In December 2015 and during the heat of the controversy in California over whether to shut down or re-license the state’s last operating nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon, Fairewinds President Maggie Gundersen and Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen were in California presenting to various colleges and universities. In this video, courtesy of EON News (Ecological Option Network), Arnie Gundersen speaks to an audience about the risk of atomic power at California Polytechnic State University. The ominous title of the presentation, “Expect the Unexpected”, is perhaps foreshadowing as certain audience members employed by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E, utility owner of Diablo Canyon) attempt to denounce the inconvenient truths of Arnie’s speech during the presentation’s follow-up Q&A. The PG&E trolls’ irrelevant and rude query comes back to haunt them as audience members come to the defense of Fairewinds’ truth-speak. Thanks to Ecological Options Network (EON) for producing the video.
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EMCEE: (:49) Welcome to the Electrical Engineering Department for an impromptu presentation that we’re really pleased to have. My name is Braun. I’m a professor in the Electrical Engineering Department, and together with the Physics Department and the Mothers for Peace, we were able to somehow get this chance to happen that Arnie Gundersen would come and give a talk here on campus. So we’re really pleased to welcome him with decades of experience with the nuclear power industry and we’re here to learn what he has to say. So thank you for coming. (applause)
AG: Thank you all for coming. I’m standing here looking at computer engineering. And when I went to college, that didn’t even exist. It’s an exciting time to be an engineer. I went to Rensselaer and I wanted to get into engineering physics because I wasn’t quiet an engineer and I wasn’t quite a physicist and that was a great combination. And my freshman year, they canceled the program which drove me into nuclear engineering, and then as nuclear engineering enrollments declined in the 80’s, they renamed the department Engineering Physics. So if I had either gotten there a couple years earlier or a couple years later, I would have been in the discipline I wanted to be in. So anyway, I have a bachelors and masters in nuclear and I was a Senior VP in the nuclear industry, and over my 45 years, I’ve seen five meltdowns. And I wanted to share the experience from those five meltdowns with you. So the five lessons that I think we should learn from the five meltdowns are first, that safety systems will fail. The second is that emergency plans will fail. The third is that radiation is going to enter the groundwater in the event of these failures. Fourth is that people will die; and the fifth is that the risk is grossly underestimated. The first one, that safety systems will fail. When we design a nuclear power plant, designers come up with this term – maximum credible accident or the design bases accident. And they come up with criteria that they build a power plant to. An example is that at Fukushima Daiichi, the designers decided that the tsunami wall should be four meters high – about twelve feet – and later they raised it to five meters, about 15, 16 feet. So that was the design basis tsunami. An example at Diablo would be the ground acceleration on the power plant. It’s 4/10th of the acceleration of gravity. Later it’s been shown to – claimed to be shown to be able to handle a .7G earthquake. But that’s a design bases. One of the problems that’s happened that I’ve seen in my career is that in every one of these meltdowns, the design bases has been exceeded. So I really can’t consider the design bases any more. It seems to me – it’s not like Moses walks down from the mountain and chiseled in stone are “Don’t worry, a tsunami is not going to exceed 15 feet and you can base that as the criteria for your design.” The tsunami that hit Fukushima Daiichi was 45 feet high and the design bases tsunami was 15 feet. So clearly, design bases are not the worse that mother nature can throw at you but in fact they’re the worse that you can afford to mitigate against. And it really, to my way of thinking, is a financial decision that drives what the design bases can be. And so when we look at safety systems failing, all of these disasters exceeded the design bases. (5:13) So the first one is Three Mile Island. This is a picture of the core at Three Mile Island. It was taken by engineers about a year and a half after the meltdown occurred. And to give you an idea how ingrained in engineers’ heads the impossibility of a meltdown really is, I know the engineers that ran this camera into the reactor. And they put the camera down through a hole in the reactor vessel and they went down the appropriate length to find the core and they didn’t see anything. So they pulled the camera back out saying it can’t be, something’s wrong with our measurements and they re-measured everything. They went down a second time, put the camera down to the right distance and they didn’t see anything. And they pulled the camera back out and re-measured everything again. They put the camera down a third time and they didn’t see anything. And then and only then, a year and a half after all this radiation was released, they said, oh, my gosh, we had a meltdown. And they pushed the camera down further and this is what they saw. So the second disaster in my lifetime was – I should talk about this first – this is the containment pressure at TMI post accident. And you’ll see one exciting mark on that – that blip in the middle. Around 1 o’clock, there was a hydrogen explosion. It was so violent that the control room shook and the control room operators noticed it and in fact, this spike came off of a pressure indicator in the control room. If you look at the back end of the spike, here versus here, what that indicates is that before the spike, the containment was holding pressure. It’s at a positive pressure. After the spike, it never goes positive again? Why is that? The containment leaked. And what I did when I was an expert on the trial at Three Mile Island is I went around the containment and I found three radiation detectors that hadn’t already gone off scale. And at around 1 o’clock, they all went off scale. So I think there’s ample evidence to show that the containment leaked. We had an expert on the trial, a guy named Doctor Wrightglad (?7:42) at University of Bridgeport, who, based on the shape of that curve, estimated that between 8 and 12 percent of the containment volume leaked in the next 6 hours. So that’s an example of design bases. The design bases leak for a containment is 1 percent in the first day and a tenth of a percent afterward. And here is Three Mile Island leaking at 12 percent. So the next disaster was Chernobyl, a couple years later – about 7 years later. And the picture on the right is the molten core. It’s called the elephant’s foot, sort of looks like it. It was taken by a robot and the radiation exposure off of that would be – if it were in this room, we would be dead in less than a minute or two. It’s incredibly radioactive, even today, 30 years after the accident. So this is the molten core that slumped down through the reactor and into the basement. But