Fairewinds’ Chief Engineer, Arnie Gundersen, sat down with CCTV Host Margaret Harrington to discuss, “Nuclear Power: Who is Looking Out for the Public?” Ms. Harrington and Mr. Gundersen’s conversation covers the troubles with nuclear industry regulation locally at Vermont Yankee, nationally with discontinued cancer research by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the worldwide impact of constant radioactive pollution daily emitting from TEPCO’s (Tokyo Electric Power Co.) triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi site in Japan, and Japan’s decision to force the victims of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster to move back to their now contaminated and destroyed homes that lie within the evacuation zone. In closing, Mr. Gundersen points out that we should not be calling the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi an accident “because,” as he explains, “an accident is like when an owl hits your windshield. You have no control over it.” Mr. Gundersen and Fairewinds Energy Education have repeatedly pointed out that nuclear engineers and designers in the US and Japan knew that there were flaws in the plant’s original design and construction, including no tsunami wall, a site that had its topography radically reengineered causing ongoing ground water issues, and a known lack of adherence to current seismic regulations.Looking towards a brighter future, Mr. Gundersen states, “I think the public’s perception of nuclear has fundamentally changed and the press’s perception of nuclear has fundamentally changed… And the money has changed. In the last five years, solar has plummeted. The cost of a solar array has plummeted and the cost of a nuclear plant has increased. So we’re seeing nuclear plants shut down now and the press understands that it’s not economical and it’s not safe.” **See below for audio and transcript.**
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FAIREWINDS ENERGY EDUCATION – Interview with Margaret Harrington 9-29-15
MH: This is Burlington and here we are in the Channel 17 Center for Media & Democracy Studio in Burlington, Vermont, bringing you our ongoing Nuclear-Free Future conversation. I’m your host, Margaret Harrington, and viewers, let’s welcome our guest today, Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer from Fairwinds Energy Education. Thank you. Welcome back, Arnie. I’m so glad to see you again, even though you always bring us disturbing information about what’s going on in the nuclear power world. The title for our show is Nuclear Power: Who is Looking out for the Public? So from the top, Arnie, let’s start with Vermont Yankee and what the problem for the public is there.
AG: Well, we could have a 12-hour show on who’s looking out for the public but we’ll keep it to half an hour. At Vermont Yankee, the plant is decommissioned; it’s shut down and being dismantled. But the dismantlement will take years, and in the meantime, the State of Vermont has been very active. And my hat’s off to Chris Recchia, who is the head of the Public Service Board there – Public Service Commission. And he’s been aggressively maintaining that – he’s looking out for Vermonters. So it’s not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it’s not the owner of Vermont Yankee, Entergy, but the State of Vermont is trying as hard as it can against insurmountable odds to look out for Vermonters.
MH: In what way? Is this about cleaning up the site? Because the last time you were on Nuclear-Free Future, it was just at the closing of Vermont Yankee – that was January 1st of this year, right? 2015. So what is happening now? Do they start the cleanup?
AG: Well, they’ve taken about $70 million out of the decommissioning fund and there’s really nothing to show for it. All of the radioactivity is still there. But they’re allowed to take this money out to plan. So they’re doing a lot of planning. Actually, Entergy’s made more money since the plant’s been shut down than when it was running, because the planning is being done by an Entergy subsidiary. So they’re making a profit on the engineering hours when the plant itself was unprofitable. So it’s a moneymaker again for Entergy.
MH: And how does the NRC fit into this picture of Vermont Yankee at this point in time?
AG: You know, that’s really the key piece in this. When Vermont Yankee was bought by Entergy, nobody thought about what would happen and nobody thought about how, when the plant shuts down, who’s going to be monitoring. Back in the day before that, we had a utility-owned power plant, and the Public Service Commission could look at the process. But when we sold it to Entergy, we lost the ability to audit where that money is being spent, and we lost the ability to control the emergency plan, for instance. The emergency plan is still in effect right now, but very shortly will end, and yet at the very top of Vermont Yankee is the nuclear fuel pool. And in it is the equivalent of 700 bombs worth of Cesium. And until that nuclear fuel pool is emptied and brought down on the ground – and that’s five years out – until that happens, my position and the State’s position is that Vermont Yankee is still very dangerous. And we need an emergency plan until we get that fuel out of the fuel pool.
MH: (3:47) And what is comprised in the emergency plan? Is this the evacuation of people around the power plant?
