and I guess, see, this is where my inner geek comes out, and I can say that it's plausible, but I wouldn't want to quote you on it.
	Oh, that's okay.
	You don't have to quote me on it.
	I'm just thinking.
	And I, you know, I'm kind of with you in one way.
	I understand where you're coming from.
	You're a proponent, and you said, well, we wouldn't produce 100% of our energy with nuclear power.
	If it were up to you, How much more energy would we produce with nuclear power?
	That's where, and I'm kind of thinking out loud here because to be honest with you, I've
	never really thought about that in those terms.
	So with nuclear power, we all know the risks of that and I think the benefits are fairly
	One of the biggest ones being no greenhouse gases.
	So with coal, believe it or not, you get radiation exposure from that, because the way that coal forms, you end up with a lot of uranium and coal deposits.
	So there's radiation dose from that, and then you've got the problems with coal mining and all of that.
	And then we all know about the oil field accidents and spills and greenhouse gases from petroleum and natural gas.
	So, to me, it's a matter of basically balancing all these risks, the short-term risks of the dangers of getting and using the stuff, along with the long-term risks of, well, like me living in New York City, having to start investing and, you know, I guess we're learning how to tread water better.
	You know, if you balance all those together, I think probably about maybe 50% plus or minus a little bit of the world's power could probably come safely from nuclear energy.
	And when I say safe, I don't mean risk-free, but I mean with no more a death toll from nuclear energy than we would see from coal, natural gas, fossil fuels, and that sort of thing.
	Okay, 50%, Andy.
	What do we currently have?
	Worldwide, if you look at the power produced, what percentage?
	Or do you want to just talk about the U.S.? ?
	In the U.S.
	it's about 20%.
	Worldwide it's about 16%.
	So at 50% we'd have a lot more nuclear plants, wouldn't we?
	Yeah, and that's a concern.
	The reason why that concerns me Well, there's a couple reasons.
	One is because a lot of the capacity would be going up in China and India, which are countries that do not have the greatest safety record just as far as making any sort of highly technological things.
	For example, there was the high-speed rail collapse in China just a couple of years ago, and they had the Bhopal accident in India where several thousand people died there.
	You know, the places where we really could use the capacity are places that I don't know if it can be safely built and operated.
	The other thing that concerns me is that right now we don't have the capacity worldwide to put up high-quality nuclear reactors, even in the developed world, at the rate that we would need to try to reach that 50% number.
	It's easy for me to say that ideally it should be 50% nuclear and 50% something else.
	But when we get down to the practicalities, it's not, it's not that easy.
	In the Navy, we could have a really high quality nuclear power program, because we, what I want to say, we didn't have to worry about making money.
	You know, the Navy is definitely a nonprofit organization.
	And so we could build these things to withstand battle damage and everything else and make them Make them as safe as possible.
	Sure.
	But with a profit motive, you don't have the luxury of doing that.
	Well, here's what I would say.
	Again, noting that you are pretty much a proponent of nuclear power, and I understand that.
	But I can tell you this.
	I think politically, not that I'm wild about talking about politics, the chances of more nuclear plants now are, well, could I give you a minus number?
	I'm not sure what you mean by that.
	I mean there's no chance.
	None.
	After Fukushima, as bad as it is.
	Okay, I see what you mean.
	Politically, I mean, in terms of what people would say, let's say they announced a new nuclear plant, I don't know, somewhere near New York City, let's say.
	Or safely away from New York City, but still close.
	There's no way, Andy.
	There's no way.
	Yeah.
	It would be a difficult sell.
	And, you know, the nuclear power industry was really getting excited about the fact that, you know, even a lot of prominent environmentalists were starting to support nuclear power, or at least to detest it less.
	I was, Andy.
	I was.
	You know, I had sort of gotten over at Chernobyl and bought into, as I said, you know, the fact that single containment, and no, we can do it right, and so forth and so on.
	And then, Fukushima.
	So, I think politically, there's no chance.
	None.
	Yeah, and that's... Yeah, you're right on that one.
	I know.
	So, where do we go?
	I mean, is there... If nuclear is no, and it is, then where do we go?
	Andy, any thoughts as a scientist?
	There's... Now, what I want to say... One of the problems Is that there aren't that many types of power, or power production, that you can just plop down anywhere in the world and make enough energy to power a city.
	You know, solar power, for example, works great in the desert or a place where you've got a lot of sun, but not so good for Ohio.
	We're putting up a lot of plants out here, Andy, right now.
	A lot of plants.
	With all these mirrors focused on a single point, I guess it's fairly efficient.
	Yeah, it can be, but it's a great source of power for the places where it works, but not so great for all over.
	One of the things that really struck me was when I was preparing for a lecture for one
	of the classes I was teaching and I was just looking at where the, what do I want to say,
	I was just looking at where all the power generation goes in the United States and I
	realized that more power is lost by, or just in transmission than is used anywhere else.
	More than 50% of the power that we generate is lost just by passing through the power
	lines.
	Oh, I believe that Andy.
	And that they're not maintained particularly well.
	I'm a ham radio operator and that power that you talk about that gets wasted in transmission
	is realized in noise on the radio.
	So we ham operators know about that.
	Yeah, and where that comes into power production is that the places that are great for producing
	say wind power.
	A lot of times aren't that close to the places where the power is used.
	And the same thing with solar or tidal or hydropower or whatever.
	These are all great ways of generating energy, but a lot of them are not close to major population centers.
	So ideally what we want is to have some source of energy that is a fairly good way of producing power that you can put anywhere in the country so that you don't waste all this energy just basically warming up the power lines.
	And so, natural gas is a good power source.
	It's clean, you can put those pretty much anywhere, and we've got a lot of natural gas in the country.
	Its drawback is that it produces greenhouse gases.
	Coal, to be honest with you, I don't like too much, even though I come from Ohio and there's a lot of coal mining there.
	But coal is one of the dirtier sources of power that we have, and even clean coal technology is still dirtier than a lot of other types of power production.
	You know, fuel oil, we all know the problems with that.
	And, you know, the bottom line, I guess what I'm getting at is there's nothing that's perfect.
	And what we've got to try to do is to find the least imperfect solution to the problems that we've got.
	I guess one other thing I should say too, is that not having power is dangerous.
	You know, if you think about all the things that we've got that run on energy, whether it's the hospitals or even just our refrigerators or whatever, we can't necessarily conserve ourselves into, if you will, a safer world, because deliberately denying ourselves that power is also going to cost lives.
	No easy answers, Andy.
	No easy answers.
	Hold tight.
	We're going to do a break very quickly.
	Well, it's actually a pretty proven technology.
	What they do is they stick pipes into the ground and then they circulate refrigerant through it and they just freeze solid the soil and the water that's in the vicinity of the pipes.
	And the intention is to try to block off anything that's going through.
	Basically, you make this wall.
	The advantage of an ice wall is that you can put them in, well, I can't say easily, But you can put them in more easily than trying to put in like a solid concrete wall.
	But even better than that, you know, we've already talked about the earthquakes in that area.
	If you have an earthquake and you've got a slab of concrete going down to bedrock, the earthquake can just crack that and you've got to dig it up to fix it.
	The ice is more or less self-healing.
	And so you think the ice would keep it corralled, as it were?
	Yeah, and again, this is a proven technology.
	In fact, we used something similar on the submarine that I was on.
	There were times that we had to work on a pipe where we couldn't isolate it by shutting valves, and so we would just pour it, or we'd put a jacket around it, you know, a copper jacket, pour liquid nitrogen through that, and freeze an ice plug in the pipe, and let us, you know, that would let us work safely downstream.
	Obviously, an ice wall is a lot bigger than something you put on a pipe, but it's Yeah, again, it's a technology that they've used in a lot of places.
	Okay, so if you were in charge at Fukushima, knowing what you know about the state of the disaster today, what would you recommend they do?
	You know, in Russia, of course, they built this giant Coffin over the whole thing.
	Has that worked, by the way?
	Is it safe?
	Do you mean the sarcophagus around Chernobyl?
	Chernobyl, yeah.
	The first one, they just kind of slapped together and that started falling apart fairly quickly.
	The replacement structure is a lot better.
	You're never going to have anything that's 100% airtight or 100% you know.
	And I don't like the word coughing better actually.
	Yeah, that works, too.
	The problem with the word safe is that it might mean something different to you than it does for me.
	To me, for example, when I say that something is safe, what I'm thinking in my mind is that I know that there are risks, but they're acceptable.
	Just to take an example, eating at McDonald's I consider safe, even though I know that there are all the problems with salty, greasy food and I could choke on a hamburger and stuff like that.
	But the risks, and maybe I guess this means I just look at McDonald's differently than
	a lot of people, but to me I consider that safe because it doesn't happen very often.
	So a lot of people when they say safe, they mean is there zero risk associated with this
	and nothing can be held to that standard.
	No, you can't say that.
	But with regards to the sarcophagus around Chernobyl, if that's being built properly
	and if it's being maintained properly, then it should really help to keep the structure
	from disintegrating further and it should help to contain the radioactivity.
	Actually, both those things are really good questions in view of the economic condition of Russia.
	Yeah, and again, they have a record of not doing a tremendously good job with some of these complicated projects, or even with some simple projects.
	If they're building it I don't know that I would feel as comfortable with it as if a European company were building it or an American company.
	I don't really know enough about the construction or the design or anything.
	I don't know who's doing the contract.
	I can't really tell you how comfortable I feel with it because I don't know enough about it.
	Somebody in Canada is asking, about one of their nuclear plants up there.
	Would you say that, and I'll extend it down to the U.S., that our nuclear reactors and that the Canadian nuclear reactors, they're the main group listening to us right now, Canada and the U.S., would be safe from a, what was it, 9.0 earthquake?
	Yeah, it was somewhere in the high eights or low nines, I can't remember exactly.
	The Canadian reactors probably are not built to that standard, but the reason for that is because Canada doesn't expect to see earthquakes of that magnitude.
	Vancouver area, they might expect to see higher magnitude earthquakes, but most of Canada, and I guess I should say where I'm drawing this from is my bachelor's and master's are in geology, so I took a couple classes in that, and in most of Canada, once you get past the Canadian Rockies, you just don't expect to see high magnitude earthquakes.
	And so again, the Canadian reactors are probably not built to that standard because they don't anticipate the need for it to be built to that standard.
	Now, getting back to what we were talking about earlier, if Toronto gets walloped with something that was just completely unprecedented, that means they could have some problems.
	And then you're looking at the risk.
	Do I expect to see this magnitude earthquake once every thousand years, once every million years, once in the history of the planet?
	And I just really couldn't give you those kind of odds.
	And I guess having said that too, I should say that Canada's got one of the better nuclear power programs in the world.
	They just do a really good job.
	And in fact, I think Canada does a better job than the United States because they use a lot of, what I want to say, they use a lot of similar reactors.
	So in the US, all of our reactors are pretty much one of a kind, which means that if you go from one to another, you've got to learn a new plant.
	In Canada, they They tend to use a couple designs over and over again, which means that if an operator goes from one to the other or an inspector, they're in a familiar environment.
	Why did we do that?
	Was it design improvements as we went along, or why have them be different and one-of-a-kind?
	Part of it is because I think we were trying too much to tailor the reactors exactly to the sites and to the company's needs.
	And so they ended up, you know, just maybe making a little bit of an improvement here or a little bit of an improvement there, what they saw as an improvement, and maybe it was.
	But I don't think that they necessarily considered that what might make the plant marginally safer, engineering-wise, might make it a little bit less safe from the standpoint of the operators, you know, the familiarity with it.
	Maybe it's so, if they have an accident, they can say, don't worry, it won't happen again, because it was one of a kind.
	I don't know that anybody gave it that much thought, to be honest with you.
	I think that everybody just wanted what they wanted.
	And they said, OK, you know, so let us take this design and then do this to it because of the location and this to it because of our corporate needs and everything else.
	And I think they just kind of ended up that way.
	All right.
	Let's turn our attention to this area where I live.
	And when I say where I live, I really mean where I live.
	The trucks carrying the, I don't know if it's low-level or medium-level waste, are coming right through town here.
	Actually, coming right through town.
	You see, right through town.
	It's amazing.
	So, we're talking about Yucca Mountain and the storage of a very potentially great deal of high-level radioactive waste.
	And I wonder how you stand On that, on storing this much radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain, is it going to be safe?
	Okay, well, there we go with the safe again.
	Yes, indeed.
	I'm sorry, I can't stay away from it.
	Oh, I know.
	I'm just kind of ribbing you a little bit.