the interesting thing here is at this point, it’s dry. It’s not in contact with groundwater. Again, the engineers never expected that the people on the shift that night would do the things that they did to cause a really rapid run-up in the power of the reactor. That was beyond the design bases. The next one is Fukushima Daiichi. And the three white blocks are from left to right, Daiichi 2, Daiichi 3 and Daiichi 4. There’s a little fuzzy spot on the far left and that’s Daiichi 1, which had already exploded. I want you to take a look at the middle box. Right in that middle frame you’ll see a flash coming off the middle box. And if you measure the size of that flash compared to the size of the building, you can get an estimate of the speed at which that explosion is occurring. (9:56) There’s two different kinds of explosions: There’s a deflagration and there’s a detonation. Unit 1 had a deflagration. And what that means is that the shockwave from the explosion travels relatively slowly. It travels less than the speed of sound. A detonation, on the other hand, is a shockwave that travels faster than the speed of sound. And a detonation shockwave does a heck of a lot more damage than a deflagration shockwave. Neither shockwave is expected to occur as part of the design bases of a power plant. These were caused by hydrogen buildups, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says that hydrogen buildups can’t occur. So in my career, we’ve had five meltdowns, four of which – TMI and the three meltdowns at Fukushima – after the meltdown began to occur, hydrogen gas was liberated. But yet that’s not part of the design basis, and the detonation shockwave is not, either. There’s not a containment in the world – not Diablo, not the more modern AP1000 designs – there’s not a containment in the world that can withstand what you’re looking at – a detonation shockwave. So after this, it’s all ballistic. The even has happened. But I’ll show you 20 slides in a row that take about 3 seconds in real life to watch the damage that can be caused by a detonation shockwave. (slides from 11:37 to 11:50) That’s pieces of the roof falling down. (slides continue 11:50 to 11:55) Another example of containments leaking – now remember, Three Mile Island leaked, you can tell by the shape of the curve after the explosion – this is a Tokyo Electric infrared picture of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3. And it was taken a month after the accident. And the big blotch that kind of catches your eye in the center is the spent fuel pool, which is boiling but it’s mixing with air and the gases over the spent fuel pool are at about 62 degrees centigrade, about 130 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the spent fuel pool. But if you look right next to it – and this is TEPCO data now – if you look right next to it, that’s 128C – and because this is an engineering school, I don’t have to explain that water boils at 100. So what you’re seeing there is not steam. It’s hot radioactive gases. There might be some water vapor in it but it’s hot radioactive gases. It’s another example of a gross containment failure that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t assume can happen in their design bases for any power plant. So I guess my conclusion, based on Three Mile Island and the three meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi are that the design bases that America uses and the world uses really don’t adequately address containment failure. Another example of design bases that was exceeded is what we call the LOUHS (13:41) or loss of the ultimate heat sink. And along the water at Fukushima Daiichi were pump houses. There’s four pump houses for Daiichi 1, 2, 3 and 4. And they’re designed to suck cold water out of the ocean to cool things like the diesels and to cool things like the suppression pool which had water in it that was needed to be re-circulated through the nuclear reactor. So these pumps were destroyed by the tsunami. So what does that mean? We’ve all heard that the tsunami came in unimaginably high, flooded the diesels, the diesels didn’t work, and it was because somebody was dumb enough to put the diesels in the basement that we had this disaster. That’s not true. Even if the diesels were sitting on top of the Empire State Building, they would have been destroyed anyway by this thing called the loss of the ultimate heat sink. Now when you blow the water pump on your car, the engine seizes up. When you blow the water pump on an emergency diesel, the emergency diesel seizes up. So the emergency diesels at Fukushima Daiichi would not have worked even if they weren’t flooded because the tsunami took out the cooling pumps along the ocean. (14:56) It’s interesting, a whistleblower contacted me and he said we knew that was going to happen and on Fukushima Daini, we changed the design and we put in what’s called submersible pumps, but we never went back to Daiichi and made that change. So moving on to the second point was that emergency plans will fail. Let’s talk about Three Mile Island briefly. I was an expert on the Three Mile Island trial and my point was that there should have been an evacuation based on the plant’s written procedures, at about 7:30 in the morning of the first day of the disaster. And what happened was that the plant overrode its own procedures. There was a radiation monitor in the containment and if that monitor exceeded a certain level, you were supposed to evacuate and they overrode their own procedures. Afterward, Governor Thornberg was not advised of the high radiation in the containment; nor was he advised of that hydrogen explosion I told you about. He was told that everything was under control. As an expert for the plaintiffs, I was arguing that it was wrong, that the staff of Three Mile Island should have notified the governor and the NRC. The NRC didn’t know about that, either. And that had they known the information that was available to the plant staff, an evacuation would have occurred on the very first day; as a matter of fact, three hours after the disaster began. Well, I also was a keynote speaker at Penn State last year for the 35th anniversary of that disaster and Governor Thornberg and I were the two keynotes. He was the first keynote, I was the last and there were speakers in between. And I got to talk to Governor Thornberg after his speech. And I said you know, Governor, you were lied to by the people that ran Three Mile Island. And he paused and he looked at me for about 10 seconds and he said, yeah, you’re right, I was lied to. I said, do you realize there was just one barrier between you and a real disaster in that entire Susquehanna Valley. And he said yeah, I realize that. And I said if that one barrier, which was the containment – it did leak but it didn’t completely fail – so I said to him do you realize if that one barrier had failed, you would have had an unmitigated disaster on your hands, and he said yeah, I know. And I said well, knowing that, would you have ordered an evacuation. And he said no, I was much more worried about the public being afraid than evacuating people. Ultimately, two days later, on the advice of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, he had a voluntary evacuation of women and children. But those two days that were make-or-break time, all the iodine was