arnie_Fairewinds' Arnie Gundersen on Caravan to Midnight, December 20, 2015 from Fairewinds Energy Education on Vimeo.Fairewinds Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen returns to the John B. Wells Program, Caravan to Midnight, to discuss the status of United States domestic atomic facilities, the latest news from the ongoing nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, including the effects of saltwater on atomic reactors, and more.
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FAIREWINDS ENERGY EDUCATION – Arnie Gundersen on Caravan to Midnight – December 20, 2015
John: ….in his current position as the Chief Engineer for Fairewinds Associates – that’s Fairewinds with an “e” – F-a-i-r-e-winds Associates. Arnie testifies on behalf of municipalities and intervenes regarding engineering flaws and safety issues in atomic power reactors. His testimony provided highly valuable information in the investigation of the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in the United States. Concerned about the ongoing problems and the inaction of both TEPCO – that’s Tokyo Electric Power Company – and the Japanese government to mitigate the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi site, Arnie has appeared as a regular guest on media outlets such as Democracy Now, even CNN, to discuss the ongoing catastrophe. He has written Fukushima Daiichi: the Truth and the Way Forward, published in Japan by Shueisha Publishing Company, number one on Amazon, JP Science for 45 months – 41st bestseller of the year in 2012, in soft-covered nonfiction. His website is Fairewinds.org. I repeat – F-a-i-r-ewinds.org. And let me see – what else? Well, he and his wife, Maggie, whom I just saw and met, even though Arnie had his headphones in so I couldn’t really speak to her – President and Founder of Fairewinds Energy Education, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, just returned from a three-week speaking tour in California, including presentations at Sonoma State University and Cal Polytechnical University as well as seven other venues. So here he is, Arnie Gundersen. Welcome to Caravan to Midnight. Good to have you back.
AG: Hi, John. Yeah, it’s nice to be back. Thanks.
John: Well, I take it things aren’t getting better. So since we last spoke, where have you been? What is it Buffalo Bill said to Wild Bill Hickok in that movie Wild Bill? Tell me, old pard, where have you been? I think that’s what he said.
AG: Well, Maggie and I just spent three weeks in California. You know, as you just said, it was at Sonoma State and Cal Poly and seven other venues in between. And of course, it’s interesting, the west coast of the United States is much more aware that Fukushima continues to be a disaster in the making compared to the east coast. People seem to have forgotten here on the east coast. But the west coast has a different problem because you still have the contamination in the Pacific and it’s getting worse. And then the other place I’ll be is, beginning in February, I’m going to be in Japan for a month. So it’s been a busy travel.
John: Boy. All right. So if we go to my favorite website for this sort of thing – that’s my quote there on ENE News.com, they feature your commentary and articles frequently. I’m telling you, it’s just one horror story after another, but none of this makes – none of it makes its way into mainstream news. Here we go – this is from December the 10th. “Red alert: sharp increase in radiation at Fukushima. Levels spike 400,000 percent.” 400,000 percent. Not just 400. Almost 1 billion Becquerels per cubic meter. I mean what’s the end game here, sir?
AG: (3:20) I’ve said now since 2011 that there really is no end game. This is the worst industrial accident in the history of the world. And you know, Tokyo Electric and the Japanese needed to fight it like it was a war in 2011. There was an opportunity right when it happened to prevent a lot of this radiation from getting into the groundwater and into the Pacific. And they didn’t seize the moment. They didn’t attack it with the money and the passion that it needed back in 2011. And now we’re all paying the price. I mean this thing continues to bleed into the Pacific. And also we can’t forget that the hills around the plant are heavily contaminated, too. So I think it’s a 100-year problem. I think it will be 100 years before they remove those nuclear cores.
John: Arnie, tell us this: What should they have done? I was thinking if it’s so hot you can’t get in there, what could have been done in your opinion? Of course, we can always look back and say what we think should have happened. So let’s just do that rather than be just over-the-top definitive – unless you can be. What should they have done that they did not do?
AG: Actually, I said what they should have done in 2011. And I’m really not the only person. The plant manager at Fukushima was a brilliant guy who died of cancer after the accident. But anyway, he also said we’ve got to stop the groundwater from getting into the building. And there was an opportunity back in 2011 to build a Zeolite wall. Some of your viewers may use Zeolite as a pill, because it’s a very effective absorber of Cesium and other chemicals. They could have – not on the ocean side, but on the inland side, built a wall probably six feet deep down to bedrock, maybe 90 feet, and filled it with Zeolite. And the Zeolite, then, would have prevented the Cesium from leaking out and heading inland. Now the second half of the problem was that would have allowed them on the inland side of that wall – not on the plant side by on the inland side – to pull down the water table. And if they had pulled down the water table with that wall in place, they would have prevented the groundwater from going into the nuclear containment. Now what we’ve got is the complete meltdown of the core lying on the bottom of the nuclear reactor containment, likely breaking its way through that concrete because of chemical reactions plus the heat. And whether the core has actually left the containment or not is irrelevant, because what’s really happened is the containment is leaking like a sieve and groundwater’s coming in. So you’ve got groundwater in direct contact with the hot radioactive core and it’s leaking out of the building. And they can’t prevent it now from moving because if they drop the groundwater now, they’re going to suck more radiation into their pumps and further contaminate the Pacific. That was a bit of a long answer, but let me tell you this. I told the Japanese about this in 2011 and they told me back, Tokyo Electric doesn’t have the money to do it. Now we’re 100 billion dollars into this problem and we’re likely going to spend another 400 billion to solve it. It’s a mess.
John: I wonder if somebody would have cowboyed and cowgirled up with some change if they’d had any idea it wasn’t just going to go away. I asked this question on Coast-to-Coast. Why is the world not rushing to Fukushima to try and neutralize this horrible problem? What is their problem? And then after some months had gone by and then a year goes by, it was – and then another year goes by, it’s like well, the reason they’re not rushing there now is because there’s nothing they can do about it. Do you agree that there’s nothing they can do about it now? Is it just –
AG: I did this for a living. I decontaminated nuclear power plants for a living. And there’s very little that can be done now without incredible exposures to thousands and thousands of young men. Now the question is really about the only thing they can do is encase the nuclear core in concrete and walk away for 100 years. But they still have to get the groundwater down so it doesn’t invade the concrete. So they chose to build an ice wall, and I said all along that wasn’t going to work and it hasn’t. If the ice wall had worked, they were going to freeze the ground down to bedrock, their electric bill to keep it frozen was going to be $10 million a month. $10 million a month to keep it frozen. (John: Stupid) It didn’t work. But it’s a huge number.
John: An ice wall. Well, I’m not even a nuclear engineer and I thought that was a dumb idea. I really did. I’m not saying oh, I was right again. It’s like I thought it was a stupid idea. You’re going to build an ice wall. Really? You’re going to continue to let this stuff bubble and boil down there and the ice wall is going to save the world from the disastrous consequence of this triple meltdown. I’m sorry. It didn’t grab me as a very good idea.