	I'm ribbing you a little too.
	Okay.
	Don't worry.
	Let me first talk from just the standpoint of the engineering that goes into the cast and the radiation dose rates and all of that and with some of this I can I can give maybe a little bit more information because my my doctoral advisor did some of the testing on these casks including simulating terrorist attacks on them and the casks themselves are pretty well designed there's a really neat video if you go online if you just do a Google search for something I think it's nuclear waste cask and train
	You find a really neat video of a locomotive rocket powered being shot into one of these spent fuel canisters.
	I remember that.
	Yeah, I remember it.
	You see the canister go flying off and the locomotive, the front end of that's pretty beat up and the canister is kind of mildly dinged.
	Well, actually a little bit more than mildly, but it's intact.
	You know, they're designed to withstand an awful lot.
	You know, they're not going to withstand everything, but they can withstand Most of the reasonable things that we expect them to see and an awful lot of unreasonable things.
	I know they never tested it with a woman kicking it with the high heels.
	Oh yeah, I've fallen a fall with that a couple times and a point at toes too.
	But they did test them with shake charges.
	So hopefully that would be a little bit worse.
	Well I've always heard that they've said, and you know Senator Harry Reid is He's our senator here in Nevada and he's always been dead set against this idea.
	I mean really dead set.
	I interviewed him here on the air about it.
	He was absolutely adamant that no sir, it's not coming to Nevada.
	Well, the trucks are rolling.
	It's not the high level stop I guess yet.
	What is it that we're moving over there now?
	To be honest with you, I don't know.
	I know what's happening with the high level radioactive waste.
	But in all honesty, as far as I know, Yucca Mountain itself isn't receiving waste, but I do believe that the Department of Energy, at least they used to dispose of some radioactive waste from the DOE complex at the Nevada Test Site, and so it could be trucks of that that are going out there.
	But I've got to give you an I-don't-know on that one.
	Okay, no problem.
	Let's talk about the high-level stuff, the really, really dangerous stuff.
	We've got a lot of it, right?
	Stored underneath reactors, mostly, sitting in heavy water, I think, safely.
	You love that word, safely.
	Heavy water, right?
	And that's the stuff that we're going to have to store for some period of time, actually.
	Yeah, and this is another one of those things.
	To me, I guess the way that I look at things is everything is a trade-off.
	You know, there's no perfect answer to anything.
	The advantages of what we have right now are that we don't have to transport the radioactive waste, we can basically leave it at the place where it was formed, and so that reduces the risks from transportation.
	You know, you don't have to worry about a train running into your spent fuel canister if the spent fuel canister never crosses a train track.
	Right you are.
	But see, that won't keep working because they're getting filled up.
	The spent fuel pools are being filled up but they've been going with something called dry cask storage where they take the waste out of the pools and they put them in casks and then they put those on the surface.
	I visited one of those when I was in Lithuania.
	I was there several years ago and got to visit their Chernobyl style reactors and I saw their spent fuel casks.
	The radiation dose rates outside of those things were normal, meaning they were very well shielded and they were stable.
	The downside of something like that is that the things are huge and you can see them from a long ways away.
	So if you've got them out in the open like that, then it's something that a terrorist can see and that they can try to figure out if they can attack.
	Can they?
	They can, but thanks to what my doctoral advisor told me, It would really take a concerted terrorist attack to breach those things.
	Well, most terrorist attacks are pretty concerted.
	Well, this is true.
	But something else to keep in mind is that there's kind of a common view of it that as soon as you breach the fuel rods, everything just kind of whooshes out into the atmosphere.
	It's more like cutting a slice of pie.
	You know, if you break open a fuel rod, the nuclides that are closest to that break are going to escape into the atmosphere, at least the volatile ones are going to.
	And the rest of the stuff is going to slowly diffuse down to that area.
	So you're not going to get a big whoosh of radioactivity into the atmosphere.
	What you're going to get is a more gradual release, and only if the stuff that really can mobilize.
	And obviously, a gradual release is worse than no release at all.
	But it's also better than having everything just immediately enter the environment.
	It's kind of intermediate.
	So if somebody were to put, say, shaped charges around one of these things and crack it open, then what you would get would be a release of radioactivity, at least if it was powerful enough to breach the fuel rods.
	Well, earlier you were saying that they tried shaped charges and they couldn't open it.
	Yeah, the magnitude that they were playing with.
	But if you can go to a much higher level, you can always find enough explosives to break it open.
	The question is whether or not the terrorists would bring enough explosives to break it open.
	Well, if they had studied what they were going to do, they would have.
	It certainly is possible.
	And if it really broke open, if they had enough shaped charge to really blow this thing to kingdom come, that would sort of scatter plutonium more or less everywhere, right?
	Well, plutonium, uranium, and cesium, some of the other fission products.
	Yeah, it would be scattered.
	The negative side is that it would be scattered.
	Oh, that would be negative.
	Now, let's actually talk about Yucca Mountain itself.
	Are you a proponent of storing this in Yucca Mountain or not?
	Well, I think that the safest place to put the nuclear waste is in some underground repository and in one place.
	And the reasons for that are because underground, it's going to be isolated from the environment, isolated from people, and if there's an earthquake or volcanic eruption or something like that, it's going to bury it more deeply as opposed to toppling things over and breaking them open.
	Whether or not that underground place should be Yucca Mountain or not, No, the bottom line is there's a lot of places where you could put it, and I'll use the word, there are a lot of places you could put it safely underground.
	The question is whether or not Yucca Mountain is the best place and whether or not it's an acceptable place.
	Those are two different questions.
	Do you have answers?
	Not really, because I can talk about the science of it, but I can't talk about the social and the political sides of it.
	Yeah, those are the more difficult questions.
	Alright, well let's talk a little about the science of it.
	The EPA says the waste would have to stay safe for a million years.
	Is that right?
	A million years, really?
	Yeah, and I have mixed feelings about that time frame.
	Me too.
	My mixed feelings are not whether or not we should be able to keep the waste safe for that length of time.
	But whether or not we can make any meaningful predictions over that length of time.
	I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh, but we can't make meaningful predictions into the next quarter.
	Yeah, well with the geology we can probably be fairly comfortable for the time span of maybe thousands to tens of thousands of years.
	I don't know that we can make an accurate prediction about what's going to happen a
	million years from now.
	No, we certainly can't.
	That's a long time to...
	I mean, what sort of safety things could you put in place?
	Assuming that, I don't know, in a million years, we could all disappear due to some
	biological bug that gets us all, and we could die, and there could be another group of humans
	that would rise from the ashes of the biological devastation, and they wouldn't know that it
	was there, or would they?
	I mean, could we leave a note?
	Actually, it's interesting because back in the 90s, the Department of Energy was actually
	trying to figure out how to answer just that question.
	Basically, if civilization fails, how are we going to make sure that our great-great-great-great-grandchildren
	understand that they really shouldn't go there?
	They're greater than even that.
	Great-great-great, you could go on and on and on a million years at a long time.
	Yeah.
	They really never came up with a good answer for that one.
	They were trying to think of some universal sign language, but what might mean danger,
	stay away or you're going to die today, in several thousand years to a different civilization,
	might mean something like free apples.
	You know, there's just no way to tell.
	And I don't think that they ever came up with an answer to that question.
	I mean, one of the things is that if we put it as deep as possible and put as many barriers as possible between the surface and the waste, that'll at least make it more difficult to access.
	You know, for example, if we put hardened steel in there, you know, just encapsulate the entire thing, then that means that no civilization can get to it unless they can cut through hardened steel And hopefully by that time they'll have also invented maybe radiation detectors.
	But that's just speculation.
	Really, when you're talking a million years out, you're talking more science fiction than you are anything that we can make comfortable statements about.
	Total science fiction.
	But then another question to ask is, is that million year standard something that's reasonable?
	And that's an answer I can't really give you an answer to that one either.
	I know that a million years or keeping something safe for a million years is going to give us a higher degree of safety than designing something to keep us safe for a hundred thousand years.
	But I honestly can't tell you how much the radioactive decay or how much radioactivity will be left.
	In 100,000 years versus a million years, I just can't give you a good answer on that.
	Well, let's talk about the EPA's number.
	I mean, they say a million years.
	It's got to be kept safe for a million years.
	Why does it have to be kept safe for a million years or even 100,000?
	That's a really good question.
	And in all honesty, I think that that comes out to be, well, first of all, the 100,000 that number was chosen because it was felt that after
	a hundred thousand years the radioactivity in the nuclear waste will
	have decayed to the point where really it will not pose a risk because like I
	mentioned before ten half-lives
	you're down to about a tenth of a percent of radioactivity that you
	started with well for a low level or a low amount of radioactivity ten
	half-lives will do the But for a lot of radioactivity, you might want to go a lot more than that.
	And so people went through, they did the calculations as far as how much radioactivity is in the radioactive waste.
	And they said, OK, after 100,000 years, this should be at the point where it really does not pose a significant risk to people.
	And again, I'm using kind of a weasel word.
	I'm saying significant.
	What's significant to me might not be significant to somebody else, and vice versa.
	they calculated some numerical risk estimate and they say okay when it gets down to this
	point where it poses this level of risk, whether it's one in a million or one in ten million
	or whatever, at that point then it should be alright.
	So that's where the hundred thousand years came from.
	Where the million years came from, a lot of that I think was more politics than it was
	science.
	People were saying okay, so we're going to take the number that you chose, we're going
	to give ourselves a safety factor of ten because if it's going to be safe at a hundred thousand
	years then it will be ultra safe at a million years.
	So, maybe that's what we ought to do.
	So, you think it would be relatively not safe in the first 100,000 years?
	Well, let me give you some gradations on that.
	Alright.
	Ten years after radioactive waste or after spent fuel rods come out of a reactor, I don't
	want to be close to them.
	Because, or at least not unless they're well shielded and well maintained because they're
	dangerous.
	If, you know, like if you were to sit down at dinner with one of those at the dinner
	table that would not be good.
	So that's a hundred years.
	A thousand years from now, the individual spent fuel rods are not going to be emitting
	that much radiation, but they're still going to be emitting some.
	So then maybe brief cohabitation with one would not be dangerous, but I don't know that I would want to bury it under my house and live with it for a lifetime.
	Not part of my definition of cohabitation, but okay.
	Well, using the term loosely.
	Very.
	So that takes us to about a thousand years or so.
	Ten thousand years, we're getting to the point where We're a lifetime of exposure to the thing, and now like household level proximity to a single spent fuel rod is probably not going to give you that much risk, but you wouldn't want to have an entire spent fuel bundle underneath your house.
	When you get to 100,000 years, that's to the point at which basically the radioactivity has decayed away to the point where you probably could spend the better part of a lifetime in reasonably close proximity to a bunch of it, and the risk from that would probably be no greater than the risk of driving.
	Alrighty, then let's use the 100,000 year figure.
	It's what, 10 times less than what the EPA said?
	What the heck, let's use 100,000 years.
	Kind of dangerous for 100,000 years.
	Agreed?
	Yeah.
	It just doesn't seem to me, Andy, that we can come even close to guaranteeing anything at all for 100,000 years.
	It's hard to do.
	But let me talk about something else, though, and this gets more into the geologic suitability, or just being able to lock something away geologically for a long period of time.
	There was a natural nuclear reactor that formed in what's now the nation of Gabon.
	It's in Western Africa.
	And this thing, it actually operated as a nuclear reactor for about 100,000 years or And in the course of doing that, it produced a lot of radioactive waste.
	What's interesting, especially from the standpoint of a geologist, is that the conditions that were required for this to form was that it be surrounded by water and that it be in porous media, sandstone, that could hold that water.
	And in two billion years, that's the length of time it's been since the thing shut down, Almost all the radionuclides are still present in that location.
	They've accounted for just about everything that formed during fission from that, in spite of the fact that it's been submerged underwater in rock with a lot of fractures and pore spaces and everything for that length of time.
	I did say virtually all the radioactive material.
	Some of it did escape, but not all that much.
	The reason why that's encouraging to me is that it suggests that deep geologic burial is going to keep the radioactive material locked up.
	So there's that lesson that we can draw from it.
	You know I'm close to Yucca Mountain, right?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	You know what I've got here, Andy?
	I've got a well.
	That's how I get my water.
	Okay.
	I've got a well.
	It's really wonderful water, actually.
	You wouldn't expect it under the desert.
	I'm told that we have here in Pahrump, Nevada, actually one of the second or third largest underground sources of water in the country.
	It's amazing.
	It is being taxed a little bit, but it's still amazing.