released and all of the noble gases were released. And we’ll get to the consequences of that a little later. So that was one example of emergency planning. Of course, we all know about Chernobyl. And in Chernobyl, the government was running the reactor and did not evacuate the nearby towns, let alone Kiev. And actually, didn’t even talk to Moscow for the better part of half a day. The world became aware of the disaster at Chernobyl because workers in Sweden were walking in through the parking lot, which was contaminated, and into a Swedish power plant, and they were coming to work contaminated. When they went through the radiation portal, they came to work contaminated. That’s how the world found out about Chernobyl. And thank God for Voice of America. Voice of America got on and told the people in the Eastern Bloc to take iodine. And the health effects are significant at Chernobyl already, but were it not for the Voice of America warning people about the need to take iodine pills, it would have been much worse. And of course, Fukushima Daiichi, the Japanese did not evacuate out anywhere near far enough. When they did evacuate, they sent people into the direction where the radioactive plume was. And they had iodine pills but the towns didn’t release them until the government said it was okay which was 7 days later. So we have all these plans; they just aren’t implemented. And so I conclude that emergency planning will fail when you’ve got a disaster. The next point is that radiation will enter the groundwater. TMI is the exception. There’s water in the basement but it has not entered the groundwater yet. But of course, Chernobyl radiation has entered the groundwater, and they’re building a huge, 5 billion dollar cover which they will slide over the power plant in order to keep the elements away from the nuclear core. But the fear is that unless – and that cover is designed to last for 100 years. After 100 years, they’ve got to go in and get that core or else they’ll begin to contaminated the water supply for Kiev and other things. And of course, then we’ve got Daiichi and Daiichi – the nuclear reactor cores have melted through the nuclear reactors. Think of a pressure cooker. They’ve melted through the pressure cooker and they’re lying on the floor of the nuclear containment. It’s uncertain how far they’ve gone down but we know they’re working their way in now through chemical reactors, but initially through an enormous amount of heat, and they’re working their way down through this concrete. But it doesn’t matter if the containment has been breached because the core is melted down. What happened was that the heat and the radiation levels and the high temperature have destroyed all of the rubber gaskets that go around the pipes and the wires that go in and out of the containment. So the containment is leaking through the sidewalls where these pipes come in. Now the integrity of the rubber caulking around the pipe is shot and water’s coming in and water’s going out. Now we’ve known that in the United States for 30 years. I was pointed to a report back from 1982 where the Nuclear Regulatory Commission identified that as a real possibility that you could get the heat plus the pressure plus the radiation levels were so significant that the rubber gaskets are damaged to the point where water’s coming in and water’s going out. We have this term China Syndrome, which is where the nuclear reactor core melts down to China. And I think if you’re in Japan, it doesn’t go to China, it goes somewhere else. But that’s not an engineering term. But it doesn’t matter if the core has melted through the containment. I don’t think it has. But there’s so much in-leakage into the containment and out-leakage, that effectively we’re contaminating the groundwater as well. Daiichi’s released the equivalent of 25,000 of these truckloads of radioactively contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean already. And in an attempt to mitigate it, the Japanese have built a wall and that wall is now failing from the pressure of the groundwater. We really shouldn’t be surprised but the wall has buckled about 10 inches at the top already. So we’ve released 25,000 tractor-trailer loads of radioactively contaminated water into the Pacific already, with more to come. Now the real lesson from Daiichi is what if that happened on the Danube or the Rhine or the Mississippi or the Missouri. The Pacific is a big place so this radiation is being diluted. (23:34) We used to – what I learned is dilution is the solution to pollution. But of course, even now with a huge body of water to dilute the radiation, we’re still seeing it off the California coast. So that containment will leak into groundwater should be a factor in the design of future power plants. And we are actually lucky that this is leaking into the Pacific and not the Rhine or the Danube or the Mississippi. Because you’d have to shut the Mississippi down. Or the Great Lakes. There’s 40 power plants along the Great lakes. The health consequences to a huge portion of the population of continents can be jeopardized by a meltdown. And should you be worried, my position is yes, the consequences are grossly underestimated of water (sic) entering the groundwater. The next one is that people will die. This is Dr. Steve Wing. Steve is an epidemiologist at UNC – University of North Carolina – and he and I spoke at the New York Academy of Medicine’s conference on the Daiichi disaster. It was the 2nd anniversary – 2013. Now Steve was an epidemiologist who plotted the cancer data from Three Mile Island. So the other part of this picture shows a white line going from the upper left to the lower right. That’s the Susquehanna River. And if you look along the Susquehanna River – this is a peer-reviewed report, by the way – look along the Susquehanna River, you’ll see red and then to the sides of it you’ll see green. And what Steve was able to show is that the lung cancer incidence is twice as high or more in the river valley compared to the hills. Why is that? There was a temperature inversion that day and the air sat in the valley and it didn’t make it up into the hillsides. So Steve used published data to come up with this. And this lung cancer data was the only data Steve could get his hands on, but it clearly shows a doubling, if not more, of cancer incidence for the people that lived in the Susquehanna Valley. This is Dr. Alexey Yablokov (?26:16) Yablokov was the science advisor to Boris Yeltsin after Gorbachev and the fall of the Soviet Union. So this was when we had Russia, and he was Boris Yeltsin’s science advisor. And Yablokov has written a book along with two other people that has been published by the New York Academy of Medicine. And he’s calculating something on the order of a million cancers as a result of the Chernobyl disaster. Now the IAEA and the nuclear industry is saying about 40 people. So clearly, there’s a – and I should go back to Three Mile Island – if you go up on the NRC’s web page, they’ll say nobody died after Three Mile Island. What happened was that the insurance companies settled. In today’s dollars, they gave away about $100 million to people that had loss. But as part of the deal, they had to sign that they wouldn’t talk about it. So the data that we’ve got out of Three Mile Island – the epidemiological data is only wings and