Filmed by Ecological Options Network (EON), Fairewinds is excited to share a conversation between EON’s co-directors Mary Beth Brangan, and Jim Heddle with Fairewinds Energy Education’s president and founder Maggie Gundersen and Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen at Point Reyes Station in California. In this “Tell All”, Maggie and Arnie discuss their lives as former nuclear energy insiders, the lies they were told and led to believe, and the subsequent impact of speaking truth to power as whistleblowers. Now, as consultants and educators about the risk of atomic power and its radiation leaks, Maggie and Arnie talk about their role in uncovering the operating risks the San Onofre atomic reactor that necessitated its shutdown. They also share insight of the operating risks at Diablo Canyon, California’s “Last Nuke Standing”. This speaking panel is one of a series based on Fairewinds’ recent speaking tour in California.
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FAIREWINDS ENERGY EDUCATION – Maggie and Arnie Gundersen in Conversation
Emcee: Thanks, folks. Thank everybody for coming. I want to begin with a quote by that famous and celebrated American philosopher, W. C. Fields, who once said “There comes a time in human events when we must seize the bull by the tail and stare the situation squarely in the face.” And that’s what we’re going to do tonight. As the last few days have shown us, we lived in an era dominated by what you might call a clash of terrorisms. They use AK-47’s and suicide belts and Russia and the Saudis and the U.S. and its allies use drones and missiles. Meanwhile, climate change is upon us. Nuclear energy advocates say we must build three new reactors at least a month for the next decade in order to save the planet. Yet each of the 400-plus reactors currently in operation around the world are not only potential Fukushimas in place, but they’re also nuclear weapons in place for some potential group of crazy, ruthless, tech-savvy terrorists. Meanwhile global wealth inequality has never been greater and Hillary says we must save capitalism from itself. Bernie, meanwhile, says that democratic socialism can do that job. And Trump says just build a wall and everything will be fine. But a recent study of three decades of data by liberal mainstream political Scientist Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University found that the U.S. political system has become what they call an oligarchy, where wealthy elites and their corporations rule regardless of which party is in Congress or the White House. The central point, they say, that emerges from our research – and I quote – is that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial, independent impact on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or not independent impact.” And as Gilens explained in a later interview, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. So given this state of affairs, how can we hope to make the solartopian transition to a green, clean-powered world energy system. Well, it’s interesting that a quick look at the history of California’s nuclear-free movement gives us some clues and a great deal of encouragement. President Nixon predicted that a thousand nuclear reactors would bloom in the United States by the year 2000. In the 60’s, PG&E announced plans to build 63 reactors, every 23 miles up and down the California coast. Think about that for a minute. But thanks to informed popular resistance, interventions in the courts and the legislatures and in the streets, that didn’t happen. Only 9 of those 63 projected reactors ever got built. One at Humboldt Bay, one at Pleasanton, two at Rancho Saco, three at San Onofre and two at Diablo Canyon. Today only 2 are still in operation; those at Diablo Canyon. Now from a planned 63 nuclear power plants in the 60’s down to 1 nuclear power plant – 2 reactors but 1 plant in 2015, it’s not a bad track record. And it speaks to the effectiveness and efficacy of informed, nonviolent popular resistance and also as a demonstration of the essential non-viability of nuclear energy, vulnerable as it is to public opposition, industry incompetence and what renowned energy maven Amory Lovins has called a terminal overdose of market forces. And he’s been saying this for three decades. The shutdown of San Onofre in 2013 was hailed as “a seismic event for the nuclear industry.” And the man who said that was in a position to know whereof he spoke, because he had once been an executive in that industry – and he had played an important part in helping to shut down San Onofre. That would be Arnie Gundersen. His partner, Maggie Gundersen, founded and is President of Fairewinds Energy Education, for which Arnie serves as the Chief Nuclear Engineer. The Fairewinds organization has emerged as a major player in informing the public about the risks of nuclear power and the real potential of a solartopian transition. We are very pleased and honored to have Maggie and Arnie with us tonight. They were both once working professionals in the nuclear industry; Arnie as an engineer – nuclear engineer and a top executive; and Maggie as a public relations professional. That’s what makes them today so knowledgeable and effective as educators and consultants to organizations like Friends of the Earth, Mothers for Peace, No Nukes California, Fukushima Response and ??6:52 that are now working to shut down our state’s last nuke standing – that’s Diablo. Fairewinds has also played a key role in supplying hard-to-come-by, up-to-date, accurate information about the ongoing Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster in frequent video reports that are available online and free to download and use as you wish, at Fairwinds.org. I highly recommend that you visit that site and contribute what you can to support their ongoing work. Their motto is “We’ll help keep you informed,” and we’re very fortunate that that’s what they’re going to do for us tonight. Arnie will lead off with a presentation and then we’ll have a conversation with both of them and then a dialogue among us all.