	Now, I have these worries about, I don't know, in my mind, I'm thinking of all this stuff buried that's not going to be really safe.
	I hate to dandy that word around.
	There's a couple things.
	First is finding a way to get the radionuclides into the water.
	And this is part of the waste site design and the canister design is trying to make that take as long as possible.
	So that's one of the reasons why these things are surrounded by steel and concrete.
	And one of the reasons that they chose a place that's Under hundreds of feet of rock and still hundreds of feet above the water table is just to make it in order for that waste to get into the water.
	You've got to have water percolate down into the chamber where the waste is being stored.
	But earthquakes, you know, they do the darnedest.
	Oh, this is true.
	And that can speed up the flow considerably.
	So it's it's possible.
	One of the reasons why they chose the place where they did is to try to maximize the distance that the water has to go and then still to have to dissolve through the container to dissolve the waste out and then reach the water table and flow from there.
	And obviously it's possible.
	The question is over what time frame will that happen?
	And it could be thousands of years.
	It could be hundreds of thousands of years.
	But if there were a catastrophe, it could also be centuries.
	There's a lot of unknowns there.
	What I would say, and if I were living there, and I know that that's an if, and it's easy to say from here in New York, but if I were living there, I don't think that it's likely that it would happen in my lifetime or my children's lifetime.
	I strongly doubt that it would happen within my grandchildren or great-grandchildren's lifetime, but when you get out into the tens or hundreds of thousands of years, I would say that it's possible, but again, that's where I would hate to have to assign.
	I could not say if it's one percent chance a tenth of a percent chance, five percent or whatever, I
	couldn't give an odds to it.
	So you wouldn't say it's safe?
	Well, I would say that the risk is close to zero for the next several generations,
	and after that it would be a low number, but I couldn't hazard a guess as to how low that number
	or how high that number would be. Okay, let's talk about France for a moment.
	I don't do a lot of that, I don't talk about the French a lot, but they have been doing this thing, you know, this cycling thing.
	Instead of burying the radiation, as we've been talking about doing, they're recycling it now.
	They actually had a demonstration on, I forget what it was, one of the network morning programs years ago, and they actually showed The recycling of some pretty high level waste to the point where it was harmless.
	What are they doing over there and why can't we do that?
	What they're doing is taking a, from the engineering standpoint and the economic standpoint, they're taking a better approach to it than we have.
	They, when you're done, I'm trying to think of the best way to phrase this.
	When the reactor fuel is in the reactor, you're burning up the U-235.
	That's the part that fissions, and it's also producing plutonium, because everything that's in there that's not U-235 is uranium-238, and that turns into plutonium over the life of the reactor.
	You know what, Andy?
	This sounds like it's going to be a bit of a talk, so I'm going to stop you there.
	We're going to come back to this recycling in a moment.
	I've got to do a break, and we just have to do those in radio once in a while.
	is a great, great outlet for dark matter.
	However, there is still a need for terrestrial radio when Mother Nature gets rough.
	The new, and it is a brand new, I don't know if you're a CC Radio fanatic or not, I am, the CC Radio 2E from Sea Crane, And it's a brand new radio, folks.
	If you got one of them, you know how good they are.
	This is the new one.
	The CC Radio 2E is an Echo.
	Can be your emergency radio.
	Comes with no weather band.
	It will receive stuff that other radios... They don't even know it's there.
	That's how much difference there is in the reception capability.
	It comes also, by the way, with a 2 meter handband.
	How cool is that?
	That's right.
	You know, in recycling this stuff instead of doing what we're doing and storing it and not knowing what to do with it.
	So what say you?
	Should we be doing that?
	Should we be doing what France is doing?
	Could we begin even now?
	Or is it too late?
	Or what's the deal?
	And actually, I guess first I should apologize because I was flipping into what my kids call professor mode.
	So I'll try to be a little bit less lecture-like.
	But as far as the fuel goes, the bottom line is when you pull the fuel out of a reactor, there's still usable uranium and plutonium in there.
	And there's also a lot of other radioactive materials, which is why this stuff is so dangerous.
	But there's usable uranium and plutonium and stuff.
	What France is doing, and a lot of other countries too, is recycling that.
	They're removing the stuff that we can use again.
	And then that removes a reasonable amount of the radioactivity from the fuel right there.
	And so they don't have to mine as much uranium.
	They don't have to process as much.
	You know, basically the term for it is closing the loop on the nuclear fuel cycle.
	And it makes a lot of sense.
	We stopped doing that during the Carter administration.
	And the main reason why is because we were worried about the plutonium.
	That's the stuff that you can also make nuclear weapons out of.
	And the concern was that if everybody was recycling fuel, And it just added a lot of potentially weapons-grade plutonium to the world's stockpiles.
	And so the hope was that if we kind of unilaterally went away from recycling or reprocessing the fuel, then the rest of the world would too.
	What we did not plan on was realizing that it meant that we were just stuck with all this, that fuel all over the place, and that we would have to dispose of it.
	We can reverse that.
	I'm not quite clear on what you said.
	What you seemed to say was that if other people did it like France and other countries and recycled, that we shouldn't and the reason would be that it would be less likely that the terrorists would get their hands on Yeah, but basically what we were trying to do was to set a good example for the rest of the world, and hoping that if we did everything the way that we considered right, that everybody would say, wow, why didn't we think of that?
	And that they would just follow us.
	And what we didn't consider was that the rest of the world might say, well, that's really a pretty stupid idea, and that they would go ahead and do things a different way.
	So there were just two different ways of looking at it.
	Yeah, it's puzzling to me.
	I guess I don't get the psychology of it yet.
	Well, I guess one analogy would be if, say, you didn't like the way your neighbors kept their yard and you just said, OK, well, I'm going to keep my yard nice and tidy and everything and hope that they'll see it, be embarrassed, and follow suit.
	And, you know, leaving it up to your neighbors to decide whether or not to do that.
	So you're suggesting the U.S.
	is a nice, tidy yard?
	Well, that's what we thought.
	The problem is that, I guess to extend that analogy further, is that we never took the yard clippings out to the curb so they're just piling up in the backyard and so we might have a nice tidy yard, but we've also got a huge compost pile that we've got to do something with.
	Compost pile, yes, at least a compost pile.
	Well, you know, if that thinking might have had a tiny flaw in it, why can't we start recycling?
	We can, but it's going to take a while because we don't have the infrastructure set up to do that on a large scale.
	Which means that we would have to take the 5 or 10 or 15 years, however long it would take, to build the reprocessing plants if we do it here.
	Otherwise, we would have to ship the fuel overseas and let the French or the British or somebody else reprocess it for us in December.
	Yeah, but that's not that long.
	I mean, when you're talking about 100,000 or a million years, whatever, you know, what did you say, 20 years to build it?
	True, but then we're switching between the geologic time frame and the congressional time frame.
	And I don't know that we can trust Congress to stay interested in something for 20 years.
	And yet you're saying that, I mean, how can we trust them to be good oversight people for 100,000 years?
	I don't know that I trust Congress to be good on oversight for the next three months.
	You're aware, aren't you, that their latest approval rating was like 5%?
	CNN actually uttered earlier that it might be higher than that of Al-Qaeda.
	Yeah, and I guess I've got to say in that one, I'm one of the 95%.
	But part of the reason for coming up with the regulations that they're doing, or that they're trying to come up with, or the standards or whatever, is to basically make it kind of Congress-proof.
	If we've got a facility that we can walk away from and not do anything with for 100,000 years, then it would take Congress actually taking action to hurt it.
	Not Congress-proof?
	That's less likely than Yucca Mountain-proof.
	Or maybe a better way to put it is Congress-resistant.
	Kind of like the way in the Navy we used to say sailor-resistant as opposed to sailor-proof.
	Okay.
	All right.
	What I would like to do is allow some of the folks to ask you questions.
	And I guess it could range from what it's like to be on a nuclear sub, to Fukushima, to Yucca Mountain, to the recycling questions, all of that.
	What say you?
	You up for it?
	Yeah, and I guess with just one comment, and that's that I will, everybody call in and I'll do them the courtesy of listening to everything that they have to say, but I would like to ask that they return the courtesy and let me finish my answers before they start on something else.
	No, I actually would demand that myself.
	Okay.
	So, there you go.
	Alright, I think this is going to be Billy from North Carolina.
	We're going to try it this way.
	You're on the air with Andy.
	Hey Andy, hey Art, glad to hear you back.
	It's been something that I've listened to.
	You hit on it a minute ago, Art, when you talked about the water problem, of it melting down.
	But, you know, in scripture it says a star fell from heaven.
	Well, the question is, we're not having scriptural questions here.
	No, I'm not.
	No, I ain't what I was going to get to.
	I was going to say, I had a geologist, he worked down on the oil rig, and I was just looking at my Bible and reading through it.
	He said, let me show you something.
	He was talking about, he said, do you know what wormwood means in Russia?
	And I said, I have no idea, and he said... Well, I know what Wormwood is, and we've had nothing yet that has dispensed away with a third of everything, you know, even... Correct, correct.
	But what I was saying is, he was saying that a nuclear power plant has the power of a star.
	The generation of the future... Alright, hold it right there, and we'll deal with that.
	He said a nuclear power plant has the power of a star.
	Now, there is a lot of power in a nuclear power plant, but it doesn't compete with a star, does it Andy?
	No, I think that might be mixing two things up.
	Nuclear fusion is what powers the sun, but we can't really do that yet.
	We're not doing nuclear fusion at all, right?
	Well, not in a controlled way.
	Right, and not in a, what would be the right word, an economic way.
	Yeah, we can't draw power from it.
	The joke is that nuclear fusion power is about a generation away and always will be.
	That is a wonderful question, actually, fusion.
	Is it really that far away, Andy, and is it the hope that we should hold on to for power in the future, or what?
	I guess I kind of look at that the same way as my mother-in-law is treating me nicely, is that it's something that I always hope for but I'm not really planning on.
	Alright, let's go to Michigan and Wes.
	Hi Wes.
	Hey, how you doing?
	Thanks Art for taking my call.
	You're welcome.
	I just wanted to ask your guests, what exactly would happen if Fukushima didn't melt down Even farther, you know, and how about, you know, like a small nuclear device, ironically like a Hiroshima type nuclear device, setting it off, would it just melt it over and close it off?
	Is that even a feasible option?
	Okay, he is suggesting an actual nuclear detonation at that site as a way to I don't know what he imagines it would do.
	There's actually two interesting things in there.
	One is whether or not the fuel from a commercial nuclear reactor can blow up or it can have a nuclear yield, like a nuclear weapon, and that can't happen.
	The amount of the fissionable uranium in nuclear fuel is just too low to let it explode like a nuclear bomb.
	No, Andy, I think what he was doing was suggesting that we have a nuclear detonation at one of these messy sites.
	I don't think that would be a really good idea because not only would you be setting
	off a nuclear explosion, which is something I don't think is a good idea to begin with,
	especially not close to the surface, but what it would probably do would be to not only
	throw its own fission products into the air, but it would dredge up all the radioactivity
	in the fuel that is underground now and it would spread that into the atmosphere.
	I think he was thinking of vaporizing the whole problem.
	Yeah, but again, the problem is that it would vaporize it right up into the atmosphere, so then we would end up with a lot of radioactivity in the atmosphere.
	So I don't think that would be the best way to go.
	Okay, well it was worth a shot.
	Chris in Florida, you're on the air with Andy, hi.
	Hi, Mr. Bell, and Doctor, my question is, and please excuse me for not, I mean, I'm going to sound kind of ignorant, but I don't understand the green substance that glows.
	Did you define it so I could understand it?
	And then the second part to that would be, is it like, I mean, is it natural or is it man-made?
	Are you talking about kryptonite?
	Well, no, but, you know, you see nuclear stuff that's green and glowing.
	Is that something that we made, or is it natural rock that we found?
	Could you break it down for me?
	Sure.
	Yeah, the green glow that most people think about comes from the paint that they used to paint watch dials with.
	They would mix radioactive material in with a material that gave off light when the radiation hit it, and it just happened to give off kind of greenish-yellow or greenish-blue light.
	But with reactor fuel, you actually get more of a purplish-blue glow, and that's from something completely different.
	It's when you have the radioactivity going through the water, and it's actually traveling faster than the speed of light in water, and that gives off a type of radiation called Cherenkov radiation.
	So, yeah, so two different colors, two different mechanisms.
	It's natural, or at least the... I should back that up a bit.
	Mix the radium, we take the radium out of the rocks, mix it in with the paint, or with the phosphor, and so that's obviously artificial.
	But the light that comes out, that's from a natural process.