all of the people who suffered losses were compensated to the tune of – in today’s dollars, about $100 million. So Yablokov is up here at a million people roughly, and the IAEA is around 40. Clearly, there’s a huge difference. And it depends on who you talk to. This is Dr. Uri Vandishevski (?27:55) Uri discovered something called Chernobyl Heart. He was tinkering with mice in a lab and he noticed that when mice were given cesium, it affected the way their hearts grow. And your heart – I’ve learned a lot about medicine over the years – the number of cells in your heart is established when you’re extraordinarily young. And it doesn’t grow after that, which is one of the reasons why we don’t have a lot of heart cancer is because the cells are not dividing. But they do get – like in infants, their hearts are deformed and sometimes fatally deformed. When Vandichevski saw this happen at Chernobyl – he published a paper about Chernobyl hearts in the children around there – they arrested him and threw him in jail for 7 years. Ultimately, the EU prevailed and he was released from jail after 3 years, but all of his data and all of his specimens have been destroyed. So it’s tough to be a scientist in what was the Eastern Bloc in Ukraine and surrounding areas when you know that when you publish you’re going to be thrown in jail. The charges were that he had accepted money from his students to inflate their grades. No students testified against him but two parents said that it happened. His bank account reflected no increase in money, and yet on the basis of oral testimony of two parents with no evidence, the guy was thrown in jail for 7 years. So thank God for his colleagues in the EU for turning that around. So when you look at the data that the IAEA – International Atomic Energy Agency – is evaluating it on, they don’t include people like Vandishevski and all of his colleagues who are obviously a little bit afraid to publish. The last point is how we estimate risk. In the nuclear industry, if you assume that a containment doesn’t leak and you assume that people can go back to their homes in a very short period of time, that’s the cost of the accident or routinely incredibly underestimated. The NRC assumes the loss of a life at around $3 million. The EPA assumes $6 million. So the NRC undervalues the loss of a life compared to other federal agencies. And also the loss of property. If you believe that the farmers’ fields are going to be farmed the next year, the economic losses are essentially insignificant. But if you look at Fukushima where we can’t – there’s 160,000 people displaced for five years, away from the land that they used to grow rice on, those costs are grossly underestimated. So the cost of a disaster are underestimated. But the other piece of it is that the probability of an accident is grossly underestimated as well. For instance, if you look at five meltdowns in 35 years. Three Mile Island was roughly 35 years ago. 35 divided by 5 is 7. So about once a decade, history tells us there’s going to be a nuclear meltdown. Well, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will say that the probability of a meltdown is around 1 in a million per reactor year. So there’s 400 nuclear reactors. A million divided by 400 says that there should be one meltdown every 2,500 years. Well, if you’re a policymaker, you can bet that your district will be safe if the chance is one in 2,500 years. But if you thought that somewhere in the world, a nuclear meltdown was going to occur once a decade, policymakers might have a different view of the problem. This is why the analysis is wrong, in my opinion. We have this thing called probabilistic risk assessment – PRA – I call it Pray. But the probabilistic risk assessment is like what are the chances of drawing an ace in a deck of cards. There’s 4 aces, there’s 52 cards. It’s about 1 in 13. We know that. That’s good statistics. But if you don’t know how many cards are in the deck, if you don’t know how many cards are in the pile, you can’t make that determination. And that’s the problem with nuclear power plants. We don’t know all the things we don’t know. We don’t know all the possible ways that a nuclear power plant can fail. And so what that does is has the effect of underestimating the probability of a meltdown and of course, we underestimate the consequences of a meltdown. When you assume the containment leaks 1 percent on the first day and then a tenth of a percent after that, that’s a lot different than what the NRC said Daiichi, according to an NRC telephone call two weeks after the accident, was leaking at 300 percent a day. So essentially, every 8 hours the radioactive gases in Daiichi were being released. Well, if you use that number, you’ll come up with an entirely different scenario than you would if you use the much less conservative numbers that we use when we license and when we re-license a power plant today. So again, the points were accidents will happen. I’ve been saying sooner or later in any foolproof system, the fools are going to exceed the proofs, and it’s happened five times in my career. The groundwater will be contaminated. Emergency plans, even if they’re written well won’t be implemented, and that the consequences are grossly underestimated. I got to know Naoto Kan who was the Prime Minister of Japan when the disasters happened at Fukushima. And by the way, he’s an engineer. He was not a nuclear engineer but he was an engineer. And we were on several speaking tours together. And Kan is vilified in Japan for not evacuating soon enough, especially in Fukushima Prefecture, which is like a state – a prefecture. So in the state of Fukushima, he’s vilified. And I said to him, Mr. Prime Minister, I put myself in your shoes and no one was telling you the truth. I said Tokyo Electric was not telling you the truth, nor was your own regulator, METI – the ministry of trade and industry. So given the information you were getting, I think you made the right decision. And he turned to me and he said thank you – because not many people feel he made the right decision – he said thank you. He said the information I received was neither timely nor accurate. So when your policymakers are – and the same thing happened to Thornberg at Three Mile Island; the same thing happened to the Soviets at Chernobyl and Naoto Kan in Japan. When the people operating the plant don’t tell you the truth and when the people regulating the plant help to cover it up, you have a problem. And you’re not going to implement the evacuating plans soon enough. And then of course, the last piece of that was that the frequency of a disaster is underestimated and the consequences are underestimated, which drives plants to be re-licensed for an extra 20 years and it drives decisions to build new nuclear power plants as well. The latest generation of power plants, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a set of assumptions in them that talks about, you won’t even need an emergency plan because they’re sure that none of the radiation will leave the site boundary. And we’re seeing that now down at San Onofre where San Onofre has been allowed to eliminate its emergency planning because while it’s got the equivalent of 700 nuclear weapons worth of fuel in the spent fuel pool, the reactor is not running any more. So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has