F: (7:52) I just want to mention that Fukushima radiation has been detected right on the shore of Vancouver Island, as well as 100 miles offshore of Eureka in Northern California, and one mile off shore of Del Mar which is almost to San Diego. So it’s swirling around here. There’s a unique signature to the Fukushima radiation and it’s Cesium 134. if you find Cesium 134 along with Cesium 137, which is everywhere from bombing, then you know it’s come from Fukushima Daiichi.
MG: You cannot depend on the government to help you at all. I’ll give you an example, not about this coast, but a lake that’s in Kansas, and there’s a nuclear plant there. And we got very strong tritium releases there. And the water was tested and it tests positive for that. And no one – the utility – they know that tritium has been leaking out, the federal government isn’t reporting it, and that lake is one of the most advertised sport fishing lakes in the country.
M: There are several military nuclear power plants and also additionally, University of California nuclear power plants. How many military nuclear power plants do we have here in California? And has there ever been a meltdown here from that?
MG: Very recently, some studies that showed particular utilities were releasing large amounts of radioactivity and claiming that it was Fukushima Daiichi radioactivity. This is not on the West Coast; this is another state. And the signature tests that he took showed the 134 and 137 Cesium results.
AG: (10:10) There was a nuclear reactor here in California that had what may be the worst nuclear disaster in American history. It may have exceeded Three Mile Island. There was a plant back in 1959 when LA was nowhere near as big – there was a plant at Santa Suzanna run by a contractor named Rockadyme (?10:35) that had a meltdown that severely contaminated what are now the suburbs of LA. At the time, it was farm country and it was totally covered up. And I went to school 10 years later. And we knew nothing about this. It finally came out in the 80’s. So Maggie’s comment about not trusting our government – this is an industry that was born in secrecy with the bomb, and that same mentality pervades it already even now. But it’s not just bomb issues; it’s commercial as well. But I don’t know of other military reactors. I imagine nuclear ships come into San Francisco, etc., but I really don’t know of any other reactors in the state.
Emcee: I know you all have questions but I want to ask you to hold them for a few minutes because we’d like to have a little exchange up here first, and then we’re going to open it to a general dialogue. And I’d like to begin with you, Maggie. Since you both made the transition from inside to outside, I’d like you to talk a little bit about that process and what it’s personal impact on you both in your lives was, just in general.
MG: The process was a drastic change when each of us began to see the lies that we’d been taught. When you’re 17 or 18 or 19 and you’re starting to study at college, you’re going to believe a lot of what your professors and scientists and advisors tell you. And to learn that they either believed in this false mythology or they didn’t know what they were talking about, it’s quite shocking to have to deal with that and realize that we’ve made significant errors. I know Arnie started in Engineering Physics and once he was at RPI on a scholarship, they changed it to a different subject and he had a choice of Nuclear Engineering or Physics – right? And I was a journalist and I came to it from journalism background. And I sat in on all these science classes that the corporation – combustion engineering contractor that built these plants and designed them- I spent hours with the physicists and design engineers and asking questions. And I was paid one full day a week to go to class for a year. And it was just all not true. All not true.