	Since we're into colors here, I do have a question.
	Every time they talk about Iran's nuclear program, they show a shot of whatever it is, about half filled with something yellow.
	Is that yellow cake?
	That we're seeing, or what is that?
	Yeah, if I'm thinking about the same pictures that you're talking about.
	I show them all the time.
	Yeah, it's like a yellow powdery substance.
	That's right.
	Yeah, that's yellow cake.
	All it is is uranium oxide.
	And it just happens to have a nice bright yellow color.
	I see.
	So that is what they call yellow cake.
	Yeah, what it is is they chemically separate the uranium from the rock when they mine it, and then they mix it with oxygen.
	Basically, it's uranium rust.
	And that's what the yellow cake is.
	When Iran says they have no interest in acquiring a nuclear weapon whatsoever, and they're not working on it, do you buy that?
	Not particularly.
	It's one of those things where the Dutch enrich uranium, and the Japanese do, and the British do, but we trust them.
	Iran hasn't yet learned our trust.
	Uh-huh.
	That's true.
	There you go.
	Greg in Alabama, you're on the air with Andy Karam.
	Hey Andy, the question I've always had is why can't we get something like SpaceX, put everything
	Hi.
	in a space shuttle, fly it up and put it on the moon or just fly it into the sun and let
	it just disappear into the millions of degrees of the sun.
	Why can't we do that?
	Gee, I've got an answer, but Andy, you go ahead.
	Yeah, the biggest thing is just the expense of doing it.
	It costs an awful lot of money still to lift even a couple pounds into orbit.
	And until we can get the cost down to something that the nation could afford, we're just not likely to be doing that.
	Gosh, Andy, that wouldn't have been my answer.
	Oh, OK.
	What was yours?
	Well, I mean, we've already had a couple of shuttles blow up, right?
	Oh, there's that, too.
	I guess I was just thinking of one reentering the atmosphere and then one that just blew up and, you know, if it had enriched uranium and season and all that it blew up that the obvious problem
	with it and well you know that that part which i think also
	uh... you know uh... okay well uh... anyway that would have been my answer
	let's go to uh...
	let's see group of all highland scott hi
	uh... first of all i wanted to say that uh... i really thought that you know you
	got it was yesterday where somebody referred to howard stern vice president
	Howard Stern was hilarious, because I didn't think that interview would go on that widespread.
	Yes.
	Second, my question is, I don't know if your guest has any knowledge to it, but this is as energy as this field.
	Maybe it heard something about it.
	You never hear anybody talk about zero-point energy, and I was wondering if there was any research being done into zero-point energy, and I'll actually take my answer off the air.
	All right, and we've lost our phone system here once again, so if you would disconnect that caller.
	Boy, I'll tell you what.
	Zero-point energy, that really is something that people have been talking about and talking about and talking about.
	As far as I know, it's not real.
	On the other hand, you never know.
	Professor, you may have heard something that I've not heard.
	To be honest with you, most of what I know about that is from watching the Stargate science fiction series.
	And as far as I can tell, that's a little bit further off than fusion power.
	I understand.
	So one of those things that might be scientifically possible, or at least not yet shown to be scientifically impossible, but we're nowhere close to having that.
	So you've actually heard of it, though?
	Yes.
	Yeah, but as to how it works, I haven't the foggiest.
	It's not beyond the Stargate explanation.
	I feel the same way about my phone system here.
	I'm going to give it a try.
	Let's see.
	This would be New Mexico and Jerry.
	Jerry, hello?
	No, it's not Jerry.
	This is Jerry.
	Hi, Jerry.
	Uh, Jared, actually, but anyways.
	Uh, actually, going off of zero-point energy, that kind of burns off, uh, and your first caller, uh, segues into what I gotta say, is, uh, uh, Mikio Kaku talked about how, uh, you know, nuclear fusion, probably about a hundred years off, and the nuclear rods could actually be, uh, the spent nuclear fission rods could actually be burned, E equals mc squared, in a fusion reactor, into essentially nothing.
	Actually, that brings up something really interesting, and I meant to mention it earlier, so I'm glad you asked that here.
	With the spent reactor fuel, if we can expose that to a high dose of neutrons, those neutrons can change some of the radioactive materials in there into something that's still radioactive, but that will decay away a lot faster.
	There have been thoughts, I hadn't heard about it in the fusion reactor, although those produce a lot of neutrons too.
	But I have read about possibly starting up a different type of nuclear reactor that works on thorium, and using that also to burn up the spent fuel to transmute it to something that's shorter-lived, and maybe that'll be gone in a hundred years instead of tens or hundreds of thousands.
	Right.
	So China just eliminates the idea of having to store this stuff for a hundred thousand years because, well, You know, I mean, by that time, I don't, you know, if humanity hasn't killed each other off by then, then, then, you know, I think we have the power to, you know, we have evolved the technology to get to that point, because, I mean, it was only 150 years ago we had electricity, and 75 years ago that we got the first nuclear power.
	And, you know, 150 years from now, Who knows, you know?
	Yes, you're right.
	150 years from now, who knows?
	And so, 100,000 or a million?
	Yeah, I can't, I mean, you can't fathom ideas that far off into the future, but you can see the progression of technology easily getting to that point within the next 100, 150 years, so your storage problems shorten down dramatically into hundreds of years instead of hundreds of thousands.
	Great show.
	Big fan.
	Long time listener.
	Great guests.
	Thank you and do call again.
	Take care.
	Yeah, and in fact that's one of the things that I think is good no matter where we put the radioactive waste.
	Is that we ought to keep it accessible so that if we do develop a technology like that, we can just take the canisters to wherever the technology is or bring the technology to the canisters and go ahead and start working on it without having to dig down thousands of feet to get it up again.
	So whether it's leaving the mine shaft open or whatever, I think we've got to leave our options open.
	It would be a shame to just cut ourselves off from anything that might come up in the future that could help shorten the problem.
	Very good point.
	I mean, should we decide to reprocess, for example?
	You're right.
	Why lock it away?
	But then if you don't lock it away, then, well, it's not perfectly safe.
	Well, but, what would be ideal, I think, would be to find something that, and again, it gets into balancing things, it would give us a good balance between being able to retrieve it without having to go to too much trouble, Versus not leaving it so accessible that any bonehead can get in and cause problems or get themselves in trouble.
	Right.
	Of course, having all of this material, this really awful material, in one place does present a sort of a national security problem, right?
	Yeah, but having it in 50 some odd places also presents a problem.
	It does.
	But transporting it from 50 different places to one place Well, it has its own set of problems, eh?
	No, there's that too.
	As I mentioned before, I grew up in Ohio, and they used to transfer the weapons-grade uranium from the uranium enrichment plant there to wherever it was the next step to make the nuclear weapons, and they did that without any of those shipments getting stolen.
	You know, we can transport it safely.
	But obviously nothing is perfect.
	What we have to do is to try to reduce the risk as much as we can, and then hopefully have enough contingencies built in or well enough trained people to try to cope with the unexpected.
	Okay.
	Dan in Canada, way up north, you're on the air with Andy.
	Hi.
	Oh, hi, Art.
	I just wanted to say first, Roswell to you, Art.
	Thank you.
	And followed by 7.3s.
	And also 51s from Belgab.
	But yeah, for Andrew, I was just going to ask... For Andy, you can give him 137s.
	Okay, well, you know how you say... I know the Duke clients are a little bit different across America, right?
	So, what would we... If we talked about, say, a Fukushima-style thing happened.
	To some of the nuclear plants, or maybe all of them.
	I don't know.
	What would be the safest place to be in America if that were to happen?
	If something of that magnitude was to happen?
	Well, you'd have to specify which nuclear plant you're talking about.
	Well, I'm talking about like, you know, for instance, Northwest Pacific.
	Okay, then I would say Florida would be good.
	Oh, really?
	Well, actually, it's not quite that dire.
	I used to live less than five miles away from a nuclear power plant when I lived in upstate New York, and the biggest impact was that we got free calendars with really good photography every year.
	Plus, when they tested the sirens, it was kind of annoying.
	But to be a little bit more serious, or less flippant, is that up to several miles away, You can have dangerously high levels of radiation for a short period of time, and by short I mean maybe for days to weeks.
	But that depends on, first of all, how much of the radioactivity is released, and second, how steady the winds are, and also how much that gets out into the environment.
	So, under the worst case, you can have dangerously high levels of radiation up to several miles away, and like I said, that can last for days or weeks.
	And it would be a long period of time, as we're seeing with Fukushima and as we've seen with Chernobyl, before the dose rates and the radioactivity would naturally decay to the point where you'd be allowed to go back into the area.
	So, from that perspective, I guess the safest place would be somewhere upwind.
	The prevailing winds normally blow from west to east, and so the safest place would probably be somewhere to the west and like 10, 20, 30 miles away.
	But having said that, I just do feel obligated to point out that even in Japan and even around Chernobyl, the area where the radiation really was dangerous for a prolonged period of time was much smaller than that.
	One other thing that I should add, too, is that in any radiological accident, whether it's a nuclear power
	plant accident or nuclear weapons or radiological dirty bomb or anything like that,
	the best thing to do is to go inside, hopefully into the basement if you're in a house with a
	basement, and to shut the doors and windows and to put your air system on recirculate
	because what that's going to do is to keep you as far away from the radioactivity that's
	coming down as possible and it will keep you from breathing it in until it all settles to the
	ground.
	You know Andy, when I was a kid, they told us to say this place was right under our desk
	at school.
	Can you hold on for a second?
	We're going to do a quick break here.
	Hello, Doctor.
	Hello.
	Fubushima, those diesel generators, is that what caused the whole thing?
	Yeah, that was a really big factor.
	And that is where they just made a mistake.
	The diesel generators were in a place where they could be flooded out.
	Well, first of all, the reactor did what it was supposed to at first.
	It had a huge shock.
	It shut itself down.
	But then there's still all this radioactivity in the fuel rod, and those heat them up.
	So you've got to keep circulating water through there.
	And when they started losing the water, That's when the diesel generator comes on.
	Well, actually, the diesel generator comes on when they lose power, and that's to keep the pumps running, to keep pushing water through the core, and also to pump new water in to make up for the water that's lost.
	Without the diesel generator, they just couldn't do that, and the core melted.
	Right, they scrammed at the appropriate time, but if the generators were up higher, it would have... I heard a lot about this when it first happened, and then nothing months after that.
	Is it TEPCO?
	The generators should have been higher up.
	Yeah, there were a couple things they could have done differently.
	You know, one is they could have put a bigger wall around the generators.
	They could have built a bigger seawall to shield it against a higher tsunami.
	Or they could have put the generators higher up.
	And that's one of those things, in retrospect, they probably should have done one or more of all of those.
	But again, it's getting back to what I mentioned early on.
	Is that they just didn't think that it was necessary because that height tsunami is supposed to only happen once every maybe 10,000 years or so.
	Andy, a question for you.
	If the generators had been in a safe place, I know safe, but if they'd been in a place where they would have continued running, let me put it that way, would that have kept everything okay?
	They would have had a better shot.
	They were still losing water from the reactor and they would still have had to been able to suck water in from the ocean to put into the reactor.
	But at least they would have had the pumps to be able to do that if the pipes were still intact.
	So maybe a better way to put it is without the generators, they just didn't have a chance.
	With the generators, they had a better chance.
	Okay, let us go to, wow, Wyoming.
	Wyoming, and Kenny, hello.
	Well, hello there.
	How are you all tonight?
	Very well, thank you.
	Doing well.
	Well, good.
	Art, I love your show.
	I've listened for a long time, and I'm glad you're back on the air.
	Andy, I've got two sons that are Navy nukes.
	One's an EM, one's an MMELT.
	Ah, that's what I was, a machinist mate, and the ELT is engineering lab tech.
	Yeah, yeah.
	They're both topside though.
	They didn't go subsurface.
	Okay.
	Well, that's too bad, but still good for them.
	Yeah.
	Hey, I was going to ask the question about the recycling, but you answered my question, and I'm just enjoying listening to you guys tonight.
	Well, thank you.
	Yeah, and if I can just say one thing about the training that your sons have gone through, That was, in my opinion, Naval Nuclear Power School and the nuclear power training was more difficult than the master's and the doctorate that I got.
	So for them to get through that really speaks highly of them.
	The one thing that we've covered tonight, Andy, that I just can't seem to wrap my mind around is this recycling thing.
	It just doesn't seem like enough to say, well, You know, we've got a different kind of yard in psychology over here and so we're not doing it.
	This doesn't seem like enough of an answer about why we're not recycling.