allowed them to collapse the emergency planning zone down to just the site itself. But at the same time, they’re still allowed to maintain their Price Anderson insurance. And Price Anderson insurance means that if there is a need to evacuate, you and I are going to pay the cost. So my position is, if you want to collapse the emergency plan down to the site boundary, like we are planning to do on these small modular reactors that are 20 years in the future, or like we’re doing on plants once they’ve shut down, the utility that owns them should be required to renounce its Price Anderson insurance as well. Why should the citizens pick up the risk and the cost be minimized for the people that own it? (38:11) My last point is I spoke with Naoto Kan and he said Japan’s existence as a country was jeopardized. And I’ve read Gorbachev’s memo where Gorbachev blames the collapse of the Soviet Union not on Perestroika but on Chernobyl. So think about that. You’re dealing with a technology that, when it goes wrong, has the chance of wiping out a country overnight. And the two people that face that – Chernobyl with Gorbachev and Naoto Kan in Japan, plus three other previous prime ministers in Japan, all say that going down a nuclear route in the future is a mistake. So the people that have looked the dragon in the eye have come away convinced that this is not a viable solution for future energy problems. But that’s the topic of another talk. So I’ll leave it open to questions. (39:15)
QM: I have a question and probably there’s not an answer but I think the science and the technology is on the side of everything that you said and I think the risks are there, the risks are great and that sort of thing. And yet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they make these sort of outlandish statements about the risk and that sort of thing, and they always get away with it. But the science never supports what they say. What can be done about it? Is there anything that can be done about something like that? I’m also an engineer and as an engineer, it frustrates me to see that sort of thing.
AG: I can give you two examples to support that before I give you a potential answer. I was Friends of the Earth’s expert on San Onofre and we filed something called 2.206 petition and in July of 2012 – the tubes blew in January of 2012. So we filed – and the rights of citizens to petition the NRC is through this thing called the 2.206. And so it took the NRC six months to convene a petition review board, so now we’re at the January of 2013 and I had a two-hour PowerPoint presentation in front of the petition review board. And the chairman of the petition review board fell asleep twice during my presentation. So there’s a problem there. And then the NRC is required to let you know six months afterward, and what happened is that they waited until 2015 to release their decision. And their decision was that since the plant had already shut down, the issue was moot and they didn’t have to make a decision. So that’s an example of what we all run into in this industry. The problem in my opinion is that the commissioners – the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is run by five commissioners. And the five commissioners are appointed by congress. And the chairman is of the political affiliation of whatever party has the White House. So there’s five guys; either two dems and three Republicans or two Republicans and three Dems. But they’re appointed by congress. But every one of them is vetted by NEI – Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying group for nuclear power. So you don’t get into the commissioners role unless you’re approved by the lobbying group that’s pushing nuclear power. So the five people at the top have – they’ve already been signed, sealed and delivered by the nuclear industry. Then you get down to the staff level. At the worker bee level, I think there’s a lot of really honest engineers and scientists. But to work your way up into management, decisions become co-opted. And to work your way into high management where when you leave you wind up with a great job at a utility, you wind up thinking like utilities. There’s a concept that’s called regulatory capture. And there’s actually a book on it, an old book on it, but it seems like when a regulator gets started, they have the best intentions. But over time, the people at the agency who are supposed to regulate, build a wall around it. And bureaucrats being bureaucrats don’t mind being trapped in the wall. But what you can do about it is contact your congressmen and your senators and say it’s unacceptable. I applied three times to be on a thing called the advisory committee for reactor safeguards – 17 wise people. There’s 4,000 people and 17 wise people and these 5 commissioners. So I applied to be – and I had 56 environmental organizations supporting my application. And it was rejected. So it just – you’ve gotten this structure that dates back from the Manhattan Project and things like that and this issue of secrecy and a priesthood – the term is an atomic priesthood, which is actually – was invented by a pro-nuclear person back in the 60’s and I think quoted by Barry Commoner, but this atomic priesthood feels that only it can read the text in Latin and the rest of us have to just go along. It’s frightening. And the only solution is to lobby congress, and frankly, the nuclear industry spent $670 million on lobbying in the last 10 years. That’s $600 on lobbyists and $70 million in direct campaign contributions to various senators and congressmen. So one way to change it is to come up with $670 million. But short of that, it’s a stacked deck. The times the commission has shut a nuclear power plant down have been zero. The one they sort of claim happened was the Susquehanna back in the 80’s. And what happened there was the plant was running and the resident inspector walked into the control room at night and found all five reactor operators asleep. And that was enough for them to shut it down for three years until they got their act together. But short of that, when a power plant has already shut down, some of them they haven’t allowed to start back up until they clean up things, but it’s never been that the Nuclear Regulatory commission said you’ve got to shut down. The General Accounting Office did a study on – I’m sorry, I can’t remember the reactor – but one of these that had shut down. And they said the NRC had 54 items that had to be cleaned up before they started up. And the GAO said 44 of them you knew about before it ever shut down. Why didn’t you shut it down earlier? And of course, there was no response on that. So it’s an uphill fight for citizens to have an impact on the agency. This 2.206 process that I talked about, every single 2.206 has been rejected. Some of them are, they accept a tiny piece and then reject the lion’s share of it. When I was a nuclear whistleblower in the 90’s and what our family went through is time for another speech, but the inspector general did a study of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and 700 people had filed whistleblower complaints with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Two percent were investigated. So of the 700, 14 were investigated and three fines were issued and nobody went to jail. It’s an uphill battle.