AG: You know there is an example of Zeolite wall working. Near Buffalo, New York, there was a waste plant called West Valley. And they had Cesium leaking out of the plant. And they built a Zeolite trench all the way around it, and son of a gun, it stopped the Cesium from leaking out. So we really did have a good fix at the time and still no one is willing to try it. It’s terribly frustrating for me and for those of us that really think that there was a solution.
John: Well, let me ask you this. The WIPP site out there – are we still producing 6,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste per year or was that just the amount going into the WIPP site out there in New Mexico?
AG: Well, the WIPP site is handling old reactor waste that dates back to the bomb project. So none of that is being produced. What they’re finally doing is taking it from laboratories like Sandia and Los Alamos and they’re shipping it to WIPP. So it’s not like it’s new radioactive material. It’s stuff that we’ve held above ground for 50 or 60 years. So – but WIPP is not yet working. I guess your listeners might recall that they had an explosion on Valentine’s Day in 2014. Luckily, it happened at night when there were no people working in the mine. If it had happened during the day, it would have been disastrous because they would have inhaled that radiation. But they still haven’t started WIPP back up. We’re going onto 2-1/2, 3 years now. So all of that waste continues to sit above ground, waiting for WIPP to reopen, and frankly, I’m not very optimistic at least portions of it will ever open.
John: (11:17) It strikes me as a really bad idea to continue to use nuclear energy. In your opinion, how badly would our industrial initiative in just this country be if we just shut them off and did something else?
AG: It happened in Japan. Japan had 30 – had 54 nuclear plants, and they accounted for 35 percent of its production before Fukushima Daiichi. And they shut them all down for now 5 years – almost 5 years. And son of a gun, Japan continues to be there and continues to be a major force of international commerce. Now in the United States, we have 99 nuclear power plants and they only account for about 19 percent of our power. We have a huge reserve margin. So we could shut them down if we wanted. As a matter of fact, maybe 20 of them are on the verge of shutting down anyway because they’re just not economical. So the precedent does exist for shutting nukes down, and on top of that, life goes on. We’re working on – at Fairewinds, we’re working on a report. It’ll come out in about a month. So your readers and listeners are getting the very first cut at this. We can clearly show – you’ll hear people say, if my nuke shuts down, global warming is going to increase and the polar bears are going to die. The contribution of nuclear power to all of the global warming gases, if we did without those nukes, we would only increase global warming gases by 3 percent. So we’ve got 450 nukes around the world and they only are improving the amount of CO2 going up in the atmosphere by 3 percent. So we’re not doing it for global warming, that’s for sure.
John: Well, it’s interesting because I thought that carbon dioxide was really good for plants. I think they have to have it. Are you into that stuff – the global warming thing and the oh, carbon dioxide is a bad thing and all that? I mean there are many reports that say no, actually the Amazon rainforest and other forests around the world are beginning to improve, if anything. What do you make of all this – stupid –
AG: I agree that CO2 is good for plants; that’s for sure. But I’m with the 95 percent of the scientists that think it’s bad for the planet and it’s going to cause the sea level to rise. Whether or not we agree on that, it’s the argument the nuclear industry is using to keep running. When I was building these plants back in the 70’s and the 80’s, nobody was talking about carbon dioxide. Everybody was talking about the energy shortage. We had gas lines at the pumps and all that stuff. So I think you and I might agree to disagree on whether or not CO2 is a problem or not, but it is what the nuclear industry is using as the false argument to build new nuclear power plants and to keep these ones running. And it’s just – any individual power plant is less than 1/100th of a percent of the amount of gases we’re throwing up every year. So it’s peanuts and it’s a marketing ploy.
John: A marketing ploy. What is the old expression? Madison Avenue never gives up? I guess they don’t. Let me ask you something. Going back to the thing that happened in Japan, what is the role of salt water in this? I have a note to ask you about this. Is it a corrosive factor or what’s the importance of the salt factor?
AG: Yeah, this is another – I think this might be a first on the air as well. Nuclear plants are designed to be cooled with the purest of water. You’ll see those crystal clear pictures of the fuel pool and the water has to be ultra pure. Well, after the meltdowns began – we had the tsunami, we had the earthquake and then the meltdowns began – the plant didn’t have any pure water because the pure water tanks were right next to the ocean and they got destroyed. So there was – even if the pumps were working, there was no way to get pure water in. There was no pure water on site. So what the plant manager did – this is the guy who’s since died of cancer – he said well, we’ll get some fire trucks in and we’ll drop their hoses into the Pacific and we’ll pump Pacific Ocean water into the nuclear reactors. The people at Tokyo Electric thought that was a really bad idea, but the plant manager who in my opinion should be the world’s hero for how he handled the accident – the plant manager said, I don’t have a choice. So he pumped the Pacific Ocean water into the hot nuclear reactors. Now it’s salt. And anybody who’s ever had a boat or seen a picture of a boat – they rust in salt water. Salt is sodium chloride and the chlorine – the chloride ion is real, real aggressive on stainless steel, which is what the nuclear reactors are made of. Back in 1972 – I hate to admit I’m that old – but I worked on a nuclear plant in Connecticut, and we broke a pipe that allowed 62 gallons of salt water per minute to get into the nuclear reactor. And in 15 seconds, all of the stainless steel tubes that monitor the neutrons in the core and essentially tell you the power level, failed. So after the leak – within 15 seconds after the leak we had no idea what the power level was. The reactor scrammed. It was down for a year because the chlorine in the salt had attacked the stainless steel so severely. So engineers have known now for 50 years that salt water and nuclear power plants really don’t play well together. So what the engineers downtown, 150 miles away from the reactor, were afraid about, was that the reactor would crack when the chlorine hit it. Well, the plant manager said look, it’s going to crack anyway. I’m in the middle of a meltdown here. Tell me a better way of cooling this core. And they couldn’t come up with any. And he said screw you, I’m going to do it. So he injected the chlorine into the reactor – he injected salt water into the reactor. That had one good advantage and 3 or 4 really bad things happened. The good advantage is it did cool the core somewhat. But the bad things were that all of the stainless steel inside that core cracked and it likely increased the speed at which the nuclear core melted through the nuclear reactor. And then the worst thing yet is that that salt plus that hot molten blob of radioactivity lying on the bottom of the containment – the salt accelerated the rate at which that blob of radioactivity ate its way into the concrete containment. So if we don’t have a meltdown all the way through the nuclear containment, we were very close. So salt is something that no one has studied yet; both the Japanese and the Americans really don’t want to take a good, hard look at the impact of injecting ocean water into Fukushima. Yet the plant manager was stuck between a rock and a hard place and I think he did the right thing. But in the process of cooling the reactor, he also cracked the reactor and likely increased the speed at which the concrete began to deteriorate. So it was the best of a bunch of bad decisions.