	What do you think?
	To tell you the truth, that answer is not all that satisfying to me either, but everything that I've read on it That basically comes back to the same thing, that Carter was trying to set a good example for everybody else, and instead of trying to cut back on the proliferation risk through treaties and everything else, he just figured that if we set a good example for everybody, they would follow us.
	And he made a mistake.
	John in Arizona, your turn with Andy.
	Yeah, Mark.
	Andy, I'm from Paducah, Kentucky, and they're shutting down the Paducah.
	Gaseous diffusion plant, and also across the river, Honeywell.
	They do something with nuclear materials also, in Joplin, Missouri.
	Okay.
	That place is totally contaminated.
	I know people that live around there, you know, they shut them off from their private wells.
	I knew a guy that worked on I mean, you know, how are they ever going to clean that place up?
	up in hospitals and he drove down the road and Geiger counter went off the charts.
	I mean how are they ever going to clean that place up and why are they shutting it down?
	And first, I spent a summer in Paducah doing some groundwater work with a company that I was working for at the time.
	And what we were doing was putting in wells to monitor, I think it was the Northwest Plume, to look for the radioactivity in there as well as some of the chemicals.
	Beautiful place, really nice people.
	Is he right, Andy?
	Is it a mess?
	Yeah.
	Part of the problem is that before we knew any better, one of the accepted ways for cleaning up contaminated water was what they called soil column treatment.
	Because when you pass dirty water or contaminated water through a soil column, a lot of times it will scrub out some of the contaminants.
	And that used to be an accepted way of treating it before we realized that it was really not all that bright a way to go.
	In other words, it keeps going and gets into the groundwater.
	Yeah, because eventually you saturate the soil and so it does get into the groundwater.
	Why was that hard to anticipate?
	I mean, if I go out and take a hose and just water and water and water, I know that water is going to go down and probably meet other water down below the ground.
	I mean, wouldn't that be the first thing you'd think of?
	Yeah, but at the time they just didn't know as much about groundwater and not as much about contamination as we do now.
	Wow.
	Part of the reason that we can say that it's kind of stupid today is because we've made these mistakes in the past.
	You know, just like I've learned from a lot of the mistakes that I've made and I don't do those things anymore.
	Unfortunately, the mistakes that I made only affected me and whereas the mistakes the Department of Energy made affected the people who are downstream.
	You know, they, to their Discredit.
	They were doing these things that don't make a lot of sense and they did try to soft sell it or to downplay it for a long time.
	To their credit, at some point they realized that they had to do things differently and they are starting to clean it up.
	But there's no way around it.
	It's going to take a long time to get the contamination out of there.
	And it's going to cost a lot of money.
	How long would you guess?
	It's probably going to be decades.
	Yeah, as far as how many decades, I don't want to guess there, but it's going to be a long time.
	I don't expect to be around to see it finished up.
	Would you live there?
	Yeah.
	Like I said, it's a pretty town.
	The people are nice.
	It's in a beautiful part of the country.
	Make sure that either, A, if I had a water well, I would do some testing and make sure that I was upstream from the plant, or B, if I was downstream of the plant, I wouldn't have a water well, and I would ask the Department of Energy to make sure that they remembered me when they were bringing in the water to other people.
	Okay.
	And plus, you've got a Geiger counter.
	Well, there's that too.
	And I guess the other part about it is that I You've been working with us long enough that I at least know the tests to do and how to do them to satisfy myself that everybody's being on the up and up with me.
	Alright, off to Alabama and Woody, you're on with Andy.
	Roswell's Art, two things, hypnotized by Fleetwood Mac, is that in your wheelhouse, sir?
	I don't know, I'll check into it.
	Yes, Andy.
	I was wondering, what kind of timeline are we looking for before we're atomically altering elements?
	I mean, that can't be more than a few hundred years out, right?
	No, actually we're doing that now.
	But I think when I say that, I might mean something different than what you mean when you say that.
	But every time we put something into a nuclear reactor, we're bombarding it with neutrons and that causes it to change into other elements.
	So, and nuclear fission is another way that changes the uranium atom into a couple atoms of maybe cesium and technetium or something like that.
	So all that stuff really is, it's altering the atoms, transmuting them into other things.
	Thank you, sir.
	You're quite welcome.
	Well, thank you, and thank you for calling.
	Please call again.
	So we'll hop over to Pennsylvania and Ed.
	Hi, yeah, I was just wondering what your guests thought about using the waste in atomic batteries or radioisotope thermoelectric generators.
	I know some of our spacecraft are powered with these things and I just don't see why things like breeder reactors and these atomic batteries aren't used.
	I just wondered what your guests thought about that.
	Yeah, and actually we are doing that to some extent, but a lot of that gets back into the whole recycling fuel stuff.
	If we just lock it away, then we can't really take anything out of it.
	So the Soviet Union did make a lot of the radioisotopic thermal generators, and we've made some also.
	But believe it or not, right now we're buying plutonium from Russia for our spacecraft.
	But no, the caller is absolutely right that if we did decide to start reprocessing fuel again, one great way to get rid of some of the radioactive materials would be to make RTGs, and I guess that would be kind of a low-volume way of doing what another caller said about blasting it into space.
	We wouldn't be able to get rid of all of it that way, but some of it.
	Well, we actually do blast some into space.
	I mean, we launch satellites that are powered, have nuclear Power on board, plutonium, in fact, and people sort of wince and worry when they launch those.
	How about you?
	Ah, no, and even when I lived in Florida, I really didn't worry about it too much, just because they go through so much testing on those things, and you talk about something that's over-designed, is that, you know, even if one of the rockets did blow up, it just really wouldn't even make a dent in the capsules.
	I see.
	All right, to Pennsylvania again, and Todd.
	Hello, Todd.
	Hey, Art.
	There was an article that was in Pop for Science years ago where they took the material that the control rods are made out of and bombarded it with x-rays, and it gave off 10% more energy than gamma rays.
	I've never heard anything else about that since I read that in that magazine.
	I was wondering if Andy knew anything about that.
	Boy, that's one that I hadn't really heard.
	I'm trying to think how that might happen, and that's just something I can't really give you a good answer to without wildly guessing, and I prefer not to do that.
	I'm sorry.
	It was either improper mechanics or improper science, but they just gave some crude examples like it could be used to power a boat or an airplane.
	Oh, okay.
	I think I know what you're talking about.
	I heard some kind of speculation that if you bombard certain types of atoms with low energy
	x-rays, then it will trigger them to release higher energy things.
	What's happening there, it's kind of the equivalent of if you have a ball on the top of a table,
	you might only have to give it a little push.
	You only have to give it a little bit of energy to get it to drop off the table, then it hits
	the floor with a lot more energy.
	So they're doing the equivalent.
	They're kind of giving a little push to an atom that's already radioactive.
	And the thinking is that maybe if they did that, it could trigger it to give off a higher level of energy.
	It's one of those things that sounds interesting in theory, but as far as I know, nobody's ever managed to really do that in a reliable sense.
	Okay.
	Did you guys already cover the thing that was in the news today about a new discovery with lasers, nuclear power?
	No, I don't think I heard that one.
	I've not heard it either.
	What are we talking about?
	Well, I didn't catch all of it.
	It mentioned lasers and nuclear power, and it kept going across the screen, and every time I went to look at it, you know, I just kept looking at the end of it.
	So, and I missed the beginning of the show, so I didn't know if you guys had all covered that or not.
	Actually, I think what you might be talking about is they found ways to enrich uranium using lasers instead of the gas centrifuges or gaseous diffusion.
	Really?
	And the laser enrichment is actually kind of clever scientifically, but what they're doing effectively is just picking out, almost sorting it atom by atom to enrich the fuel instead of kind of the gross approach.
	What we're doing now is more like putting it through a series of sifters.
	So that's one of those things that they have shown that it does work.
	They're just trying to figure out how to make it work on an industrial level instead of on a laboratory scale.
	Interesting.
	All right, to California and Mike, you're on the air with Andy.
	Andy?
	Hello?
	Andy, question for you, and I know it jumps into the political realm, but what about building a mega-reactor in Yucca, out there by ourself, you'll love that, so that everything would be contained in one spot, and as technology moves forward, maybe we could recycle this.
	And it's all in one spot.
	That's one of those where I'm going to have to kind of dodge it a little bit by saying, technologically, it makes an awful lot of sense, but I'm not quite sure how it would fly politically.
	Well, now, wait a minute, Andy.
	Okay, so maybe I'm wrong.
	Well, I'm not saying you're wrong.
	I'm just saying the idea of a mega-reactor is very, very interesting.
	However, earlier in the program, you were telling us that the delivery of electricity Point A to point B, say, New York, would make it not so workable.
	I mean, because if it is workable, then we should be able to deliver tons and tons of electricity from all the sun and the wind that we have here in Nevada.
	Yeah, and actually I guess there's a couple parts to that.
	The one, the transmission losses.
	My guess is that, or I know that Yucca Mountain's not too far from Las Vegas, and Las Vegas Every time I go there, all those lights, and I'm just thinking about megawatt hours.
	Well, there's other things I'm thinking of, too, but that's one of the things that comes to mind.
	Oh, I see.
	So, from that sense, a reactor like that could deliver power, and probably economically, to Las Vegas.
	Los Angeles, I know, is further away, but they also use a lot of power, and given the line losses, you'd lose a lot of energy, but it would still be a supply of power there.
	But another way to look at it, Is if you build it to produce power, then it's probably not that cost effective a way of doing it.
	If you produce it to try to help with the radioactive waste problem and the power is a byproduct, then I would say that you've got possibly a cost effective way of dealing with the waste and a great side effect that you're also generating power with it.
	But that would be kind of like using your toaster to heat your home, saying that, OK, my goal was to cook the toast, but it also warms my kitchen.
	All right, hold it right there.
	We're going to take a break here and do a little bit of business.
	The Fukushima nuclear disaster showed us, once again, that nuclear reactors are fundamentally dangerous.
	Not only do they cause significant damage to the environment, the health of the population, and national economies, the heavy financial cost of the meltdown is inevitably borne by the public, not the companies that designed, built, and operated the plants.
	None of the world's 436 nuclear reactors are immune to human error, natural disaster, or any of the other serious incidents that could cause a disaster.
	Millions of people who live near nuclear reactors are at risk.
	Any thoughts on whom I'd append that?
	Wow.
	This sounds like the point at which we should do the equivalent of animal, vegetable, or mineral, but I guess it would be like political, scientific, or other.
	Green.
	Huh.
	Peace.
	Okay.
	I gave it all away.
	Greenpeace.
	Greenpeace wrote that.
	Would you fundamentally disagree with that premise, or how do you feel about that?
	I would agree with some of the individual statements that they made, but I think that I would disagree with the conclusion, because we could also make a statement that cars are fundamentally unsafe, That a lot of people die in traffic accidents and they spew out the greenhouse gases and everything, and so we should ban cars.
	But we've made the decision as a society that we get enough benefit out of cars and trucks and other things like that, that we're willing to accept the risks that go along with it.
	So with nuclear power, they're correct in saying that there are risks associated with it.
	And they're also correct in saying that the cost of a cleanup will be borne by the public, but I should also point out that that's the case whether the cleanup is paid for by the company or by the government.
	If the government pays the cost and we're paying it directly in the form of taxes, if the company pays the cost, we're paying it indirectly in the form of increased electrical bills.
	But either way, it's the people that pay for electricity who pay the taxes.
	They're the ones who get stuck with the bill for cleanup.
	It's just how easy it is to see that.
	Oh, that's a good idea.
	Let's talk about money for a second.
	When you talk about something like the Daiichi plant, where do you figure that costs to build?
	Probably in the billions of dollars.
	As far as how many, my guess would be at the time it was built, probably a couple billion dollars.
	In today's money, it would probably be 10, 20, somewhere in that range.
	Wow.
	That's a lot of inflation.
	Alright, so what do you think, by the time all is said and done, it will have cost to clean up the mess there?
	Yeah, we're again talking in the tens of billions of dollars.
	So, if they decide, and the variable in there is how big an area they decide to clean up and how thoroughly they decide to clean it up or the methods that they use.
	I see.
	You know, the easy way to do it would be Well, actually, the cheapest way to do it would be just to put a big fence up around an area and say, OK, nobody goes in here for 300 years.
	If they decide that's not acceptable, the next easiest way to do it would be the equivalent of sweeping it under the rug.
	Tuck in a lot of dirt and pour the dirt on top of it and just cover it up.
	But that's probably not an acceptable way to do it because the contamination is still there.