FQ: And isn’t a large part of the NRC’s budget from the nuclear industry?
AG: The question was how is the NRC funded. 90 percent of the NRC’s budget is from taxes on the power plants that it oversees. If you’re in trouble – if a power plant’s in trouble and an inspector has to be flown out, the NRC charges $285 an hour for that inspector to be there. But only 10 percent of the budget is paid for out of taxes. And now with power plants shutting down – five power plants have shut down in the last two years, with two more scheduled to shut down in the next two years – the NRC staff realizes that oh, my God, if we have fewer power plants, there’s going to be fewer of us. So I think there’s pressure on the staff to continue with the rubber stamp.
MG: (47:33) Wasn’t there a time that Congress was – that the NRC was pushing more enforcement action and didn’t Congress intervene?
AG: Yeah. In his book – I know Shirley Jackson was the Commissioner – Pete Dominichi (?47:56) was the had of the oversight panel. And he actually talks about this – he’s proud in his book that he threatened Jackson with cutting her budget unless she was easier on the power plants. And son of a gun, she became easier on the power plants. So it’s in Dominichi’s book. He actually has a rather lengthy discussion of how proud he was to get the NRC to cow tow to the industry.
MQ: Hi. My name’s Steven Duwalick (?48:29) I’m a community member here. I grew up in nuclear industry and been a reactor operator and all of that for 30 years. I come to these things and listen all the time. It’s always interesting. I like helping people and I’m happy to answer any questions for anyone after the meeting. But today I have one question and I just want to comment real quickly. Quality of information is amazingly important nowadays. It’s very, very easy to blur the lines between truth and lie and walk the gray area in between. And I have rarely seen such an eloquent speaker, such an educated person blur those lines so much in my experience. I could find very little of what you said that I could 100 percent agree with – very little. And very much of what you said I could agree with almost at all – none – almost a zero. So my only question for you is how much do you get paid to do this.
AG: I’m on social security. I get nothing.
MQ: But you’re running this business. It’s a nonprofit.
AG: Yeah. I work for free.
MQ: How much do you get paid?
MQ: Well, my salary – I have my own business on the side and I do work for PG&E but that’s irrelevant.
MQ: Why? Well, it’s relevant what he makes but it’s irrelevant what you make working for the nuclear industry.
MQ: (50:04) When they give you the money, they don’t say you have to do everything we say.
MQ: But a person is let go unless you do. That’s understood.
MQ: Let me just jump in. That’s not true at all. As another employee of the ?50:18 power plant, I am here on my own time at my own will and I’ve never been encouraged to attend one of these meetings or told your job is on the line or you need to attend these things. The company makes the information available. I’m happy to come on the rare occasions that I do. And Mr. Gundersen, I thank you for supporting something you believe in on your own time and on your own dime. And I’m sure Steven feels the same way.
MG: And I can tell you as the founder of Fairewinds – I’m Maggie Gundersen – that we lost everything when he blew the whistle. We both came from the nuclear industry. I was in charge of public relations at proposed nuclear plants. And I can tell you that the NRC did not support us. We ended up losing our home, our savings, our pensions. And maybe you will be honest with your communities when you find a violation, but when we found them, we were honest. And we stand behind that integrity. And maybe you just stand behind your paycheck. That’s fine.
M: I understand you’re very angry.
MG: No. I’m not angry. I’m offended by your belief that somehow we didn’t speak the truth. And I can tell you that we did and every single thing he talked about today is backed with science – real science – the science that’s out there, and not the nuclear gamesmanship.
M: I can go through that entire slide deck and give another one-hour speech explaining how almost everything you said was not totally true.
MG: Then you’re seeing the wrong data. Because ours is all peer reviewed.
AG: I got to talk to the advisory committee on reactor safeguards – so 17 wise guys – wise men. And I think now there’s a woman on board, but they were wise men at the time. In 2010. And I was arguing about something called net positive suction head and how in reactors like Fukushima Daiichi, the containments would leak. And they gave me two hours and I had a – it’s up on the site – there’s a discussion of containment integrity on the Fairewinds site. And they listened and said thank you very much. And then the staff got up. And I’d clearly shown that there’s been 39 containment failures and liner breaches, including a crack right through the wall of a containment at Fitzpatrick. And I said you can’t assume this thing called net positive suction head will provide the pressure to drive the pumps post accident. And then the staff got up after me – actually the next month – and said we assume no containment leaks. And so here’s the data from Daiichi that shows that we were right. And it wasn’t just me. It was the state engineer of Vermont and it was Dave Lockbaum of Union of Concerned Scientists. It’s an uphill battle when you have all the data on your side.