AG: Yes. It’s maintaining the sirens. It’s maintaining the network of people that are called upon, the phone systems. There’s a center for the emergency plan that people would go to in the event of an emergency. So it’s maintaining all of that infrastructure and drilling to make sure that an accident doesn’t happen. And we seem to forget that Vermont Yankee had a near-miss back in 2008 when the nuclear fuel pool was here and they were lifting nuclear fuel out with a very heavy crane, the brakes failed. And it began to drop without human assistance. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission seems to forget that brakes can fail and that if that were to happen in the next five years, Vermont would be in serious trouble.
MH: Take us back to that 2008 incident when the brakes failed and then the emergency mechanism kicked in – right?
AG: No. What happened was the brake failed. Like in a car, though, they didn’t completely fail. It just slowly, slowly, slowly went down and down and down and they couldn’t stop it until it got to the floor. And that’s the nearest one of these heavy cranes has come. The canister that carries this radioactive fuel is very highly fielded (?5:20) And empty it weighs 70 tons and full with the nuclear fuel, it weighs 100 tons. So what did Entergy do when they were testing the brake, they tested it for 70 tons, but they never tested it for 100 tons. And what happened was that extra 30 tons of weight was enough to cause the brake to fail and the container to fall. So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t want to address that there’s a huge risk until we’ve got that fuel down on the ground. And Vermont Yankee is really unique, too, in that there’s a school right across the street. And one of the things I’ve been saying is that when – you have to move the fuel – there’s no doubt it’s important to get the fuel off the roof – but when you do that, make sure the school isn’t in session, because it’s just one more risk. Let’s get those 500, 600 kids out of there in case something goes wrong. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t want to hear about that, either.
MH: And you’re saying that these emergency standards and mechanisms will be out of operation at a certain time.
AG: Right. The emergency plan is in effect now, but essentially Entergy plans to do away with it in less than a year. And the fuel is still there for another 3 or 4 years after that. So the problem becomes what do we do in the next 4 years if there is an emergency at Vermont Yankee. The plans and the phone lines and all that kind of stuff has been eliminated and there’s nobody watching the store; there’s nobody here to protect us.
MH: (7:01) But where does the State of Vermont come in and the State of Vermont’s responsibility for the people of Vermont. Like our topic is “Who is looking out for the public?” So who is looking out for the public in this instance?
AG: Well, Chris Recchia has been very active in trying to get Entergy to keep the emergency plan in place, and Entergy doesn’t want to spend that money. So they would rather risk our lives than spend the money on maintaining a plan until the fuel is off the roof. And I don’t think that’s fair. I think that Vermonters gave them that money. It was money that we contributed for years. And for Entergy to now tell us how they plan to spend it – not on our public health and safety – that’s a concern.
MH: Arnie, what do you project will happen at this time when the emergency plan isn’t in operation?
AG: Well, I hope that other states will become involved because Vermont Yankee is not the only plant that’s like this. It’s not the only what we call a merchant plant. It’s not owned by a utility, but there’s 40 others like that, and hopefully Doug Hoffer, who’s the auditor, and Chris Recchia, who runs the Public Service Board – commission – will put pressure on the other states to put pressure on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Nobody thought of this back 10, 15 years ago when these plants were being spun off. But now that they’re approaching the end of life, we really need to address watching the fund, which is a State Auditor role, and watching the public safety, which is the Public Service Commission.
MH: Right. And so the State of Vermont is responsible for the people’s safety in Vermont.
AG: At the end of the day, it’s the governor and the administration that’s responsible. If things go to hell at Vermont Yankee, we’re not going to drive to Louisiana to interview the head of Entergy. We’re going to drive to Montpelier and interview Peter Shumlin. So at the end of the day, the buck stops with the governor and his appointee, which is Chris Recchia.
MH: And at the same time, they are - the oversight body is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is a federal agency, right?
AG: Yes.
MH: And there – you have told me before on this program that they have oversight over the nuclear power plants, but at the same time, their job is to sell the nuclear power business.
AG: (9:44) They claim to have oversight on nuclear power, but Maggie and I at Fairewinds, we put together a huge report – 45-page report – on the problems with decommissioning, in February. And they allowed me six minutes to present the report to them, and they sat there like stones in the process. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Brattleboro. They got this report and they haven’t done a thing with it now in half a year. But the nuclear industry wants to relax the nuclear decommissioning standards, and they approached the NRC back in April, and they’ve already had a hearing and they’re already moving down the process of relaxing the standards. So it’s not an agency that’s an honest broker – it’s just not.