	The most thorough way to do it would be to say, okay, we're just going to scrub down everything that's above what was here before the accident, and we're just going to haul that away and find some place to bury it.
	And then we're going to replace the topsoil because, of course, if you take it down below the living part of the soil, then you're just left with minerals and that won't grow very much.
	But that would be the most thorough, but also the most expensive.
	I wish we could just sweep it under the rug, as you said.
	Well, I would probably have the same reaction to that as when my sons try to do it or shove all their stuff under the beds, saying, well, it looks great, but let's take a look at what you've hidden and why don't you try to address that somewhat too.
	Does that not be safe?
	There's a couple of things.
	I mean, first of all, you know, like say you bring in and you just decide to bury that entire part of Japan under a foot of clean topsoil, well, that'll reduce the radiation dose rates at the surface.
	But then you've got to think that all the plants that you plant there, their roots, a lot of them go down more than 10 feet or more than a foot or whatever.
	And so if their roots go down into it, then they're going to start bringing the contamination up and putting that into the trees and the leaves, and pretty soon it just migrates up to the surface.
	Oh gosh.
	So if you're going to take that route, you've got to bury it deeply enough so that the roots can't get to it, but not only that, but so that the worms, the burrowing animals and all that, so that they can't bring it up to the surface either.
	So it's kind of like shoveling everything under the carpet, then realizing you've got this big lump that you've still got to try to figure out what to do with.
	That's got to be glowworms, huh?
	Well, I guess as a scientist, I have to say that if you eat radioactive material, you don't glow, but it's still a great image.
	Let's go to Illinois, and Scott.
	Hello, Scott.
	Hey Art, Roswell and 51, and I guess now we're doing Cesium 137 to Andy.
	137 to Andy, yes.
	I just wanted to give you one statement and then one comment.
	I used to live in northern Japan.
	I was stationed in Masawa Air Base in northern Japan, and I've got a lot of friends there that are really worried about it.
	So, you know, we're just... I've been offered jobs to go back, and I've kind of been hesitant to do that.
	So I know that it's not just me.
	I know it's not just my friends that are in the Air Force.
	I know it's a lot of other people out there that are quite scared of the area.
	So, you know, and I'll take my answer off the air, but I was just kind of curious what your thoughts on Being frightened over this in that area of Japan because it seems like they're talking about getting it Fixed and not really reporting at all.
	And then my question was about future technologies I was kind of curious what you thought about like using some form of molten Sodium or something using almost like a dynamo effect instead of nuclear energy using a dynamo and my last comment Sorry, I'm kind of trying to get all this out there real quick is The 51's wouldn't let me get away without saying I am SteelBot, so thank you for Spooky Matter.
	You're very welcome.
	That's the internet nickname.
	All right, so the fear factor.
	Andy, that's worth a conversation for sure.
	The fear factor.
	Yeah, and when I was there, we got as close as 20 kilometers, so about 12 miles away.
	And as I mentioned before, I measured radiation dose rates there that were definitely higher than background.
	They were the units that we use as a millirem, at least in the U.S.
	we use millirem.
	And just to put it in perspective, we get about one millirem every day just from natural radiation on average.
	And the dose rates I was measuring there, the highest were from a quarter to a half of a millirem per hour, so significantly higher than background.
	On the other hand, I also did some calculations as to how much radiation dose I would get if I lived in that area for the rest of my life.
	And then I went ahead and extended that and said, well, what if I was just born here, you know, growing up in this area from a newborn all the way to death?
	I gave myself 80 years just to be generous.
	Sure.
	And there's no way around it.
	There's an elevated radiation dose there.
	And I would have picked up worst case about 80 rem, so 80,000 millirem, which is a significant dose of radiation.
	That's enough to give you Oh, what is it, about a 4% risk of developing a fatal cancer as a result of that radiation?
	And that certainly is not nothing.
	You know, that's more dangerous than my milestone or my, or what is it, baseline of is it more or less dangerous than driving a car?
	So, you know, so that's if you live your entire life in the most contaminated area that I went to.
	And it's something you've got to think about.
	Driving a car is pretty dangerous.
	It's about, if I remember right, there's about a 1% chance of dying in a traffic accident over the course of your lifetime.
	I guess that's one good thing about living in New York City, is I can take mass transit and I don't have to drive.
	I see.
	You mentioned something about a dynamo?
	Yeah, oh, yeah, and let me just say one more thing about the risk in Massawa, and then I'll try to tackle the dynamo part.
	In Massawa, that's far enough away that the radiation dose rates By the time you get there, they just are not nearly as high as what I measured close by.
	So I would have some concerns about living close by.
	I really wouldn't worry about living in Mississauga at all.
	And I should also say that close by would be if I was in the area that was the most heavily contaminated.
	You can go maybe 5 or 10 miles to the side of that and the dose rates are back down to something that really is not that big a deal.
	That's kind of in the current state of the plant, though.
	I mean, we did discuss other things earlier, like, you know, good old number four over there with all those rods and the possible collapse and all of that sort of thing.
	You'd have to factor that into your thinking, I would imagine.
	Yeah, but the thing is, the prevailing winds are the prevailing winds.
	And so if something happens to the spent fuel in number four, that's going to be carried pretty much in the same direction that the stuff from the reactors that already melted down was carried.
	You mean toward us?
	Well, there was a lot that went out over the ocean and made its way towards the U.S.
	There was also a lot that went off to the northwest, and that's where I measured the highest dose rates.
	And then some even kind of trickled through the mountains and was carried back down to the south, so it was more like an upside-down checkmark, and it traveled in that valley there.
	But basically, the areas where the dose rates are the highest now from what was already released Are the same areas that would have the highest dose rates if there was another release.
	Alright, let's go to Washington and Clark.
	Hello Clark.
	Well, good evening and thank you for taking my call.
	Dr. Karam, what kind of thermal load are we looking at from these melded cores and how are they dissipating the heat without getting more water back into the ocean or into the environment?
	Oh, but they are.
	I mean, that's what they're doing every day.
	They're pouring water on it.
	Well, is the water being poured on and drained into the ocean?
	Or do they have some... Well, I mean, they're storing the water in these big tanks.
	It's my understanding.
	Is that correct, Doctor?
	Yeah, they... Well, first of all, they are keeping... They're keeping the core covered.
	And they're trying to do their best.
	Well, and they are removing the waste heat from it.
	Some of the water is leaking back out into the groundwater.
	And that's still flowing towards the ocean.
	That's one of the reasons why they wanted to put in the ice wall that we talked about earlier.
	Some of the water is being pumped out and it's put in these containers and some of those containers have been found to be leaking.
	So they are having some releases of the radioactivity into the environment.
	And as I said before, it's not an ideal situation.
	It's certainly not what anybody wants.
	I don't think of it as ideal.
	And I guess something, too, if I could make a more general comment.
	I know that I've been downplaying some of the risks from this.
	I'm not trying to say that there's no problems, just trying to say that maybe the problems aren't quite as bad as what a lot of people are worried about.
	It is true that people, the moment you say the word nuclear, you know, people probably have an overreaction.
	Oh, I understand that completely, and the analogy that I use sometimes is it's not unlike my son's room to pick on them again.
	The room does not pose an immediate risk to my health, but I'm not sure if I would want to spend the rest of my life there unless some cleanup were done.
	Thank you.
	Okay, well thank you very much for the call, and please do call us again.
	Let's go to Ohio and Jim.
	Hey, Otto, I've heard so much about you over the years, and how you doing, Andy?
	Doing well, and yourself?
	Well, I'm out here driving the tractor-trailer across the fruited plain, bringing everything from aspirin to Xanax to the Capitalistic Society.
	Well, good deal.
	You listen, I just wanted to ask you, you know, when I was a kid, I used to watch the Jetsons, and he'd go to Georgia, be going along in his little car there, you know, flying around.
	How about Is it feasible to have cars with little small nuclear power cells?
	Because we're going to run out of these fossil fuels eventually.
	I'm just wondering if that would be something that we could do in the future.
	Believe it or not, they built a nuclear airplane back in the 60s.
	Yeah, but, well, okay, so I guess I'm generalizing again, figuring if it's up in the air and flying that it counts.
	But they did have a flying nuclear-powered aircraft in the 60s, and the problem was it just put out too much radiation.
	And the reason for that is because you've got the weight constraints.
	If you are going to make something that puts out enough power but is light enough to get up into the air, you've got to do away with a lot of the shielding and the other support systems that keep the outside or the rest of the world safe.
	And they couldn't figure out how to do that.
	But isn't it, you know, distributed into the air and sort of melts into the air, right?
	Well, but you're still kind of spewing fallout where you go.
	And if you're high enough up in the air, yeah, you're right.
	The radiation itself, the direct radiation, would dissipate to the point where it would not be a threat to anybody.
	But it's the radioactive waste, and then you also, if you're trying to pare the weight to a minimum, then you're also cutting out some of the safety systems.
	So it's one of those things where technically it can work, and to extrapolate that down to a car, it's possible.
	But right now it's just not all that good a way to go.
	In the future, we can only hope.
	Okay.
	Wyoming brings us Jason.
	Hi, Jason.
	Hey Art, how are you doing?
	Very well, thank you.
	Roswell from the Art Bell Channel on FNET.
	Thank you.
	We wanted to ask if your guest Um, ask your guests if all would be lost should there be a another tsunami or typhoon or to hit Fukushima or Fukushima.
	Yes.
	Fukushima.
	Yes.
	Thanks.
	Yeah.
	If, if something like that were to happen right now, first of all, it would be just as well.
	I can't say it would be just as bad.
	It would be bad for the plants, but the operating reactors have already melted down.
	So I can't do a whole lot more damage to them.
	The reactor number four we've been talking about obviously could hurt that and it could dump that onto the ground.
	You're saying when you say bad for the plants you mean the nuclear plants or you mean the plants that grow?
	I'm sorry, the nuclear plants.
	It could wash away or damage the structures that are left there.
	But again, the reactors have already melted down so you can't do too much more damage to them.
	The big thing that I would see is that if you lost electrical power again, then you would have the same problems as before.
	So, at least with the temperatures rising.
	Well, yes, but those cores that we keep talking about, they don't know where they are.
	You know, they're sloshing around there somewhere, those cores.
	You know, as we discussed earlier, if they should somehow get, you know, washed into the ocean, it would probably be bad.
	Yeah, but that's probably not going to happen.
	I hope not.
	I really hope not.
	But since we don't know where they are, and they're really pouring this high volume of water in there all the time, you just can't know.
	Yeah, and I guess what I mean when I say they probably won't get washed into the ocean, I'm kind of picturing the entire core being sucked out to sea and being deposited in one mass out in the ocean.
	And so that probably won't happen.
	Probably won't, but you know doctor, you've got to consider that when this earthquake occurred, There are actually parts of Japan that have been moved from above sea level to actually below sea level so that when high tide comes in, they flood every day.
	Well, so something that can move the land like that, you know, you have to think that it's a lot of power.
	And that's a good point.
	I hadn't really thought about that part of it, but no, you're right.
	An earthquake could shift the land so that it would be underwater and become part of the bottom of the bay instead of part of the shoreline.
	If that were to happen, well, I guess the flippant answer is they would still be underwater, so they'd still be cool.
	The little bit less flippant is that it would make it possible to wash a lot more radioactivity out into the ocean, and that's something that we certainly do not want to see happen.
	Rather not, yes.
	To Louisiana and Charles, hi.
	Uh, yes.
	Mega half-life Roswell, sorry.
	Half-life, I love that, okay.
	I got a question.
	I keep hearing, I don't know where this stuff comes from, all of our military tanks and stuff being made out of depleted uranium, emissions, stuff like that.
	I'm just curious if that's a possible part of recycling or where that stuff comes from.
	I'll take my answer on the radio, Art.
	Okay.
	Here it comes.
	That's a really good question and actually I wanted to Say something before I get to answering that, and that's the questions that the people are asking on the air, and also the questions that are being posted on this Dark Matter XM that I've been looking at, too.
	A lot of those questions would do credit to my grad students, so I've really been impressed with the questions people have been asking.
	Oh, thank you.
	By the way, I want to note Dark Matter XM is not an official site.
	It's a fan site, and that's fine.
	Okay, yeah, and I did agree, or I had been answering questions on that and discussing some stuff with some of the people logged on to that before the show, and I'm going to be back again for an hour or until my coffee runs out afterwards.
	But, yeah, probably for about an hour afterwards.
	But anyhow, get to the depleted uranium.
	Natural uranium can't sustain a nuclear reaction because it just doesn't have enough of the U-235, which is what fissions.