John: (19:59) You know, you would think that in 2015, you expect to hear – 2015, we’re living in the rarefied world of the future. And people just seem to be getting dumber, Arnie. Is that just me getting older and being grumpy? Or are people just turning into morons, worst than ever before?
AG: I think on the nuclear power issue, you’re absolutely right. We should have the libretto which you are great at – I’m not even going to try to –
John: It’s rough on your larynx, I’ll tell you that.
AG: There’s so much money – when you borrow money from a bank, the bank wants collateral. We all know that. Whether you buy a car or a house or whatever, when you borrow money, the bank wants you to back it up. Well, the utilities in Japan have been borrowing money for 5 years to keep these 50 nuclear reactors – keep the staff paid at these 50 nuclear reactors, that aren’t running. Now the fix is in, because the banks wouldn’t have given that money if they didn’t think they were going to get it back. So there’s been a promise that don’t worry, sooner or later, these 50 nukes are going to start back up. And to my mind, that’s a terrible bargain to have made because Japan is the most seismically active place on the planet. It’s got the highest population density. You’ve got lots of people and you’ve got lots of earthquakes and oh, by the way, there’s 50 nuclear plants. So yeah, I think we’re getting dumber with time.
John: It’s absolutely insane. And you’re such a gentleman. I didn’t want to start a food fight right here on the program, so to speak – let’s attack that table over there – but why in the hell would somebody build 54 nuclear plants in an area known over the centuries for earthquakes and tsunami?
AG: I can tell you the answer if you’re into conspiracy theories. The real reason why those nuclear plants were built was that – well, first we had Nagasaki, which was a uranium bomb. Then we had Hiroshima, which was a plutonium bomb. And then, 10 years later, there was a huge hydrogen bomb explosion called – I’m sorry, the name has skipped my mind now –
John: Was it the thing they set off at Bikini Atoll?
AG: Castle Bravo – right. It was the Castle Bravo test. And it was 10 times more than the scientists thought it would be.
John: Oh, is that all?
AG: (22:44) Yeah. Instead of 2 megatons, it turned out to be 20 megatons.
John: So they didn’t see this coming, right?
AG: So there was a Japanese fishing boat 100 miles away, and it was called the Lucky Dragon 5. And they saw the flash and they were 100 miles away. And about 3 or 4 hours later, it began to rain this white, powdery stuff like snow. And they began to get sick. They didn’t realize it was radiation sickness. But then they pieced together that the stuff from that cloud and the bomb that they had seen were related and they realized that the Americans had done it. So they did not want to tell the Americans that they were now contaminated because they were afraid that the American navy would sink them and kill them all. So they beelined back to Japan where a lot of them died of radiation sickness. Well, the State Department – the American State Department was terrified that Japan would become an antinuclear colony because they’d just had 2 bombs dropped on them and now they had this hydrogen bomb as well. And so the State Department came up with this plan to give Japan nuclear power plants. And that’s how we got Fukushima Daiichi. So the poor Japanese, they got nuked at Hiroshima, nuked at Nagasaki, nuked on the Lucky Dragon 5, and now we’ve nailed them again Fukushima Daiichi. Every one of those is an American design.
John: We bribed them with two new plants for free? (AG: Yeah. Yeah.) So that’s why they’re General Electric plants. Because we gave them a couple.
AG: Right. That’s how General Electric got their foot in the door to build nuclear power plants in Japan. If it weren’t for the Castle Bravo tests and the Lucky Dragon 5, the State Department would not have forced the Japanese to buy nuclear power plants.
John: I don’t even know how to react to this. I really don’t. To me, that is the most abominable form of treachery. I got to tell you, Arnie, it just makes me proud as punch, as that lunatic – I don’t even remember his name now – who was that –
AG: Is it any wonder now that 70 percent of the Japanese don’t want nuclear power plants?
John: No, I can kind of see their point.
AG: We bombed 2 of their cities. We bombed one of their fishing boats. And now we’ve destroyed the Fukushima Prefecture. And I think they can be a little gun shy here.
John: Hubert Humphrey. Remember? He was proud as punch of everything. Yeah, I tell you, it makes me proud to be an American knowing that the government of this land just continues to perpetrate things like this on the world. It’s just stunning. You know, I was never one of those guys that was like, it’s the government, man. This government is evil, this American government is evil. I was never one of those guys. I was like, the hell with it, we’re Americans, let’s go get it. Let’s go conquer the rest of the world. We bring good things everywhere we go. Well, I’m going to have to back away from that position. It’s like moonwalk backwards away from that. Oooo, just kidding. So hmm. I keep hearing about stuff being shut down here and there. It pops up on the scope and then it’s gone. I’m not going to say it’s scrubbed, but where are we with Hanford? And where are we with Diablo? And where are we with all of this stuff that’s cracking – that the containment vessels are cracking and everything else? What’s going on stateside?
AG: (26:37) Let’s talk about – Hanford is sort of separate from the others because Hanford is a bomb factory and we built it in the early 1940’s. Everybody was afraid of the Soviets and communism and they were using enormously toxic chemicals to strip the plutonium out of the nuclear fuel that was coming out of Hanford to make lots of plutonium bombs. Well, the goal was to make bombs and not really to handle the waste. So now Hanford’s got legacy nuclear waste. It’s not running now. The only thing Hanford should be doing right now is to be cleaning up Hanford. It’s not like there’s any operating reactors there. But the – what’s happened, though, is that the Department of Energy has done a really poor job with the cleanup. And we’re 70 years since 1940 – 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 – yeah, 70 years into making bomb waste at the Hanford site, and we still haven’t processed a gallon of it. And it looks like it’s going to be another 70 years before it’s completed. So we’ve got 140 or 150-year legacy to clean up the mess that we started in 1940. You know, the big fear, and a whistleblower came forward on this, to his credit – the whistleblower identified that these storage tanks can blow up. A chemical reaction can cause these tanks to blow up and contaminate Washington State and a lot of the states downwind. So that forced the Department of Energy to go back and say – first off, they tried to fire the guy, and then ultimately, the guy prevailed and won a $4 million settlement against the Department of Energy for trying to screw him. But now they’ve had to remodify all of the chemical systems because he was right and because Hanford could have blown up. So we’re stuck with bomb legacy waste that we built to fight the communists in 1940, and we likely will be stuck with them until almost 2200 – the next century. So this legacy waste issue is going to be probably 70 billion dollars more and likely 70 years longer. It’s a real mess. But that’s the bomb issue. The other issues you talked about are operating nuclear plants and that’s a little different.