MH: And who – in your opinion, who is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission accountable to? Are they accountable to the people or to the nuclear power industry – in fact?
AG: Well, yeah, the papers say that they are a regulator, responsible for safety. But there’s five commissioners and they’re all appointed by Congress and everyone – once a year for five years – and each one gets the approval of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying arm, before they take the job. So here we are, the five people responsible for looking over Vermont Yankee and the other hundred nuclear plants are essentially approved by the nuclear industry. You won’t find someone like me, for instance, or Dave Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists in that oversight role.
MH: Now it seems that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is very much on board of lowering the standards for nuclear power plants. For instance, they’re closing the study on cancer statistics around nuclear power plants.
AG: That’s one of the saddest things to happen this year. There was a program with the National Academy of Science and other scientists to look at cancer statistics around nuclear power plants. And it’s been done in Germany, and the results were awful; that there is an increase in cancer surrounding the nuclear power plants in Germany. Well, the NRC was going to do the same thing here, and just two weeks ago they canceled it and they said well, with budget constraints, we didn’t want to spend the money. So their position is frightening because I wonder what was in the data that was coming in. But they didn’t want to spend the money. But at the same time, they’re entertaining a petition with – a group of scientists have approached them with something called hormesis. And what it means is that radiation is good for you. And more radiation is okay; as a matter of fact, it improves you because the mutations are a positive factor in your life. So they’re out there –
MH: This is true? Hormesis is a study from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission?
AG: Hormesis is a theory presented by rogue scientists – the National Academy of Science does not support it. There’s a report called BEIR – B-E-I-R 7 – and it says no, hormesis is not a real phenomenon. But yet these rogue scientists are saying a little radiation is good for you. Here, have a little bit more. So what they’re trying to do is raise the standards that you and I are subjected to. And at the same time, they’re refusing to analyze the exposure of people around nukes, they’re seriously considering a rule-making hearing raising the radiation standards.
MH: (13:31) Arnie, back several years ago, you and Maggie Gundersen, your wife and one of the founders of – you two are the founders of Fairwinds Energy Education, and you were telling us how the radiation around the school down in Vernon by Vermont Yankee – how they were lowering the standards for radiation around the school. Isn’t that so? So this is something that has been going on forever.
AG: Yes. Vermont Yankee is unique in that it has a school literally right across the street, 4,000 feet away from the nuclear reactor. And what happens during refueling outages is that tritium, which is a radioactive liquid water, boils off from the nuclear fuel pool and goes out the stack and deposits in the neighborhood, including on the roof of the school, including on the playground and all that kind of stuff, so that for the 43 years Vermont Yankee was running, it’s been constantly depositing radioactive tritium on the ballparks and on the roofs of the buildings in the vicinity. And yet no one at the NRC has ever measured that. It’s a phenomenon. It’s actually called rainout. If you think about it, it goes up with the ventilation and mixes with the river fog and then settles down on your windows, on your car, on the grass, on the roof of the buildings. And it’s tritiated water that winds up on the roof of that school. It’s sad.
MH: It is terrible. And nobody from the NRC has measured it, and yet at the same time, two weeks ago, they’re lowering the amount of radiation that is good for us. And they’re saying at the same time that radiation is good for us.
AG: No, they’re actually raising the amount –
MH: Raising. I’m sorry. Raising the amount.
AG: And it comes from Fukushima. What happened at Fukushima was that the number was 100 millirem that you and I could receive from a nuclear plant. And when the accident happened, oh, my gosh, there was probably out to 50 miles and the 100-millirem number wouldn’t hold. So what the Japanese did, they said the new number is 2,000. They raised the safe threshold 20 fold and that allowed them not to evacuate as many people. So the Japanese evacuated 180,000. About 60,000 have come back to their homes. And the problem is that – well, they just had this huge typhoon over there called Etau – E-t-a-u, I think – Etau. And they were on record as saying that our power plant had a leak. One of the pumps didn’t work and some water – radioactive water entered the Pacific. And they’ve been collecting garbage bags full of radioactive soil. And right now, there’s something on the order of 30 million garbage bags in about 100,000 locations throughout Fukushima where people have gone out and collected radioactive soil and put it into garbage bags. And about 300 of those washed out during the storm as well. That’s all Tokyo Electric is focusing on. But they haven’t cleaned up 90 percent of the state, the Prefecture of Fukushima. And this colossal rain that they’ve had has washed all of that down into the villages that were previously clean, and then down into the streams and back out into the Pacific. So they have the press focused on these little problems at Fukushima; meanwhile, the entire state of Fukushima Prefecture is leaking like a sieve and nobody is doing anything about it.