	So they've got to enrich the amount of U-235 by a factor of about maybe 8 to 10 in order to make nuclear fuel.
	What that means is that for every pound of nuclear fuel they make, they're making several pounds of depleted uranium.
	Uranium that the U-235 has been taken out of.
	So that depleted uranium, believe it or not, depleted uranium is not all that radioactive.
	And they use it for radiation shielding in some industrial applications because it's just this really dense stuff.
	It's twice as dense as lead and it doesn't give off all that much radiation.
	It's kind of used for weapons too, right?
	Yeah, they use it for armor on the tanks because it provides great protection and they also use it for penetrators to blast through tank armor because it's what they call self-sharpening.
	As it goes through it, the outer layers just fluff off and it basically burns and punches its way through the tank.
	Well, here's a question for you.
	If you're, say, an artillery guy and you're firing Depleted uranium shells again and again and again.
	I mean, you do this because that's your job.
	Are you at risk?
	Not from the radiation.
	And I base this on measurements that I made when I was in the Naval Reserves for a while.
	And it was a ship that had depleted uranium munitions and they just are not that radioactive.
	But the depleted uranium, uranium is a toxic heavy metal.
	So you can get uranium poisoning the same way that you can get lead poisoning.
	And if you handle it improperly, if it's not properly coated to suppress the uranium, or if you get a lot of dust or stuff like that, then you can actually get skin irritation, or if it gets into your body, it can cause kidney problems.
	I see.
	All right, hold it right there.
	We'll take another break.
	Time does fly when you're having fun.
	And Dan, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Hey, Roswell.
	I've got a question about Fukushima, TEPCO has admitted that the boron wafers between the fuel cells have been disintegrated.
	If one of the fuel cells touches the other, they say there could be a chain reaction.
	What would that cause?
	What do you think, Andy?
	We were kind of on that earlier, and Andy was suggesting that the geometry might continue to prevent that, but I think there actually have
	been some, not so much a change, but you know, release of radiation, sudden release. Andy?
	Yeah, well, like I said earlier, I don't think that there's much of a risk of having a nuclear
	chain reaction, you know, starting the fission up again, but it certainly is possible that
	as the water gets in there, water will dissolve anything given enough time, and it's always
	looking for new flow paths and everything, and I think it certainly is possible that
	the water can be going in there and washing away stuff that they just hadn't seen before,
	or that it hadn't been exposed to before.
	Do you think thorium molten salt would be able to eat up the spit fuel?
	Yeah, that's one of the technologies that I was thinking about earlier when we were talking about transmuting fuel.
	I've read an awful lot about it.
	There's a book called Superfuel that I read that talks about thorium reactors, and it certainly sounds like Like a very reasonable way to go about trying to transmute a lot of the longer-lived radionuclides in the fuel, turn them into something shorter-lived that's a lot easier to deal with.
	Yeah.
	In Japan, actually, ask the international community.
	Recently, the last week or so, or this week, they have asked for help.
	If you know the culture in Japan, they do not ask for help unless it's extremely dire.
	He makes a very good point.
	A very good point, Andy.
	Yeah.
	No, you're right.
	And I guess I just think if I need to fix a leaky faucet at my house, I'm not going to call my neighbor.
	I save that for something that really deserves it.
	So you're right.
	Japan asking for help really is a big admission on their part.
	Oh, yeah.
	All right.
	Well, have a good one.
	Thanks.
	Thank you.
	That was well said.
	I, too, have lived in Japan for many, many years, Andy.
	And he could not be more correct.
	For the Japanese to ask for outside assistance is almost unheard of.
	They just don't do that unless they're at the total end of their rope, radioactive rope.
	Yeah, and that's one of the things that really surprised me about being invited to go there to help out, was it just floored me that they were asking for outside help.
	I guess that sort of gives you an idea of how desperate they feel the situation might be.
	There's a lot of wisdom in realizing when you can't handle something on your own.
	Right.
	Let's go to Kyle in Wisconsin.
	Hi, Kyle.
	Hi, Art.
	You really know how to pick good guests.
	I do.
	I don't think you've had a boring guy on yet.
	Andy, I've got a question for you about storing the waste long term.
	Rather than hundreds of thousands of years, you think about just a couple of hundred.
	Many governments and companies and so forth change, and of course the personnel change over the years.
	What's going to happen two or three hundred years from now if people start wondering what's buried over Nuka Mountain?
	Maybe nobody remembers what was put there.
	Well, gee, just in a couple of hundred years you're worried about that?
	Uh, yeah, that'd be a poor choice to go over and just, you know, dig.
	You should at least have a big sign that says, uh, call before digging.
	Or actually we could just mix it all in with fruitcake because those two things just seem to accumulate forever.
	Oh, you're all right, Andy.
	Let's go to John in North Carolina.
	John, hi, you're on the air.
	Art Lucho Roswell.
	Thank you.
	Yes, my question is, for your very intellectual guest there, why is TEPCO making this so difficult for the general public?
	And, you know, is it a lot worse than what we were told?
	Why are you, in essence, asking whether TEPCO is telling the truth?
	Yes, like, was there more radioactive water that was put out into the ocean, or was it, you know, exactly what it says, what they said it was?
	Well, there's two parts to that.
	The first part is that it is worse than the information that Tepco has been putting out.
	Oh, really?
	The second part of it is that it's still, in my opinion, not as bad as what a lot of people think.
	So it's worse than TEPCO has said, but not as bad as people think.
	Right.
	And the reason that I feel comfortable saying both of those things is that first, as this goes on, we have been finding out that TEPCO has been minimizing a lot of things and trying to make themselves look better.
	And that's a natural reaction.
	It's understandable, but it doesn't mean that it's acceptable or excusable.
	But it is understandable.
	But because people have such heightened fears of radiation, It still is not as bad as what a lot of people think, because a lot of people just really, they give it more credit.
	Now, let me give one specific example.
	In the last 100 years, how much has our exposure to medical radiation gone up?
	You know, 100 years ago, you might get one x-ray in a lifetime, and now every time we turn around, we're getting dental x-rays, or CP scans, or fluoroscopy, or whatever.
	Our exposure to medical radiation has skyrocketed in the last century.
	And so you would expect that if we were really exquisitely sensitive to radiation that we'd see cancer rates going up.
	But if you look at the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society websites, you find out that a 70-year-old today is less likely to get cancer than a 70-year-old was 100 years ago.
	Another thing that's kind of interesting is if you look at radiation levels from nature in different parts of the U.S.
	and compare that to cancer rates in different parts of the U.S., you find out that the places with the highest radiation levels Have lower cancer rates in places with lower radiation levels.
	And so, what I'm trying to get at with this is not to say that radiation is completely safe or that there's no risk, because obviously there is.
	It's just that the risk is a lot less than what we normally think.
	It's not as extraordinarily dangerous as it doesn't have the power that a lot of people ascribe to it.
	Right.
	Okay, does that answer it for you?
	Yes, thank you so much.
	You're welcome.
	Take care.
	So, Tepco's been sort of underplaying it a little bit, huh?
	Yeah, and again, I can understand that, because we see companies here do that, or anywhere.
	Everybody tries to protect themselves, and it's understandable, but like I said, just because it's understandable doesn't mean that it's right.
	Well, I was having a difficult time understanding why they invited you over there.
	I'm clearer on it now.
	Let's see, Arkansas.
	All the way to Arkansas.
	Dale, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Hi, Roswell.
	Art, nice to have you back.
	You and I have done a lot of miles together.
	Thank you.
	Are either of you two gentlemen familiar with Greg Palast, the investigative reporter's book called Vulture's Picnic?
	No.
	No, actually I'm not.
	Okay.
	Chapter 10 is entitled Fukushima, Texas.
	And in it, he Andy, are you familiar with the Long Island Light Company and the Shoreham Nuclear Plant?
	A little bit.
	What I know about it is that it was built, it went critical once, and then they shut it down and it has not operated since.
	Yeah, and they also had to pay out $4.5 billion in fraud claims.
	Okay, that part I did not know.
	Okay, and the construction company, Stone & Webster, is also the same construction company that built Fukushima.
	Oh my God, is that right?
	And then what was proven in court was that they faked all the SQs, had an earthquake, was all fraudulent.
	Well, let me ask this.
	You say it went critical.
	What exactly happened, Andy?
	Oh, well, and actually, when a nuclear reactor goes critical, It's not the running around waving your arms saying that we're all going to die.
	Reactors are critical.
	What that means is it's just operating at a constant power.
	So we did low power physics testing on a reactor or a naval reactor I worked at, and it was making about enough energy to heat a cup of water.
	Or we could be critical and making enough energy to drive the entire submarine or anything in between.
	So the Shoreham plant, what I was told, Is that they started it up, it went critical just to show that it would operate but then they shut it down and they never started it up again.
	And that was because of what?
	I mean they're so expensive you wouldn't think they'd shut it down unless...
	Now, what I heard, and this is anecdotal, so I can't say that I've read the documents.
	I can just say that I've talked to people who were part of the argument.
	But what I heard was that there was so much public opposition to it that it was shut down for community, societal, political reasons, however you want to phrase it.
	But again, that's anecdotal.
	So you don't think it was a technical problem?
	You think it was a political problem?
	That's what I heard.
	So as far as the construction of the Fukushima reactors, I really can't comment on that except to say that a guy that I used to work with did some work in Japan on similar reactors.
	He was a nuclear power tech and he said that he thought that they were actually constructed very well and that they were run very well.
	And my submarine pulled into Japan several times for overhauls, and I do know that the Japanese workers that did the maintenance on our submarine, they just had a great work ethic and they had a great attention to detail.
	So I would suspect that Stone and Webster, even if they designed it and managed the project, I'm assuming that they would have used Japanese workers to build it, and I have no reason to think that they would have been sloppy with that when they were so good at so many other things.
	Let's go all the way up to Canada, and David, hi.
	Hi, Art.
	Mega Roswell to you.
	Thank you.
	Andy, I had a question a little bit more, I guess, old school.
	It goes back towards the nuclear standoff that we had with the Soviet Union back during the Cold War.
	I was just kind of curious, had we ever actually came to blows Nuclear weapons have been launched.
	What would be the minimum safe distance for the lowest payload capacity that any of the nuclear weapons that would have been fired?
	What would have been the minimum safe distance from where it hit to, I guess, come out unscathed with no radiation, putting aside the fallout and any of the other negative effects that would come That's a really good question.
	First, I can tell you that one of the apps I have on my phone is called the Effect of Nuclear Weapons.
	On that, you can plug in the distance, the height of the burst, and the yield, and it will tell you what the damage is from heat, from the shockwave, and from the radiation at whatever distance you plug into it.
	It's a really good way to either start or end conversations on an airplane.
	But from the Hiroshima weapon, I was in Hiroshima in 2000 for a scientific conference and I was staying at a hotel that was about maybe about a 20 minute walk from the site where the weapon went off and pretty much everything within that radius, the buildings were collapsed.
	So you're talking or they were either collapsed or burned down.
	So you're talking about an area that was maybe a mile and a half in diameter was just completely
	devastated.
	The reason that that might not be applicable in the U.S. is that a lot of it depends on
	the site where you would set one off.
	One that went off in New York City would be different than one that went off, say, in
	my hometown of Akron, Ohio, just because the geography is different, the buildings are
	different and all these other things and it would just it would have different
	radius.
	And wouldn't it depend also, I mean, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were pretty small compared to what we've sort of come up with since.
	You know, we moved to the hydrogen bomb.
	True.
	Megaton, it just seemed to get bigger.
	Yeah, and so on the small end of things, if you were out of the plume, so if you were upwind or laterally, then Probably as long as you were more than a couple miles away, you would be safe from that, in that you would not be exposed to a dose of radiation, you wouldn't be, or at least not to a really high dose, you wouldn't be fried alive or anything.
	Downwind, it could be dangerous up to several miles away if you're stuck in the plume.
	With the bigger weapons, obviously the area grows.
	So if you've got a weapon that's ten times as powerful as the Hiroshima weapon, The thermal effects and the radiation effects would be dangerous up to ten times as far away, and the effects from the shockwave, let's see, that would be about maybe up to four or five times as far away.
	Those would be lethal.
	So, when we really get up into the megatonage, it's a factor of a lot, right?
	Yeah, when you get up into, say, a ten megaton weapon, which is a thousand times as powerful as the Hiroshima device, Roughly speaking, then the shock wave would be fatal up to about 10 times as far away as in Hiroshima, and the thermal effects would be fatal and radiation up to about 30 times as far away.