John: Well, has anybody done the math on – can you tell us approximately how many cubic – I don’t know, yards or meters, whatever is your choice – of nuclear waste – is there such a thing as an average sized nuclear plant, or do they all vary in size?
AG: Well, they’re around 800 megawatts probably on average. So that’s 800 megawatts – that’s 800,000 kilowatt output per reactor on average. Some are smaller; some are bigger. The big issue is what’s in their spent fuel pools. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allows them to store these old nuclear fuel rods. They take them out of the reactor and move them and put them in a fuel pool for 40 or 50 years. And each one of those reactors has on average the amount of radioactivity in 700 bombs that we dropped on Nagasaki. So the content of the radioactivity in those fuel pools is 700 times the Nagasaki bomb. At every one of 100 nuclear reactors around the country. It’s frightening to realize how much nuclear waste we’ve got sitting in fuel pools waiting for a place to store it.
John: (30:50) Oh, boy. Well, inevitably, we come back to the same question, which is why. I mean are these people just so fixated on selling reactors and the money that comes from the sale of them and the maintenance of them and the upgrades to them and the repairs and everything else that they’re willing to risk polluting the entire planet to continue using this stuff? I mean what’s the matter with everybody, Arnie? I don’t get it.
AG: Yeah. It’s really lucrative. The average kid right out of college with a nuclear degree starts – this is no experience – four years college, bachelors – starts at $90,000 a year. It’s a real lucrative business to be in. So I think the people that are in it want to perpetuate that lucrative business. But we looked at the cost to mitigate carbon dioxide. You and I are going to disagree on whether we need to or not, but the nuclear industry is saying we do. And if we try to reduce carbon dioxide by 20 percent using nukes, it would cost 16 trillion dollars. That’s more than the gross national product of America. 16 trillion dollars. So I think there’s your answer. There’s a helluva lot of money on the line.
John: Okay. Well, of course – I mean the easiest comeback for that one is, well, there’s always a lot of money in new ideas, but nobody wants to be first, but a lot of people want to be next – but not very many of them want to be first. So I guess we’re just going to have to wait on the human race to evolve a little more in its thinking before we can kiss this stuff goodbye. But even if we shut down – you know, Australia, I understand, shut down all of their nuclear power plants. Dr. Helen Caldicott led her campaign over there and got them to abandon it. Is that true? Did they abandon it?
AG: Well, there are no nuclear plants in Australia, in part because of Helen Caldicott. But Australia is one of the three biggest exporters of uranium. So they’re mining it and giving it to others, John, even if they’re not using it themselves. And that’s along with Canada – Canada, the Soviet Union and the United States. But the big one is Australia. And their big client is China. So they claim to be holier than thou in that they don’t have any nuclear plants, but they’re more than willing to sell that uranium.
John: I don’t mean to take license within range of your hearing, but isn’t this just a circle of bastards? They just – it’s like oh, yeah, we don’t use it but here, we’ll sell it to you; you can use it. It’ll be fine. I mean, man, I tell you, it makes such a strong case for the devil running this planet. I can think of nothing else that seems like a better idea as to what’s wrong with this place.
AG: (33:58) The nuclear industry has this idea that they want you to think of a nuclear power plant as clean. But if you look at the whole cycle from taking it out of the ground, the biggest radioactive accident we ever had here in America was not at Three Mile Island. It was at a Native American reservation three months after Three Mile Island. There was a uranium mill, and they were stripping the uranium out with acids, and they had this huge storage pond. And the acids ate a hole through the dam that was holding the storage pond back. And it released probably 10 to 100 times more radiation into a river that has totally contaminated Navajo land for now 35 years. And it was called Church Rock. It’s out in New Mexico. So at the beginning of this process, it’s anything but clean. In Moab, Utah, there’s another one of these facilities. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission made the owner store – set aside $6 million to clean it up, and the cleanup now has hit a billion dollars. So guess what? They’ve gone bankrupt and it’s you and I and the public citizens that are paying to clean up this mess. So the front end’s a mess. We’ve got Daiichi to show us the middle doesn’t work very well, either. And then of course on the back end, we’ve got no place to store it. So it was never well thought out from the very beginning.
John: Well, I tell you, I just feel more confident that everything’s going to be okay with every passing minute. Unbelievable. Have any power plants been actually decommissioned in this country recently? Has anybody abandoned any plant?
AG: Well, there’s – there were 250 power plants that applied to be constructed. And 130 of those were canceled before they ever ran. So that leaves 120. Now there’s 99. So 21 have already shut down. And about a dozen of them have been reduced back to a farmers field, with the exception of the fact that there’s nuclear fuel still waiting to be removed. But everything else – all the structures are gone at about a dozen power plants. The other 20 roughly are in a mothball status. They call it SAFE Store. I call it SAF Store. The industry spells it S-A-F-S-T-O-R, and they pronounce that safe, but I think your third grade teacher would scold you if you pronounced s-a-f – it should be SAF store –like sap here in Vermont. So we’re sitting on these nuclear plants for as long as 60 years. At the Hanford reservation, there’s a bunch of these old nuclear plants. And what’s happening is rodents are getting into the plants and then they go out into the fields and leave their droppings. And their droppings are so radioactive, they can pick them up in a helicopter at 1,000 feet. So they track these rabbits because of the rabbit droppings off into the woods. Then they pay guys to go out and shoot them - $75 an hour to go chase rabbits and shoot them. And the guys call this bunny money when they’re out there hunting these contaminated rabbits. So we’ve cleaned up a few but we’ve got a lot more to go.
John: Let’s go back to Diablo Canyon just for a minute. Isn’t that a seismic area it’s located in?
AG: (37:54) Yeah. Yeah. To me, it’s the most dangerous plant still operating. And there are a lot of dangerous ones. But it is the most. If you kind of close your eyes and think of the west coast, just up at Vancouver, which is right over the northern border with Canada and then down by Washington and into Oregon, there’s a huge place where the two plates – the Pacific plate and the North American plate are overlapping, and it creates something called the Cascadia Subduction Zone. And the last time it broke free was in 1600. And there’s no written accounts of it but the Native Americans talk about Seattle being flooded by a tsunami. Seattle’s pretty far inland and the areas around Seattle are prone to another tsunami if this Cascadia Subduction Zone breaks free. Well, that’s connection into another fault. You might have heard of the San Andreas Fault, which is connected into the fault that runs right next to this Diablo Canyon plant. And there’s a couple of them there. The Shoreline and the Hosgri fault. They’re all interconnected up and down the entire coast. The problem here is that when the plant was built, they never realized that these offshore faults were there. And engineers build a plant based on how fast the ground moves. That’s called the G rating. Diablo Canyon was built for a ground movement of .4G. G is the acceleration of gravity. But this new earthquake, they believe if one of these faults were to break, will produce a .75G earthquake. Diablo keeps sharpening the pencil and showing that they can continue to run, but to my way of thinking, they’ve run out of lead. It’s just not safe for what we continue to find – these hellacious fault zones right offshore.