AG: I was on a radio show with Helen Caldicott. Three times during the show, she said “They’re so evil!” And I said, Helen, you can’t say that; I used to be one of them. So I really try not to demonize the other side. I got into nuclear because I believed that it was the solution to the energy crisis. If you remember back in the 70’s, the gas lines and things like that. And there was never any discussion about global warming. These nukes were not built to save the world from global warming; that’s a marketing ploy. But the issue that drove me – first off, the math is intoxicating. It’s an incredible technological achievement to figure out how to split an atom. And I’m sure it’s a power trip, looking back on it. The people on the other side of this argument really believe that they’re trying to change the world. So we’re trying to change the world from people who are trying to change the world. And that’s the dynamic that’s occurring right now. The people on the other side of this argument are incredibly well paid, too, which makes them a little more obtuse to new ideas. The average student right out of college with a nuclear engineering degree starts for around $100,000 a year. So it’s a very lucrative – not only do they believe they’re trying to save the world from global warming, but they’re really paid a boatload of money to make that belief as well. The problem isn’t with the people; the problem is with the technology that can have that one awful experience and wipe out a country. And people will say to me, oh, I know the people at Diablo Canyon, they’re really nice and they send their kids to the local school and they coach soccer and they’re in the church choir – yada, yada, yada. The people at TMI, I knew. They were nice guys and they were in the church choir and they played soccer with their kids, etc. And the people at Chernobyl, same thing; and the people at Fukushima Daiichi. They didn’t fly in from 700 miles away because they knew the plant was not safe. So when you hear that argument that it’s safe or I wouldn’t work there, the people at Fukushima and the people at Chernobyl and the people at TMI said the same thing. And it’s a false argument.
Emcee: A lot of the impact of popular education has come from whistleblowers who’ve come forward and either overtly or covertly let us know what’s going on on the inside and the questions we need to ask in order to educate the public and impact the policy makers. You were a whistleblower and it had a tremendous impact on you and your life together. Can you just summarize briefly what that meant to you?
AG: I’ll do the geeky technical stuff and Maggie can talk something about the emotional trauma. I was a senior vice president and I came in to work one day and this woman said, you know, the film – we were storing really fast, black-and-white film for a special project in the accounting section. She said, you know, the film is fogging in there. And I looked in and I found radioactive material being stored there. I said, what? So I went over to the safe and found four vials of radioactive material being stored in the accounting safe. And I told the president of the company about it and he fired me. So then I went to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I absolutely believed that they would come to the rescue and that they were the men with the white hats. And Maggie did not. Maggie told me, don’t do it. So they covered up the six violations that I had identified. And Maggie was a reporter, and that helped a lot because we did have some local publicity. And John Glenn got involved. Senator John Glenn ran the Senate Oversight Panel that handled Inspector General. So he got an Inspector General report that showed that all of the violations that I had identified were correct – and a couple others – and that the person in charge of the inspection had deliberately falsified the inspection to screw me and not the company. And that my company was giving bribes to the NRC as well. So then we were sued for a million-and-a-half dollars. We were driven into bankruptcy. We lost our house in foreclosure. And now it’s time to get the emotional component.