	And then the fallout, of course.
	Yeah, the fallout.
	I did some calculations once and figured out that a 10 megaton nuclear weapon that was set off on the east coast, if the winds were blowing directly west, you could detect radioactivity as far away as St.
	Louis.
	And sure, that would be fairly easily detectable.
	And of course, a single nuclear test, you can pick up radioactivity all over the northern hemisphere.
	Are we picking up anything at all from well, I guess they're not, you know, the North Koreans are the only ones that I'm aware of that are actually testing right now, but that's all underground.
	So there's not much above ground, right?
	To the best of my knowledge, there have been no above-ground tests since, I think, the 1990s.
	I think the French were the last ones to set off an atmospheric test, and that was someplace in the Pacific.
	I can't remember exactly where.
	Okay, here's a question for you, and I've been curious about this.
	The North Koreans have been setting them off, as you know, above ground, but the U.S.
	has been making statements like they didn't get the yield that they were expecting uh... even going so far as to almost suggest
	their fizzling uh...
	perhaps a poor term what do you know about that
	the first nuclear weapon they set off was actually pretty pathetic
	pretty pathetic from a nuclear weapons point of view is still pretty awful from
	the scale of damage it can do point of view Even a fizzle can completely devastate a city block and you would still get a lot of radioactive fallout from it.
	They've been getting better as they go and I guess I have to use that term in a qualified manner.
	Better from their perspective, worse from everybody else's.
	Okay, let's go to Indiana and Harold.
	New listener, I must admit.
	I've got a question for Andy about the nuclear protocol books on the Navy.
	Sure.
	Supposedly my uncle wrote them, and I was just wondering if you could confirm that.
	His name was Marvin Ford.
	Wait, can you repeat the question again?
	About your uncle?
	Yeah, he supposedly wrote the nuclear protocol books for the Nimitz fleet.
	Okay.
	Yeah, and that could be, but the Navy is kind of selfish.
	They don't list the authors on any of that stuff.
	I was just wondering, because he had pictures of the Thresher, the Nautilus, and the Enterprise.
	He was stationed on the Enterprise, and he said he was in charge of putting seven nuclear power plants on there.
	That sounds about right, and I'll tell you, if he helped to develop those procedures, then my hat's off to him, because the Navy procedures were incredibly thorough, and they were designed so that you pretty much couldn't go wrong as long as you followed them.
	Well, I know when Sharon Noble happened, I was at his house, and he woke up my MPs and rushed up to Washington right when that happened.
	Ever since, I'm just wondering if he was telling me the truth about it all.
	A lot of people got up in the middle of the night for that one, I'm sure.
	And when Chernobyl went off, I was on my very first time at sea.
	It was for a 10-week at-sea period off the coast of the Soviet Union.
	And what we heard, we were near Vladivostok, and they just said, OK, any time you guys come up to ventilate, pull an air sample and see how much radioactivity is there, because there were some problems with the Soviet reactor.
	So we detected fallout even near Vladivostok from the Chernobyl accident.
	Wow, that's a long way away.
	Yeah, but again, I know I keep coming back to this.
	Just because we can detect it doesn't mean it's dangerous.
	I didn't see anything there that posed a risk to us, but we could sure see it.
	Gotcha.
	All right.
	To Jeff, and I don't know where you are, Jeff, but hi.
	Oh, I'm at a truck stop in California.
	All right.
	And Roswell, thank you.
	Thank you.
	I seem to remember about a dozen years ago there was some sort of natural disaster in the Philippines and the US Navy parked the sub there and ran sort of a drop cord to provide power.
	They sure did.
	To expand on that, could a decommissioned nuclear sub parked near a city be able to provide enough power to be feasible in that it would be quake-proof, tsunami-proof, What a really good question.
	Andy?
	Yeah, that's something, and again, here I've got to distinguish between the engineering part of it and the non-engineering part of it.
	The engineering part of it, it certainly is possible.
	You know, submarine reactors, I'm not sure what the capacity is of the newer ones, and to be honest with you, I'm not allowed to tell you the capacity of the one on my submarine.
	Oh, darn.
	But they certainly make as much power as the smaller-scale civilian nuclear reactors, and they've got the capability.
	They know how to deal with it and everything else.
	The bottom line is it's something that engineering-wise is certainly possible to do.
	I guess the odd part of it But I'm not sure if either the Navy or the regulators or the public would find that acceptable.
	So, but if everybody signed off on it, it would certainly make as much sense or more sense than doing what they did to my submarine, which was cutting out the reactor compartment, burying that in Idaho and towing the rest of the submarine up to Puget Sound to sit and rust.
	I'll be darned.
	I wonder how many nuclear plants have been built and then just not used.
	They actually built a nuclear plant in the Philippines on one of the islands
	and then ended up abandoning it because of public pressure, never got fueled.
	Well, I know that there was one near Cincinnati that was built as a nuclear
	reactor and after Three Mile Island they just turned it into a
	conventional power plant.
	And then they had a lot of nuclear reactors that were partially
	completed before we kind of had our moratorium on them here in the US.
	That's a really good question.
	And as my engineer officer used to say, and that's a really bad answer.
	All right.
	Again, we'll take a brief break here and come back and answer the balance of questions.
	Hi, Art Roswell from the FNET channel on FNET again.
	Thank you.
	I have a follow-up on that.
	Sure.
	This regards Fukushima as well as Chernobyl and any storage facility.
	What would the repercussions be environmentally if there were to be a major, major earthquake at any one of those sites?
	Well, we kind of found that out already.
	But okay, another earthquake.
	Let's imagine another, say, nine-pointer in the Japanese realm.
	Okay, so, to me, the worst case would be if something were to happen right under the existing site, rupture all of the water storage containers there, and that would just all flush out into the bay.
	Yeah, that would be the worst case.
	Oh gosh, a typhoon could do that.
	Well, yeah, I suppose that could do it too, but Let's just picture something that puts all the radioactivity in the wastewater into the bay instead of in the leaking containers that it's currently in.
	Then we've got two possibilities.
	I'm sorry to be kind of, I guess, professorial on this, but it's just kind of the way my mind works.
	In one case, say it all stays nearby, just settles into the mud there, it sticks to the clay particles, which is possible, and it stays all in that bay.
	Then the radiation dose rate in that bay would be high, and probably high enough to cause environmental damage in that area.
	But if it's all locked up in that one place, then it's not going to spread into the wider ocean.
	So the environmental effects to the rest of the planet would be fairly low.
	The other extreme is if none of it gets locked into the sediments, if it all flushes out into the wider ocean and just circulates through the world, and without wanting to sound trite about it, it's a really big ocean.
	And my best guess on this, and I've got to say guess because I have not done the calculations, but my best guess on this is that we would have measurable levels of radioactivity in the water, but they would probably not be significantly higher than the natural radioactivity that we already see there.
	I was thinking it would redefine the whole term dead zones, but maybe not.
	No, I don't think that it would.
	And again, the reason why is that it's a really, really big ocean, and the amount of radioactivity is huge if you're standing right in the middle of it, or even if you dump it all into, say, a couple square miles.
	Well, then, Professor, how about that as a solution?
	Just wash the whole damn thing out to the ocean?
	Well, to pick on my sons a little bit more, that's kind of like saying, well, you can clean up your room by dumping everything out the window into the yard.
	And it might, well, maybe that's not the best analogy, but it's It's one of those things.
	We've got this principle in radiation safety called, as low as reasonably achievable, which means that we should take all reasonable measures to try to keep radiation dose to people as low as we can, even if it means going below the limits.
	And I just don't think that anybody would think that dumping all of it into the ocean, basically diluting it into a non-problem, I don't think anybody would consider that to be reasonable.
	And yet you were saying that actually it is, from a scientific point of view, a reasonable Solution?
	I mean, if it all got dumped in, you said it wouldn't raise the levels to any dangerous anything.
	Yeah, and I guess that's where the scientist part of me kind of goes to war with the, is it right part of me?
	And even if the scientist part of me, even if I can calculate that the radiation dose rates would be trivial, it still does not seem like the right way to take care of the problem.
	Well, what is?
	Personally, I think that it has to be cleaned up.
	I don't know that it has to be cleaned up so that every speck of contamination from the reactor is gone, but I think that it should be cleaned up to the point where we can say that the risk to the population from the remaining radioactivity is so low that it really is not worth worrying about.
	But whether that level is 1 in 10,000, 1 in a million, 1 in 10 million, that's a decision that only the Japanese can make.
	Do you think if the Japanese decided to dump the whole thing into the ocean that people would get upset?
	I have no doubt that people would get upset.
	They're just not thinking scientifically, I guess.
	Well, if I can just make a comment on that.
	You may.
	There's more to a lot of these questions than science.
	The science, the answers to these questions should be based in science, and we should at least know what it is that we're doing.
	We should know the scientific rationale behind, you know, either for or against the courses of action that we take.
	But we also have to consider what's acceptable to society and what's morally and ethically right, as well as what makes sense scientifically.
	Otherwise, scientists could run the world, but I don't think that would be a really good way to have things.
	I don't either.
	Jerry in Arizona, you're on the air.
	Yeah, good to talk to you again, Art.
	Andy, in modest hindsight, would you have handled Fukushima any differently?
	You mean as far as the emergency response goes?
	Well, the cleanup, the containment, the whole mess.
	Did they do everything the way you would have done it, or would you have done it differently given The way the reactor was built, the seawall and everything, if you were in charge when the earthquake happened, would you have done things any differently?
	Good question.
	As far as the actions that they took, I think I would have been faster to try to get emergency electrical power there and I would have been faster to try to start putting seawater into the reactor.
	I can understand why they took the course of action that they did, because once you put seawater into a reactor, you're never going to use it again.
	But I think that's the point at which I would have said, you know, chances are we're never going to use this thing again anyhow.
	Let's just keep it cool.
	As far as the actions they took with the public goes, I really think the Japanese did a credible job.
	I think they did what they should have done as far as getting people inside, evacuating some areas.
	serving people out and all of that.
	I mean, I was impressed with the shelters that I saw there because we were there a month after the accident.
	People have been living in these shelters for a month.
	They were fully stocked.
	They smelled good.
	They were well lit.
	They were tidy.
	You know, the Japanese just did a great job with that.
	Well, I agree.
	The Japanese are absolutely probably, if it had to happen somewhere, I would say the Japanese were probably better prepared to handle the emergency than almost any other country on earth, and that includes us.
	Yeah, I think so.
	Where they dropped the ball, though, was in their public communications and... Ah, yes, well, actually lying.
	Well, and I'm even thinking beyond that, but just the way that they explain things to the public was, I guess, a polite way to put it would be that it was not satisfying to the public.
	I wasn't satisfied at all.
	Yeah, because what they did was basically the equivalent of saying, OK, do this because I say so.
	OK, now do this.
	And because I say it's best for you, as opposed to assuming that the public could understand some of the reasons for these things and telling them why they were having them take these actions.
	But another thing, too, that one of my friends pointed out, who's an expert in communications and emergencies and stuff, he said that when you have a health question, you don't go to your auto mechanic.
	Or to a politician, you go to a doctor.
	And unfortunately the Japanese, they have politicians and engineers who are giving a lot of the answers to health-related questions.
	And it just wasn't the best way to communicate that.
	So their actions, I thought they did a pretty good job.
	But the way that they communicated their actions and the information and everything, that left room for improvement.
	Actually, Professor, we're running out of time here, but one last question.
	In almost every nuclear accident, will governments have lied about it?
	It doesn't matter whether you're talking about the one in the old Soviet Union or Three Mile Island.
	I was nearby that one when it happened.
	Or now Fukushima.
	The lies have just, you know, Excellent counter-example to that, and that was when they had the polonium poisoning incident, which was radioactive in London.
	The Brits handled that very well, and they're actually used as an example as to a good way to communicate radiation information to the public.
	I hadn't thought of that one.
	All right, well, listen, Professor, we've got to go.
	We're out of time.
	It's been a wonderful show.
	You're leaving the line stock full.
	I'm sorry, everybody.
	We couldn't get to everybody.
	Thank you for being here.
	Oh, thank you.
	And really, thank you to you and everybody who's called in for being so kind and making me feel very welcome.
	I appreciate it.
	I'm sure you're going to get a lot of comment on this.
	Take care, Professor.
	You, too.
	Bye-bye.
	That's it for now.
	Hey, listen, tomorrow night, We're gonna do open lines and, uh, truly anything goes.
	The only rule is... No.
	Bad.
	Language.
	That's my number one rule.
	You all have a good night.
	It's been indescribable.

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