MH: (17:26) And meanwhile, as I’ve read in the press, in the media, they’re moving people back into those zones, right?
AG: Yes. The deal there is really sad. Let me just finish up one thing on this water into the Pacific. The people on the West Coast of the United States have a reason to be worried. It’s not being monitored. You’ve got every river that comes out of the mountains of Japan has been dumping radioactivity into the Pacific. To get back to your question about the people returning, what the Japanese are doing is, the Japanese people don’t want to return to their homes, especially since the standard is 20 times higher than it was when they left. But the Japanese government is saying look, we subsidized you to go for four years and we’ve been paying you thousands of dollars a year to live elsewhere. We’re going to take your subsidy away. But if you come back, we’ll keep paying you. So the people are between a rock and a hard place. There’s no place to work. And they’ve got the issue of how do they live without that stipend and yet what the Japanese government is doing is telling them, go into those highly radioactive areas and live for awhile and we’ll continue to pay you. But if you choose to keep your family out, it’s over. You don’t get any stipend any more. It’s truly a Draconian system.
MH: Arnie, tell us about they’re re-operating these nuclear power plants since I spoke you the last time here on Nuclear-Free Future. They had not opened up the nuclear power plants in January, but since then what has happened?
AG: Japan had 54 nuclear plants before the tsunami hit, and of course, the tsunami knocked out four at Fukushima – actually six at Fukushima, so they’re down to 48 that ever go back on line. And then they began to look at their safety concerns and they said, you know, there’s another 20 here that really have never been safe. So out of the 54, they’re down to maybe 26 that ultimately may go back on line. And what’s happening there is that the banks are continuing to fund workers that sit in the power plants for five years and do nothing. And banks don’t loan money unless they know they’re going to get their money back. And there’s been a deal made between the Abe administration, which is the Prime Minister of Japan, and the banks, saying I’m going to start up those 26 power plants come hell or high water. So the first plant just started up at Sendai, which is about as far away from Fukushima as you can get. It’s actually closer to Korea than it is to Tokyo. It’s on the southwest side of Japan, over protests of three former prime ministers. Think about that. It would be like having George Bush and Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter all stand up and say don’t do it, and have the current president do it anyway. So three prime ministers said this is a really bad idea; let’s go with a non-nuclear future. And still the Abe regime is ramming these down their throat. And the pressure is coming from the banks on the politicians. They have a thing called the DIET, which is like a parliament or like a legislature like Congress. And the pressure that the bankers are putting on the individual politicians in the DIET is astronomical. They want to get these plants running. And Dave Lochbaum in the Union of Concerned Scientists has said all they did was rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. They didn’t make this plant any more robust. All these 26 roughly power plants that will start back up were just reanalyzed to a higher standard. But they didn’t make the walls tougher or the pipes stronger. None of that was done. So it’s frightening – it should be frightening to the people in Japan.
MH: (21:47) And what is that organization there that is like the NRC here, that they supposedly set the standards for the radiation and everything?
AG: They have a national safety agency, but it’s made up of the same people that regulated Fukushima before the tsunami – the regulators have just changed the hat. They have a different charter. They have a more robust charter. And the commissioners started as very, very conscientious people. But what’s happened there is that the Abe administration has replaced commissioners with pro-nuclear people. So the NSA – the Nuclear Safety Agency – is changing and it’s becoming more compliant with what the banks what and what the Abe regime wants.
MH: And this hormesis, where does that come in as an international kind of a push? Is it only in America? Or is this all over?
AG: There’s been a rogue faction in the nuclear scientists for a long time. And the theory is – the correct radiation theory is called LNT – linear no threshold – and radiation – if you get a lot, you’re going to die; if you get a little less, maybe you won’t die; if you get a little less, maybe you won’t die – down to zero. But it’s a straight line. Any radiation is going to increase your risk of dying. And that’s what the National Academy of Sciences says how radiation works. It’s not good for you. But then there’s this group of scientists who say no, down at the low end of the spectrum – down, not at the high end, but down at the bottom, a little bit of radiation is helpful because your genes mutate and mutating genes are good because it makes you as a species superior. Truly frightening.