MQ: (53:29) I’m kind of bordering between agreeing with both sides in the sense of there’s unacceptable consequences that can’t be measured, but then there is also kind of a need to produce energy and societal demands as technology changes and whatnot. Kind of similar to how LA has horrible public transit because we didn’t start the process earlier, we’re in a position where we have – the alternatives are coal and fossil fuels. And so I kind of joke around with some of my friends sometimes – hey, I know there are other alternatives, but they’re not – there is a binary decision of either it’s good or it’s unacceptable and it has to stop. And I wonder if there’s any kind of groups that are more let’s use nuclear as a gateway in order to progress towards something that’s more sustainable and complete without any type of waste, whether it’s greenhouse gas or used fuel. Because if we shut down all the plants, I don’t know what would replace it. And I know with Germany, it’s been – and a lot of my points are anecdotal, but with Germany, it’s been replaced by fossil fuels and then the emissions build up. I love the idea of wind power and solar. I don’t see the feasibility tomorrow. I see the feasibility in 30 years. And so what I’d like would be a group that’s not getting dismissed as easily. Because I feel like when you are going hard on one side, you just get dismissed by people who disagree with you and if you go hard on the other, like no one is – I have a lot of environmentalist family members – so if I have any kind of pro-nuclear sentiment, which I see as a sympathizer to the nuclear industry, I’m a conservative sellout. With my conservative friends, I’m a liberal nut job. So oh well, that’s life. But I have a hard time fully supporting a company that’s saying the environmentalists don’t understand science and I have a hard time fully supporting environmentalists that say the scientists are liars. So do you know of any other ones that are kind of more in the middle?
AG: I’d like to think I’m in the middle. Until the disaster at Fukushima, I actually said that nuclear should be a bridge. And in 2009, I cosigned a report with five other nuclear experts allowing Vermont Yankee to run for another 20 years. So I can’t be in that anti-nuclear whack job category you were talking about. I gave a speech at Northwestern University a couple of months ago and there’s two points. The first is that the nuclear industry would have you believe that mankind is smart enough to store radioactive waste for a quarter of a million years, but the same people would have you believe that humankind is so dumb, we can’t figure out how to store solar electricity overnight. That’s – either we’re smart enough to do both or we’re dumb enough to do neither. The other point is I’m not really advocating plants shut down. I built these things. But the concept – the paradigm of the 20th Century that we needed large central station power plants is disintegrating in the 21st Century just like cell towers have replaced the central station with the operator pushing the thing. But we’re seeing a paradigm shift. When I did my thesis, God, the computer was three times as big as this room. It was an IBM 360 with – it took two minutes for my thesis to run on it and all that kind of stuff. And now my laptop has more power. So the computer’s changing the energy paradigm in my mind. And what we’re finding is that – I just boil it down to cost. A new nuke in England at Hinkley Point is scheduled to be built – two new nukes for $32 billion. And the buss bar cost – that’s as it enters the grid – doesn’t include distribution through the grid, transmission or anything like that – but it’s at least the power plant, the buss bar cost is quoted at 16 cents. Now that’s just the cost to produce the power. And that’s guaranteed. The UK has signed a contract for 35 years plus escalation at 16 cents. Then we’ve got a power plant in Virginia – North Ana 3 (?58:19) that’s a single unit, which is at $19 billion for a single unit. We have two power plants in Florida, Levy (?58:28) County – they were $24 billion for two power plants. Let’s look at Florida as an example. Florida was planning to build four AP1000 power plants and – two at Levy County and two at Turkey Point – Turkey Point 6 and 7. And the total cost of those plants was $48 billion, which was more than the capital cost of every power plant in Florida – not just the nukes in Florida, but all the power plants in Florida. So the total cost to build those four nukes was $48 billion and the increase in output in Florida was 8 percent. So it’s too costly. If you spent that $48 billion going around and putting double-pane windows on, you would have a lot bigger impact and wouldn’t need the 8 percent generation. So what’s happening in this energy power dynamics, nuke costs are not decreasing; they’re going up. The Vogel (?59:32) plants are an example of that. It was claimed that modular construction would lower the cost and they’re 3 years behind schedule and $3 billion over budget already. And solar’s plummeting and the same with wind. But what we’re seeing now is the buss bar cost for wind at about 3 cents and the buss bar cost for solar at about 5 cents, compared to what we’ve got at Hinkley Point at 16 cents. Now the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. So you get to Tesla and the power wall batteries and those numbers are coming in at around 5 or 6 cents to store it. So if you take 3 cents for wind and 6 cents for Tesla, heading down, I might add, you’re at less than 10 cents and you’ve got the 24/7 power. You’ve got power to get you through the night, and compared to – the same with solar – 5 and 5 or 5 and 6 – you’ve got 11 cents for solar that runs all the time compared to 16 cents for a new nuke. So it’s an economic burden. And it’s this thing called opportunity cost. If you spend those $48 billion on those power plants in Florida, that’s $48 billion you can’t spend elsewhere. And the power plants take 10 to 15 years to build versus slapping up solar in less than a year. So you lose the opportunity to spend that on another low carbon alternative. So I just – for new nukes going forward, I just boil it down to an economic argument. They just can’t compete. And I’m not advocating – we’ve got 99 power plants – shutting them down tomorrow. I built these plants and I think the grid instabilities of losing plants in an overnight decision would be significant. But at the same time, I think they should be replaced when their useful life is over. I have a question back here and we’ve been here a little over an hour so I’ll let people go.