MG: Well, there’s a part that you left out. Arnie was asked to speak to the Connecticut legislature at its request about whistleblower law because of what had happened to us. And it’s after speaking at the legislature’s request that we were sued for one-and-a-half million dollars because he spoke publicly about the very real violations that had been uncovered. And then Attorney General Bloomenthal in Connecticut – after four times we finally got in to see him – he is now Senator Bloomenthal – and he said I know that what you’re saying is true and Connecticut should protect you, but we can’t afford to do that because then we’d have to protect lots of whistleblowers around the state – on lots of issues, all different technologies. It’s not that I didn’t support Arnie telling the truth or not wanting to bring those issues forward. I will tell over and over again any whistleblower, protect your family first. Get the documents out, make copies, put it away and find another job and then tell the truth. Because if you’re inside, you will be fired, you will be driven through hell, or you will be – as we know some of the nuclear whistleblowers have been sent for psychological evaluations and trumped up psychological crazy evaluations have been done of them by an in-house psychologist. So it’s just – if you’re a whistleblower, get out and save your family and – we lost our house. We lost our house, our pensions, our savings. I filed a bankruptcy. Arnie didn’t. Because if he had filed a bankruptcy, then the case against us would have belonged to the bankruptcy court and we would have been driven totally under. We did have a settlement. We’re allowed to say “for one dollar and other considerations,” but I will tell you we were not made whole. We came out of that having lost. By the time the attorneys took a third and the battle took seven years and we settled because in Connecticut, the way the law is structured, you can have a pro bono attorney – a pro bono attorney who can represent you and they get a third for the regular case. If you appeal, you have to pay all the costs yourself. You have to pay all the attorney’s fees up front – if the other side appeals. And we had – it looked like we were going to win the case, and if the other side appealed, as Arnie said, which they told us they would – we would have been driven further than we already were. We were in final foreclosure on the house and had already filed a bankruptcy and had two little kids.
AG: I was a senior VP and I was in contact with lots of high-powered nuclear attorneys. And one guy said to me – he was a partner at the biggest nuclear law firm in the country – Winston Strong – and he said to me, Arnie in this business, you’re either for us or against us and you just crossed the line. And that was it. There was no work in the nuclear industry for conscientious people. The other – Maggie talked about losing the house – we call ourselves homeless. We have a house now where we’re renting, but the place where we called home, the place where our kids grew up and that special place that in your mind you think of all the happy times, we lost that. So we’re essentially homeless. And we were at a point where the church was bringing Thanksgiving turkeys. If you talk to somebody who’s been through bankruptcy, one of the roughest things they have to do every day is open the mail. And we had this long driveway. It’s like a 1,000-foot driveway. And I’d walk down, and I can remember Monday through Saturday, I hated that walk. It was like my stomach was sick. And Sunday was a wonderful day because there was no mail being delivered. But every once in awhile, you’d open the mailbox and there’d be $500 in it from somebody you didn’t know. It was just there. So there were wonderful things that happened in the midst of all this devastation. The IRS froze our bank accounts and on and on and on. It was really a terrible time. There’s a movie, The Insider, that Russell Crowe movie about the tobacco guy, Wigand. Wigand lost his family. I mean his wife said, screw you, I’m out of here, I’m taking the kids; I’m gone. And Maggie stuck with me. So that’s a big difference. (applause 23:21) Are we answering this? We’re probably answering this with much more detail –
Emcee: No, it’s wonderful because I think really people need to know the impact and the dangers for whistleblowers and make them all more brave to come forward. I want to move on just quickly to your experience at San Onofre. Fairewinds played a big role in terms of helping as consultants. You did reports for Friends of the Earth, who was working with local organizations to help educate the public and bring pressure to bear. What did that process look like to you guys from the inside?
AG: Friends of the Earth – the plan sprung a leak on the last day of January and about a month later, Friends of the Earth contacted me and said, is there something wrong here that we should know about. And I said well, let me think about it for the weekend and I’ll get back to you. And Maggie and I discovered that the steam generators at these huge things – they’re about – hundreds of tons – that they had written a paper – Edison and Mitsubishi, the people that made it – together wrote a paper – a scientific paper in a magazine called “Improving Like-for-Like Steam Generators.” In the nuclear industry, you’re allowed to replace an old steam generator with a new one if they’re the same. And there’s a process, though, if they’re not the same. You have to notify the feds and notify the public and have a public hearing. And they didn’t want to do that. So they claimed that the new steam generators were identical to the old steam generators. And there were so many things different, it was absolutely wrong. Unfortunately, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission bought that hook, line and sinker. So we turned out a report, like I said, we worked for a solid month frantically getting this report done. And we convinced Friends of the Earth to publish it on a Monday morning. And likely as a result of that report, on Monday afternoon, the NRC came out with a conflicting report. But Friends of the Earth had the upper hand because the press had that report for the first half of the day. And so rather than being at the end of the article like you frequently are in these battles, we were at the top of the article, and the NRC and San Onofre were forced to be on the defensive. And we had five other reports over five months. But Friends of the Earth managed to take the offense and force both the NRC and Edison to play defense. I have more, but go ahead.