MH: Arnie, this is Lessons from Fukushima. It was published one year after Fukushima – the Fukushima meltdown. And you have – it was published by Greenpeace, but you authored a lot in this, too. So what do you think about the lessons from Fukushima now? Do you think that people in authority have learned much? The populations in American and in Japan especially have learned a lot because we’ve been scrambling to survive all these horrible things that’s been going on. But unbeknownst to us, the radiation levels are being altered and we’re told not to worry about things. So what –
AG: (24:40) Well, that report is available on the Fairewinds site and it’s also available on the Greenpeace site. And the section I wrote was about something called Regulatory Capture – how the regulators in the industry get so cozy that they don’t really – there’s no differentiation. I could have written that today. Nothing has changed.
MH: And this is February, 2012.
AG: Nothing has changed.
MH: Arnie, what is going to happen?
AG: You know, you don’t have a big tsunami every year and you don’t have a big earthquake every year and a mountain doesn’t tumble down a hillside every year. So that in theory we’ll go another decade before another big one will hit. The statistics are we’ve had five meltdowns in 35 years. TMI, Chernobyl and three at Fukushima over 35 years. So do the math. 35 divided by 5 is 7. About every decade, we’re going to have a big accident. Do we know what it will be? No. If we did, we as a society would fix it. But the record’s clear that something will surprise us; that sooner or later, in any foolproof system, the fools are going to exceed the proofs. And what it will be and where, we don’t know. One of my biggest fears is a plant in California called Diablo Canyon – devil’s canyon – kind of a frightening term. It’s right on an earthquake fault. And when they built it, they didn’t know the earthquake fault was there. So they – but after they built it, they discovered it right offshore, and that earthquake’s fault connects directly into the San Andreas Fault. And the San Andreas Fault connects directly into something called the Cascadia Fault. And the Cascadia Fault has created the biggest earthquake in recorded history – the Native Americans in 1600 talk about a tsunami coming inland through Seattle and flooding the Seattle area from an earthquake. And records in Japan support that; that there was a huge tsunami in Japan with no earthquake. So we know that this Cascadia Fault created the biggest tsunami that’s ever been seen, and yet Diablo Canyon continues to run despite that.
MH: So who is looking out for the public? Well, viewers, we can see that Fairewinds Energy Education is looking out for the public. Arnie Gundersen and Maggie Gundersen have been on this watch for a long time now. And while you say that this could be published today as it is, have you found any kind of positive response from people or governments or populists that is listening to you?
AG: Five years ago, right before the accident – Chernobyl was a long time before that, 20 years before, and people had said well, we know how to do nuclear now, it’s not going to happen again. And what Fukushima showed us is that it is going to happen again and will continue to happen again. The DIET had a study about the accident, and they said it’s not an accident. It was a man-made disaster.
MH: (28:12) Oh, the Japanese DIET –
AG: Yes. The Japanese DIET had its own study. And they don’t call it an accident any more. They call it a disaster. Because an accident is like when an owl hits your windshield. You have no control over it. There were plenty of records to show that a tsunami would hit. There’s plenty of records at the Diablo site to know that an earthquake will hot. When is the question. Will it hit in the next 20 years while the plant’s running? I hope not. But in my world, I live in this high-risk, low probability. And these high-risk accidents are bound to happen sometime. So who’s helping out? I think the public’s perception of nuclear has fundamental changed and the press’s perception of nuclear has fundamentally changed. The politicians are still getting their campaign contributions from the nuclear companies so they’re not changing. And the money has changed. In the last five years, solar has plummeted. The cost of a solar array has plummeted and the cost of a nuclear plant has increased. So we’re seeing nuclear plants shut down now and the press understands that it’s not economical and it’s not safe.
MH: Right. Well, that is very positive, Arnie. I think that we can close our brief conversation on that more positive note. And look forward to a nuclear-free future.
AG: Thank you. I think economics is going to push it for no nukes. I don’t think we’ll see many new nukes being built because they’re just so expensive. And the old nukes are no longer cheap, either. So it’s going to be money that shuts them down.
MH: At the same time, though, from this brief conversation, it is very alarming about the relaxation of standards from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and how that impacts the population right here in the State of Vermont regarding Vermont Yankee, because a lot of us thought – we had great relief when Vermont Yankee closed. But the impact is still very, very strong.
AG: Yeah. Who’s watching the store?
MH: Thank you, Arnie. Come back again. Thank you, viewers. Goodbye for now