Q: Are you familiar with Ivanka (AG: No) Solar, thermal ?1:01:50 – it’s on the California border in Nevada on the way to Vegas. A solar array with ?1:01 powers, central towers in these 3 fields, array fields, produces – has a 1:02:04 capacity of somewhere around 377 Megawatts net. Costs $2.2 billion to build. Right on their website. $1.6 billion from taxpayers to build this thing. Google is providing over $100 million. Another company threw in $200 million, $300 million for them, like that. If you look at the plant’s operating efficiency, its capacity factor, it’s only in the 31 percent range. Which means that over the course of the year, it’s only going to operate 31 percent of the time. So it’s very intermittent. It’s not going to operate at night. It’s not going to operate when clouds fly over. You lose capacity obviously. So comparing that to say, Diablo, which produces 2200 Megawatts ?1:03:02 together, at a 90 percent capacity factor, that gives you a yearly output – Diablo is 16 times higher yearly output than that solar field that cost $2.2 billion. So if you’re going to talk dollar to dollar, you’d have to build 16 of those solar fields, which would cost $35 billion to get the same capacity as what Diablo produces.
M: ??1:03:33 old, antiquated solar panels in the State of California than anywhere in the world. (??1:03:42)
M: Listen, if that plant breaks, what happens? Nothing. Right? If a nuclear plant breaks, everybody in the vicinity is in big trouble. Here’s something from the Orange County Register. This is Southern California Edison. Their recent report. They said let’s look on the bright side of the premature shutdown that’s costing consumers and shareholders billions of dollars to decommission San Onofre because the thing was about to blow its lid. It sits on the ocean vulnerable to tsunamis. It’s going to cost $9 billion minimum – that’s to decommission it. And then we’re going to be left with radioactive material stuck in these glass casks on the ocean - -
M: Steel and concrete – all paid for –
M: But they’re going to be there forever and ever and ever.
M: The costs that you’re discussing is the cost to replace the power.
M: Well, they had a secret meeting in ?1:04:46 of the utility commission so that the shareholders would pay the greatest percentage of the cost. Now that’s in litigation. So that the ratepayers would pay $3.6 billion of the estimated $4.8 billion. But that’s all out the window now because they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar and the head of the PUC (?1:05:11) was fired. And if there’s any justice on this planet, the vice president of Southern California Edison and the head of the PUC maybe will go to prison for being liars and cheats and stabbing the public in the back. These plant are tremendously expensive to build and Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant – you talked about the solar plants don’t work at night. They had to build the Helms Project (?1:05:38) in the Sierra Nevada ??1:05:39 of a billion dollars –
M: Excuse me, sir. Do you have a question for Arnie?
M: (1:05:45) I just think these guys are blowing smoke.
F: Going back to the idea of thinking about going forward, I’m just wondering about your opinion of the feasibility and safety in particular of fusion energy. In particular – fusion.
AG: When I went to school 40 plus – 45 years ago – fusion energy was 10 years in the future and it seems to always be that. There’s two issues. There’s the physics of fusion energy, which is collapsing hydrogen atoms long enough to get more power out than you put in. And they seem to be approaching that threshold. But I’m an engineer. And once you’ve overcome that threshold there are lots of engineering problems. And the one that gets me is that there’s a lot of neutrons sent off, and the containment – the wires and the building that surround that incredibly hot plasma become irradiated with neutrons. And it seemed to me like about every year you were going to have to rebuild this thing. So I still think fusion is way out in the future and we’ve got alternatives. In my career, we started with 600 Megawatt power plants. Then we went to – they were not – they weren’t cost competitive. Then we went to 800 megawatt. And around 1000 or 1100 and ultimately, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission put a cap on. They said we can’t – we will not license a power plant over 1300 megawatts. This was back in the 70’s because the growth was going up and up and up because the economics didn’t work. And then eventually the NRC changed that and AREVA (?1:07:33) has come out with a 1600 megawatt plant, two of which are now about 10 years behind schedule in Europe. And now the industry is saying well, let’s go and build small modular reactors, none of which have been built, but they’ll be around 300 megawatts. And now – before that, though, Westinghouse came out with an AP600 – 600 megawatts – and that wasn’t cost competitive. So then they licensed an AP1000 which hasn’t been operated yet. And then they’re now saying we should go small modular. And now Westinghouse just said they’re going to make a lead-cooled reactor. So I call it the Little Orphan Annie syndrome – you know that song the sun will come out tomorrow. But the cool part about tomorrow is it’s always a day away. And I think that’s the scam in nuclear is that if you just give us another 10 years, we’ll have a better way. And global warming is not going to take a 20-year vacation. CO2 is growing at about 2 ppm a year, maybe even faster. And so if we wait those 20 years and then start to implement a new nuke strategy, you’re out at 450 ppm already and you’re just turning on the first power plant. And my position is that you’re just – when we have inexpensive sources right now that, coupled with batteries or other means of storing that energy, are as cost effective – in Texas, Texas Electric is now giving power away at night. From 9 o’clock at night until 6 in the morning, power is free because they have so much power from the wind. And I think that the future is not these massive power plants but not small modular reactors, but small modular renewables. All right, well, thank you.