MG: And the only reason we made progress after that first report, the media took Arnie to task and Jennifer Manfrey, who was head of public relations at Southern California Edison, got on KPFA and said oh, Arnie’s an ex – he’s a whistleblower and he’s a disgruntled employee and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and he’s been teaching math. Like most experts, they also have another job because expert witness testimony isn’t constant. And Edison said, oh, we have 2,000 engineers that have done these calculations and he’s one guy who doesn’t know engineering any more and he doesn’t know math. And they were going on radio, TV, everything, trying to call Fairewinds liars. And a whistleblower came forward and had copies of documents that he had gotten hold of. And he copied everything before he got it out and had it and turned it over to us. And we brought that forward and then a second whistleblower from Canada who knew inside stuff about the condensers and how they were made and that process, contacted us with information that helped. And then a third whistleblower came forward to Friends of the Earth and Senator Boxer. And Senator Boxer, boy, she was fearless. She had talked to Arnie numerous times and really pushed – really pushed. So it was amazing.
AG: (27:58) So this is Diablo’s issue here, too. The same process that both the NRC and Edison didn’t want – this public participation in the licensing process – the NRC let Diablo get away with, too, on the seismic stuff. So with all the changes that happened at Diablo when they found the Hosgri fault and the Shoreline fault – they should have reopened their docket for public participation. And the NRC looked the other way and likely had an inside deal with the public at Pacific Gas & Electric so that the public never got into that process and never really found out the weak points in the design. It plays out across the industry that the last thing both the NRC and the licensee – Diablo or San Onofre – want, is public participation in the licensing process. So what we were able to do at Edison was force that and then got to play offense instead of defense for a little over a year until it shut down.
F: That’s quite a blessing for us here in California. I also wanted to ask you, based on what you just said about what happened in the process with San Onofre and the NRC’s actions there and then in – at the Diablo Canyon, what parallels can you draw with Fukushima Daiichi and that report from the Japanese DIET about what really caused that disaster?
AG: Well, one parallel between Diablo and San Onofre is that active, smart citizenry really counts. If Friends of the Earth had just hired Fairewinds, we would have lost. But there was a core group of people in southern California, just like there’s a core group of people up here in northern California that really make the difference. You know, when you show up with hundreds of people at a public hearing, the NRC and then your elected representatives pay attention. So now onto the Fukushima issue, there was – if you look back over the hundred years before Fukushima, there were about 7 or 8 tsunamis, all of which were over 10 meters, and some were 40 meters; so all of which were at least 30 feet, and some were 120 feet. So these are documented ones. If you go up in the hills around Fukushima, you’ll find these things that look like gravestones. And they’re written in an ancient Japanese dialect from about 1,300 years ago. And they say “Honor your ancestors. Do not build below this point.” So there’s plenty of information. So with that as a history, the tsunami wall at Fukushima Daiichi was built 12 feet high. So that was what the DIET commission was saying. The engineers at Diablo know to do it right, it’s too expensive to compete. The engineers at Fukushima – and actually, they were American engineers. They worked – I worked with them. They were down at San Jose. General Electric designed their nuclear reactors in San Jose. And the design firm that actually built the facility was in Manhattan. And I worked with all those guys. So this is an American design, not a Japanese problem. It was American assumptions that caused this meltdown. Those same people worked on Diablo, and those same people worked on San Onofre. That mentality of – they call it the maximum credible accident – it’s really not. It’s the maximum accident we can afford to mitigate against. And anything more than that, we can’t afford it so we’re going to consider it not credible. And so Diablo’s got this issue of the seismic acceleration in the ground. And San Onofre had it with the steam generators. And as soon as the public gets involved in that process, then it all falls apart. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is more than willing to keep the public out of the process rather than have any kind of transparency.