John: Does a man in your position experience a lot of blowback from pro-nuclear industry representatives?
AG: Yeah. First of all, let me say I go to bed at night hoping I’m wrong. I told Maggie – three weeks before Fukushima Daiichi, she asked me what plant is most likely to have a meltdown, and I told her, I don’t know which one but I know it’s going to be a General Electric Mark 1 reactor – which is exactly what Fukushima was. I just pray that I’m wrong. I pray that when the big one hits, the plant will have already been shut down. But the blowback from the industry is frequent and – I try not to let it get to me, but it has to. I think you’re aware that I lost my job as a nuclear whistleblower in 1990 because the Nuclear Regulatory commission deliberately blew an inspection. I found some violations of the license – the company I worked for – and told the president of the company, and he fired me. And then I went to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I didn’t do it first. I went to the president of the company first. So they came in and couldn’t find anything. Then I went to John Glenn, who was a senator. And he fired up an inspection and that inspection found all sorts of stuff. He also found – and the key is that Nuclear Regulatory Commission deliberately tried to screw me. They deliberately falsified their inspection report in an effort to keep nuclear power clean, safe and reliable. But ever since then we continually get sniped at. When I was out in California, I had a couple trolls show up at one of the speeches I gave and harass me. And there’s also some pretty serious online harassment that’s going on as well. You just – I hate to get emotional here – I used to be angry, but you can’t perpetuate yourself if you work on anger. You’ve got to come at it from love as opposed to from anger. I know it’s probably way too philosophical here, but –
John: Not really. It’s beautiful, man. Keep rolling.
AG: (42:41) What keeps me going is that I really love this earth and want to make it a better place. And as long as I keep feeling what I’m feeling, I’m going to keep going out there every day and trying to make it safer for my kids – I just had a grandkid for the first time. So my grandkid – now I’ve got skin in the game for another generation. So I think that’s really the key to what motivates Maggie and I is love for the planet. And we just want to make it a better place.
John: Isn’t it amazing what people will do – it says in the Bible that the love of money is the root of all evil. People are like, the Bible, that’s just a comic book. Oh, really? Is it? No, it’s true. How many benefits – inexpensive benefits to human beings are available that are kept secret because some outfit wants to protect their profits? And they get with other people that are also players in the same industry, same commercial venture or whatever. And they just decide they’re going to circle the wagons and they’re just not going to let this be known to anybody because it’ll dig into their profits and they just don’t want that. Even if it’s bad for people. It makes no difference to them whatsoever. It’s like – it’s absolutely amoral, which is of course, I’m sure some of the underpinning reason behind people being anti-capitalist. I think as long as you’ve got human beings involved, they’re going to find some way to mess up whatever apparatus you put them into. They’re going to find some way to get around it, go under it, modify it to their own ends and put themselves at the advantage and put anybody else that’s necessary to put at the disadvantage at the disadvantage. That just seems to be the way of things. So just to recapitulate here, so how many from a peak of – tell us those numbers one more time, Arnie.
AG: There were 250 applications to build nuclear plants. 130 of them never got finished. Some of them got pretty far along before they closed the doors and some of them never got to a hole in the ground. So 250 applied; 120 got finished. And 21 of those have shut down for a lot of different reasons – accidents and just money. So now we’ve had 5 nuclear plants shut down in the last 18 months. Used to be 104. If we were doing this a year ago, it’d be 104. Now there’s only 99. A little bit like that song, 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. And there’s another 20 or so that are likely going to close because they’re just not economical. You’re looking at something that’s 40 years old. So the maintenance cost on them are astronomically high. The staff costs are high. When you’re paying a kid right out of college to make $90,000 a year to work there, the operating budget is really, really high. And they just can’t afford to keep them running any more. So we’ll probably be down to around 75 plants in the next couple of years.
John: Well, that doesn’t sound too awfully bad. By the way, before I forget to ask you, why did you predict that it would be a General Electric Mark 1 that failed? Is it because it’s the oldest one or what?
AG: (46:11) I am not clairvoyant. The nuclear industry knew that the Mark 1 design was the weakest design. I just spoke about it. When I was an engineer back in 1976, they discovered that the forces on the Mark 1 containment were in the wrong direction. They had thought when they built these things that if there were to be an accident, the forces would be down and they’d hold the nuclear power plant down. So they built all these Mark 1 reactors and they discovered 5, 6, 7 years later after they were all running, that the forces weren’t down; that they were up. So that if there had been an accident the first 5 or 6 years at the power plant, this whole darn containment would have lifted off like a rocket ship. So they put straps over top of it to hold it down and got by. So that was the first problem. And then in the 80’s, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote a report that said that if there is a meltdown, there’s an 85 percent chance that the containment will fail on a Mark 1. 85 percent. So – but they also said, well, there’s no possibility of there ever being a meltdown, so what do we have to worry about. After the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi, there was an NRC engineer – a guy named Chuck Castelle – he’s really high up in the management at the NRC – and he was quoted three days after the accident in a phone call saying the Mark 1 containment is the worst containment in the world. He didn’t just come to that decision; he’s known it for 25 years just like I did. It was an accident waiting to happen, and it did. It’s so sad that all of the nuclear industry knew that that was the weak link and none of the industry did a darn thing about it.
John: I wonder what the chances are that attrition might apply to the philosophy of using nuclear power. Do you envision perhaps a situation where, like these other plants that weren’t finished – well, I have to ask another question first – okay, so you start off with over 200 applications, but 130 of them just kind of went away. But how many – and forgive me if you’ve already answered this question, but you’ve got my mind just spinning all over the place – how many have been decommissioned because of reasons other than they’re not profitable, we’re going broke running this thing, we’ve got to go back the other way.
AG: Well, a couple of them had meltdowns. There was obviously Three Mile Island. And Fermi 1 which was right outside of Detroit had a meltdown and was shut down because a serious thing broke. Out in California we just had the San Onofre reactor shut down because a serious thing broke. In Florida we had a plant shutdown because they cracked the containment. Instead of hiring an experienced contractor who knew how to cut a containment open, they decided well they had slept at a Holiday Inn Express one night so they had become experts and tried to cut it, and they cracked the containment, almost like the crack in a Firestone 500 tire. So there’s a bunch of plants that have either melted down or broken. And then there’s another group now led by Vermont Yankee here in Vermont and Kewanee in Wisconsin. But shortly the Pilgrim Plant in Massachusetts is already scheduled to be shut down, the Fitzpatrick Plant in New York State is scheduled to be shut down; and the Oyster Creek Plant in New Jersey is scheduled to be shut down. And all of those are for financial reasons. They just don’t make economic sense. Nothing’s broken at them but they just don’t make economic sense to run. We’ve got some that just broke and some that are broke.