F: Can you say something about the international agencies like the IAEA and its relationship with the World Health Organization, for instance.
MG: Well, I can tell you about the IAEA’s charter – the UN Charter at the IAEA –
F: Tell what that stands for.
MG: Okay. International Atomic Energy Agency was chartered by the United Nations. And this charter was to promote nuclear power. It was never chartered as a regulator; its charter is to promote nuclear power around the world.
AG: So the links to the World Health Organization is that there’s a Memorandum of Understanding between the World Health Organization and the IAEA that the World Health Organization will not publish anything about nuclear power unless the IAEA approves. So at the top of the food chain is an organization – you can look it up – it’s article number 2 of their charter says that they are to promote nuclear power. And that’s the people that are regulating the World Health Organization on nuclear.
F: And also giving you statements about how many people – how the effects of Fukushima Daiichi disaster aren’t going to result in any problems. That’s who is saying that.
Emcee: So I want to open it to dialogue with all you folks but I have one more little question to ask. We have at Diablo Canyon an aging nuclear plant on 13 intersecting earthquake faults run by a company that has an almost you have to say virtually criminal record over its entire history and it’s under 30-some current indictments from the federal government for misfeasance and malfeasance in handling the safety at the recent San Bruno gas explosion. And there was even a recent article in The Chronicle a week or so ago saying that the executives at Diablo Canyon have so much on their plate that they’re not sure they want to go ahead with trying to force a license extension for these dangerous plants. So we may be very close to shutting them down. But what do you think people ought to know and do about this push now to shut down the last nuke standing in California?
AG: (35:15) If you count on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to shut Diablo down, it’ll never happen. The way to attack Diablo is through the water permits and things like that. I’ll give you an example about counting on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at San Onofre that’s directly applicable to Diablo, unfortunately. Friends of the Earth filed a 2.206 petition, which is the public wanted to open a licensing process. And that was in the summer of 2012. And the NRC finally got around to having a hearing six months later in January of 2013. And I was their expert. It was like a 2-hour presentation and it was one of our better ones. During the presentation, the chairman of the review board fell asleep twice. Now there’s something to be said – now the NRC is required to have an answer to the petition in six months after the review. So in 2013 – January, 2013, we had the review board. And the NRC didn’t answer in all of 2013 and in all of 2014, and just answered now a couple of months ago in 2015. And their answer was, we’re not going to answer because the plant is shut down and your petition is moot. My position is, it’s the same people running it who lied to you in 2012 and 2011 and before that, and now you’re not going to seek some sort of legal redress against these guys? So their position is that it was moot because the plant had already shut down. So don’t count on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to be the one to not give a license extension. It’s got to happen with your governor and your elected representatives. And I think Maggie wanted to say one other thing.
MG: Well, it’s really up to all of you because how the public worked – individual people with legislators throughout southern California – is how the information got out there. And city council after city council voted against any restart of San Onofre. That was democracy in action. We’re not involved in that process, Arnie and I. Our charters – both charters – for Fairewinds Associates and for Fairewinds Energy Education. Fairewinds Associates is paralegal services and expert witness testimony. And we are now allowed to lobby at all or do anything like that. We can be retained to give an expert presentation, but that’s it. And Fairewinds Energy Education also – I sign for any of our grant money from foundations that we will not lobby or call for action. And so we don’t. But that’s up to all of you. You have our work. It’s open on the website and there are reports – whenever we do any, we put them up. And materials and videos are there. Which city council was it – San Clemente? – that had us do a whole video for them? Yes. San Clemente City Council had us do a video that was shown at a big public meeting and talk about everything. So there’s lots of ways to get this information out there, and you have valuable resources right here with your organizations. But it means really buttonholing your state and your state legislators and your city councilors and making them see. They have a lot on their plate. It takes a lot. I was on Public Works Commission in Burlington for five years. It takes a lot to manage city infrastructure and state infrastructure and they’re not going to come looking for you and knocking at your door.