John: (50:39) Got you. I’m just wondering if it’s possible that at some point in the future, it may be just not economically feasible to run nuclear power. I mean in other words, everything has a beginning, a middle and an end, right? And I’m just wondering if – do you see them maybe running out of string at some point?
AG: Yeah. And I think despite all the hazards that you and I have been talking about now for quite awhile, it’s going to boil down to money. There’s a lot of indicators on the horizon that they’re just not going to be able to succeed to get the money that it takes to build them. There’s a power plant being built in England right now. It’s called Hinkley Point. And the power out of that plant the British have already committed to spend – to give the Chinese 16 cents a kilowatt if they build that power plant – 16 cents a kilowatt hour. So that’s what we call at the buss bar. That’s as the power leaves the plant boundary and it heads into the grid. Your electric bill is probably less than 16 cents now but that includes generation costs, which are around 5 or 6 cents, plus all the wires and the transmission and the distribution and the meter readers and all that stuff. So this is 16 cents as it leaves the plant. At the same time, we’re finding wind – offshore wind with almost the same availability, at 3 cents. And solar at 5 cents. So we’re rapidly seeing renewables like wind and solar much cheaper than the nuke. Now the quote I gave – I gave a speech over at Northwestern University a couple of months ago, and the quote that ran around the world – 600,000 people listened to it, was that the nuclear industry would have you believe that mankind is so smart we know how to store nuclear waste for a quarter of a million years. But at the same time, mankind is so dumb that we don’t know how to store solar electricity overnight. And I just don’t believe that’s true.
John: Well, all right. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we pause for 5 minutes, get a little leg stretch, whatever. And let’s resume in 5. Because I’ve got some more questions I want to ask you, Arnie Gundersen. And I’ll tell you what they have to do with, and that is poking the Russian bear. I’ll give you a hint. Poking the Russian bear with a stick in its cage trying to get him to come out and pull a nuke on you. And you know, we were just chatting about some – it’s like you have to tell the people this. So Arnie asked me a question and the question was, John, do you know why they call them nuclear power plants rather than atomic power plants. And I said, why no, why do they call them nuclear rather than atomic plants. And Arnie said….
AG: This is another one of those fascinating insider stories. Back in the 50’s, they did call them atomic power plants. One of the first was in Shipping Port in Pennsylvania, and it was called the Shipping Port Atomic Power Plant. And of course, we had the Atomic Energy Commission. But the nuclear industry realized that if we call these – well, they held focus groups and they asked people which are you more comfortable with, an atomic power plant or a nuclear power plant. And the focus groups told them that people were terrified of the word atomic power plant because it reminded them of bombs. But if they called them nuclear power plants, it made people much more favorable to the technology. So now you and I – it just sort of rolls off our tongue – nuclear power. And of course, what do we have now? We have the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So even the government bought into it. It’s that idea of framing the argument. The atomic industry realized that if they were going to make a lot of these power plants, they couldn’t call them atomic power plants, so they changed the name.
John: (54:55) I’ll tell you what, the presentation is everything, isn’t it?
AG: Yes, you’re absolutely right.
John: Why am I not surprised, really? I should have seen that one coming. Although I think atomic sounds better. Look, there’s Mayberry’s Atomic Power Plant. Wow, you guys really are in the future, aren’t you. Oh, yes. We dwell in the future with our atomic power plant. In fact, you could say that this toast was produced by atomic power. Doesn’t it taste better already? Golly. Sick. Totally sick. Oh, well, it’s a sick world and so what? We must, I suppose, revel in the sickness. If we don’t, I guess we’ll never get well. So where are we? The bulletin of the atomic scientist. I haven’t looked – it should be the bulletin of the nuclear scientist, shouldn’t it? The bulleting of the atomic scientists – we’re a couple of minutes before midnight before the world goes away. I haven’t looked at it lately. It’s depressing. But that’s part of the reasoning behind the name Caravan to Midnight. What’s going to happen after the old clock strikes 12, yes? So where are we with nuclear proliferation and all this tension between – that NATO or whatever you might call it – I say NATO now stands for no action talk only, but where are we with nuclear weaponry these days, Arnie?
AG: It’s a frightening time in nuclear proliferation. The Japanese have enough plutonium to build 1,000 nuclear bombs if they wanted to. And who gave them that reprocessing technology but the Americans. So we don’t even have to go to the normal hot spots in the world to realize that proliferation is everywhere. And it’s not just the bad guys but it’s our allies, too. But let’s go to Europe, which is probably where you were thinking. We’ve got the Ukraine, which is a point of tension between Russia and NATO. But we’ve just had a fascinating incident in the Ukraine, a really scary incident in the Ukraine, where Ukrainian nationalists blew up the transmission lines down into the Crimea. And you’ll recall that the Crimea was annexed by the Russians. So what that did was it caused all of the nuclear power plants in the Ukraine to shut down because the entire grid collapsed. The concept is called a black start. Nuclear plants can’t run unless the grid is up and running. So about a dozen nuclear power plants in the Ukraine shut down and the only thing between them and meltdowns was their diesel generators. Of course we know what happened to diesel generators at Fukushima Daiichi. So here’s a point of tension between NATO and the Russians that could have escalated into a nuclear meltdown if those diesels had failed. We’ve got from the real proliferation standpoint – going into this segment, you asked how small can we make a bomb. You can make a bomb about 20 pounds, about the size of a suitcase.
John: The Holy Grail of terrorism.
AG: They actually had backpacks – nuclear bomb backpacks – that troops would carry. And they would go – they were designed to blow up a bridge. You’d send a couple of well-armed people in and take a bridge out with a nuclear bomb. So essentially the size of a backpack is all you need. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a lot of enriched uranium all over the place. And to its credit, Russia and the United States did a pretty good job of getting most of that enriched uranium. But you only need 20, 30, 40 pounds to make a bomb. So there certainly is that much out there on the loose. Now there’s been a couple of cases every year where small amounts – a pound of enriched uranium tries to get sold from a smuggler to a buyer. Now the buyers have been Americans in disguise and we’ve captured probably five smugglers a year trying to get uranium out of the old Soviet Union and try to sell it to ISIS or the Iranians or whatever. So the proliferation risks of stolen enriched uranium are still very real. There’s the other concept, too – Obama said the thing that scares him most, that keeps him awake at night, is the chance of what’s called a loose nuke. Somebody like a bomb stolen from Pakistan or a bomb made in Iran or bomb-grade material smuggled out of the old Soviet Union to somebody who doesn’t like us very much, being smuggled into the United States and fired off in the center of a major city. It’s a frightening time because there’s so much nuclear proliferation. And we let the genie out of the barn – we let the horse out of the barn back in 1945 when we dropped those nukes. Once it’s out, there’s no getting it back. There’s another type of bomb. They call it a dirty bomb. And it’s really not a nuclear bomb at all. And there was another case where some smuggler were smuggling a large quantity of Cesium out of the old Soviet Union. And again, they got caught by American agents. You’ve got to hope that the American agents are catching every single one of these smugglers, but that’s kind of unlikely. But what you do is you take a regular bomb and you put Cesium on the outside of it, they truck it into a city and blow it up and what that does is it spreads radioactive Cesium into the city making it uninhabitable. It’s not a nuclear explosion but the residual radioactivity left over is significant enough that you’d have to evacuate the inner city of a large metropolitan area. So that’s a very real risk, too.
John: (1:02:04) And what about this thing at Indian Point? Somebody dropped some control rods or something. I mean it went – there’s nothing on it since the 7th that I’ve seen.
AG: (1:02:16) I haven’t seen much, either. There was – at Indian Point, the control rods are pulled up, and as they’re pulled up, the nuclear core begins its nuclear chain reaction, the criticality. And they’re held up by magnets – electromagnets. And what happened was there was a fire in the electrical cabinets that feed those control rods. So they lost electricity and they dropped in. Which is good. You’d rather have them drop in than fall out. But the cause of the fire was that it’s old. Indian Point now is – Indian Point 2 is 43 years old. So they need an upgrade. And Entergy, the owner, is really cheap. They don’t take care of their preventive maintenance. I served on a panel here in Vermont where we looked at Vermont Yankee, and we had these huge leaks into the groundwater around the nuclear plant. And we determined that it was because Entergy didn’t do the preventive maintenance. So Entergy hired its own panel to look at Indian Point. This is back now 2009. And they determined the same thing; that Entergy wasn’t spending enough on preventive maintenance. So now we’ve got a fire at Indian Point because it’s an old plant. And we really shouldn’t be surprised. Unless you’re willing to spend a lot of money to keep these plants in tip-top shape, these kinds of problems are going to happen again and again and again. We call this thing the bathtub curve. And I’m going to use my hands here on your Skype. Nuclear plants when you buy them are unreliable. Just like cars. If a car is going to break, it’s going to break in the first month. And then you’re going to work out all the faults and it’s going to be very stable for a long period of time; and then as it gets old, it becomes more unstable again. So it sort of looks like a bathtub. And most of the nuclear plants now in America are over 30 years old. The average nuclear plant in America is more than 30 years old. So parts start to wear out. Electrical wiring starts to get brittle. So we can expect more of these problems as these plants get old and we shouldn’t be surprised when they happen.
John: Okay. A couple of rapid-fire numbers here. 20 to 30 pounds of nuclear material will produce a bomb that would be how big in your opinion?
AG: Oh, a lot smaller than the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs. But they were designed to be tactical. You sneak them into a railroad bridge and take out the bridge and some of the people nearby. So it would be maybe a tenth of a mile in radius. They used to have tactical rockets, not these big ICBM’s. They used to have cannons that would fire a shell –
John: They’d fire them out of a 106 recoilless rifle, as I recall.
AG: Yeah. So I had a dear friend of mine who died of cancer, who was in the army in ’54 when they were dropping those bombs and then the guys would hunch down in the trench and the blast would blow over them and then they’d get up and they’d run toward the bomb. Yeah, a lot of those guys died. That’s another cover-up. Because the army said that the path he took was – instead of heading straight towards the bomb, the army said well, really, he went diagonal to the bomb and not right to it. And he said that’s a bunch of bull, he said. We went right to it. So they tried to cover it up by minimizing the exposure to these –
John: (1:06:29) It’s a good thing I didn’t join the service. I’d have been the guy running away from the bomb.
AG: Yeah. There were probably sergeants back there with guns to make sure that didn’t happen. But these weapons, these small tactical weapons that weigh – they could put them in a backpack – could take out perhaps a tenth of a mile in radius. That’s bigger than a conventional bomb can do but they wouldn’t destroy a city. And like I said, that’s Obama’s biggest fear is that a loose nuke will arrive maybe on a freighter or maybe in an airplane or whatever.
John: Or maybe walked across the border of Mexico and Texas or Arizona off of some refugee that’s trying to find a better life.
AG: My guess is – my biggest fear personally is that the loose nuke will come from Pakistan. We know that their security agencies have been infiltrated by radical Islamists. We know that the Pakistanis have something on the order of 120 bombs and that’s just a bad combination. We should be worried about Iran and we should be worried about North Korea, but – officially, Pakistan is an ally but it has been infiltrated by radical Islamists and that really scares me.
John: Yeah, a couple of them apparently, at least according to the news reports – who knows who really did it – some people are saying oh, Kraft Services did it – not Kraft Services but that’s the people who provide the snacks at movie shoots – Kraft International did it – police weapons found there, blahblahblah. But officially it’s like the woman Tashfeen or whatever her name is – I think that’s it – Tashfeen was from Pakistan. I don’t know, what do you think about this – you might not want to get into this – I’ll ask anyway. I’m thinking it might be a good idea to vet the people who are coming from the Middle East a little more carefully before you just go yeah, sure, come on in.
AG: Well, I think we should do a better job of background checks. Apparently, the woman who was involved in that massacre out in California had already written on her Twitter account for years that she wanted to perpetuate a jihad. So I think we owe it to ourselves to do thorough background checks. But I’m not one to throw up a wall and say everybody should not come in. I don’t think that’s fair. My grandfather came over. My father went to school here and he started kindergarten and couldn’t speak English. So it’s hard for me to say no immigration.
John: Your grandfather.
AG: Well, my grandfather came over, but my father was born here. And grew up in a little Norwegian enclave in Carteret, New Jersey, and didn’t speak English until he went to school. So it happens.
John: (1:09:32) Yeah. Maybe we should just put a sign up at the border that says population: full.
AG: You know, you can detect nuclear weapons as they come into – and actually, they have them – I’m right up here in Vermont. We’re only an hour away from the border with Canada. And I had a technisium 99M – a heart thing – 5, 6 years ago – they checked for something in my heart – and they told me, don’t go over the border for 3 days because they’ll pick you up. And at these border crossings and those houses that you go over where you drive the car through, there’s some really sophisticated radiation detectors, enough so they can pick up the little bit of radiation that was in my heart. So when you try to smuggle it in through official routes – highways or border crossings or things like that – it’s not likely it’s going to make it in. I just see it coming in on a freighter into Long Beach or to New York or to Charleston, South Carolina; places where before they go through that detector they could be set off and it could be devastating. That to me is the most frightening proliferation. North Korea just announced that they now have a hydrogen bomb. Most of the people in the intelligence community don’t think they’re there yet, but it’s not very long before they are. And a hydrogen bomb can be made 100 times more powerful than an atomic bomb. We live in a crazy world.
John: Yeah, we do. Now let me ask you this. I understand that the federal limits have been raised as far as pollution – or pardon me, radiation monitoring, atmospheric and I presume terrestrial, have been raised. In your opinion, without going out there with your Geiger counter and taking soil samples up and down the west coast, which would be a daunting task at least, I understand we’re getting a lot of dead sea life up and down the coast. I haven’t been out there looking at it myself, but we had a very compelling presentation by a man up in Vancouver who said oh, yeah, there’s way less little creatures out there in the water than there was awhile ago. Looks like a lot of them are being poisoned, the melting sea stars and all this. What are you hearing about this, Arnie? How is it affecting our west coast?
AG: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of pieces to that. The first is radiation standards. A group of scientists that are all on the radial fringe that radiation is good for you – it’s called hormesis – here, take this radiation pill and you’ll feel better in the morning. There’s a group of them that have petitioned the NRC to raise the standards. And the NRC hasn’t said yes to that yet but it’s frightening the NRC is even considering it. The National Academy of Scientists wrote a report called BEIR – B-E-I-R that says no amount of radiation is good for you. It’s called the linear no threshold theorem. The less you get, the less the risk is, but there’s no de minimis risk. It’s not you’re not going to be hurt. So I go by the National Academy of Science, and I hope the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does, too. So there’s pressure to raise the standards but I hope that the National Academy of Science will win over the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Now as far as what’s going on on the west coast, that’s really interesting. Nobody is checking these cadavers for radiation. I think on our last show we talked about how I don’t eat fish from the Pacific any more because I just – I don’t know what’s in them. If the government were out there testing these fish, I’d feel differently. The cause of these massive die-offs, and there are massive die-offs – ENE News has done a great job covering them – the cause of them is unknown. There’s the issue of this – they call it the Blob. There’s this huge thousand-mile by a thousand mile by 300 or 400 feet deep lens of hot water sitting out there in the Pacific that they claim could be killing them. They also claim there is a lot of infections in these animals that are strange and not to be seen previously. I will say this about the radiation from Daiichi and that’s that I don’t believe radiation is directly killing them. But radiation is known to be an immunosuppressant. When you have large amounts of radiation in your body, your immunity drops. So I think that the argument that it can’t be Fukushima because the concentrations are too low is unfounded. I think there’s enough radiation in these animals that their immune systems could be suppressed and that could be one of the factors involved in that massive die-off.
John: (1:15:14) Have you felt the need to decontaminate or chelate yourself? Do you take any of that Zeolite stuff? I was looking at it a couple of times, on a couple of occasions in the past and I saw one spot that says oh, yeah, it’s great for – it’ll fix you up, it’ll get that stuff out. And then I saw another deal where they were saying no, no, it’s been noticed if you breathe it, if you breathe the powder form it can cause all kinds of stuff – mesothelioma and call kinds of – and I’m just going okay. I’ve said this dozens of times, Arthur C. Clarke was so on the money when he said, for every expert, there’s an equal and opposite expert.
AG: Yeah, right. You can take Zeolite or there’s other what they call chelating agents that will strip the body of minerals. For instance, Cesium, which is radioactive. But Cesium is identical to potassium, and if it’s going to be stripping out the Cesium, it’s also going to be stripping out the potassium. So I tell people that want to use Zeolite or any of these chelating agents, do it with your doctor, because you’re not just – the chelation or the Zeolite doesn’t strip out just the radioactive stuff. It strips out all those minerals. And you can become mineral deficient. So if you’re going to be stripping out, some of it will be bad stuff. But a lot of it will be good stuff, too. You’ve got to be supplementing back in with good stuff because otherwise, the metallic balances in your body are going to go to hell and it could actually make things worse. So my attitude is if you’re going to do it – and I’m on the east coast so we’re not getting anywhere nailed as much as the people in the Pacific – but if you’re going to do it, do it with a doctor and supplement back in good chemicals because they’re going to get stripped out, too.
John: Yeah. So plan on – I don’t know. I suppose you could go on a regimen of it for awhile and then go okay, I’m stopping this, I’ve gone through the process, and now I’m going to start dumping the cheloidal minerals in there and put them back. I don’t know. How do you do that? How do you tear all the stuff out of your system and then put it back before you suffer a health problem? That’s the real question, isn’t it?
AG: (1:17:48) Yeah. And that’s why I just – I won’t go there because I’m just afraid, once you’ve developed a heart arrhythmia because potassium is no longer available – that’s not a good thing. So you’ve got to be – I always think if you’re going to be stripping it down, you’ve got to be adding it back in so that the good replenishes those voids that are left behind. You can get a pretty good idea whether you need to or not with urine tests and things like that. Most people really have relatively low amounts of Cesium in their bodies right now. If you were in Japan, that would be a different issue. I would feel very strongly that you should be chelating if you lived in Japan. I’m going over there for a month, and (1) I plan not to eat a damn thing from the northern part of Japan; and (2) I will be sampling my urine when I get back to make sure that I haven’t picked up excessive Cesium.
John: You might want to make a few Zeolite snack bars and pack them in there with some bananas. Zeolite and banana sandwiches. Oh, boy. It sounds great. Arnie, you’re such a nice man and you’re such a bright man and you’re just a joy to speak to. Let me ask you this. Here, I’m going to spring this one on you. What’s your message to the world, Arnie? What’s your message to the world? I mean somebody’s got to live or what was it all for?
AG: Yeah. I guess – thank you for that opportunity here. What we at Fairewinds are trying to do is just notify people of these dangers and I think the people on the opposite side of this argument – the well-paid executives in nuclear – believe that they’re trying to save the world from global warming. So I really feel like I’m trying to save the world from people who are trying to save the world, which is a strange dichotomy. I think the message is, I am terribly concerned about nuclear for lots of reasons. The data lead me to conclude you’re going to have an accident every ten years. That the front end is dirty and the back end is even worse. So it’s never been a well thought-out process. But at the end of the day, we live in a capitalist world and it boils down to money. And if you build new nukes, global climate change will get worse because that money gets sucked out of renewables. Instead of spending $15 trillion on a bunch of nuclear power plants, you could spend a tenth of that on the equivalent out put of solar. So I guess if we want to be hard-hearted capitalists, this whole technology makes no economic sense. And you can forget about all of the rest of it and just use that old Tom Cruise line, follow the money.
John: Follow the money. That’s beautiful. Well, look, I probably won’t speak to you between now and the end of the year, but Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to you and we’ll keep plugging away at this. You do what you’ve always done, stay strong and keep blowing that whistle. Eventually, maybe enough people will hear it and maybe somebody will come up with a new idea. We could use some, yeah?
AG: Well, thank you from all of us at Fairewinds. And it’s our yearly fundraiser, too. We wish you a happy holiday as well.
John: Take care. Arnie Gundersen. Wow.