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[Maggie Gundersen] Hello Mr. Hirose and hello people of Kansai.

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I am Maggie Gundersen. I am the President and the founder of Fairewinds Associates

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and the founding director of Fairewinds Energy Education non-profit.

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I am here today with Arnie Gundersen, my husband, and Chief Engineer for Fairewinds Associates.

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We are here today to talk to you about the triple meltdown at Fukushima-Daiichi.

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We hope to answer all your questions.

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I wish we could have joined you in person, but I thank you for watching this video

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and please send us any follow-up questions. We will be happy to answer them.

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Now let's bring Arnie into this conversation.

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Arnie, how dangerous is the situation now at Fukushima-Daiichi Unit 4,

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particularly in Japan with its continuous danger of earthquakes,

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and seismic activity and chance for an additional tsunami.

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[Arnie Gundersen] Unit 4 has always been my biggest concern.

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If you watched our website on the very first week of the accident I was saying

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that if Unit 4 were to catch fire, you would have to evacuate Tokyo.

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As a matter of fact the book that we wrote talks about that a lot.

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It is really important and it remains the biggest concern that I have about the Fukushima site.

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Unit 4 has more fuel in it than any of the other units in the complex,

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but more importantly it has the most recently used nuclear fuel.

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And all of that fuel is outside of the containment.

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So that would make it dangerous enough.

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Except that also, of course, Unit 4 has had a series of explosions and is weakened structurally.

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Before it might have withstood a 7.5 earthquake.

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I believe that the structural damage to Unit 4 is so great that if there is a 7.5 earthquake, it will not withstand it.

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Here is what would happen if Unit 4 were to crack and the water were to drain out of the nuclear fuel pool.

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The fuel is hot enough that it needs to be water-cooled. If air is all there is cooling the fuel, it will burn.

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It will burn the zircaloy cladding on the fuel, (and) will react with the oxygen to create a fire.

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And it is a fire that once it starts, cannot be put out by water. Water would make it worse.

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So the nuclear fuel would have to burn completely before the fire would ever go out.

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In the process, all that radiation would go up into the atmosphere and blow all over Japan and all over the world.

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There is as much cesium in the fuel pool at Unit 4 as there was

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in all of the atomic bombs dropped in all of the tests in the 1940's, the 1950's, the 1960's, and into the 1970's.

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All of the above ground testing has less cesium in it than is in the reactor pool at Fukushima 4 right now.

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So it is a grave situation. I don't believe that the Japanese Government is moving fast enough.

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If there is no earthquake, the plan to remove the fuel slowly is going to be adequate.

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But we cannot wait on Mother Nature.

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We have to quickly move that fuel out of that pool and onto the ground.

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The key here is quickly.

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The Japanese Government finally just this month came up with a plan

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to build a building around the fuel pool building and begin removing the fuel in 2013 or 2014.

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I said that that is what they needed to do on the Fairewinds site in an interview with Chris Martenson a year ago.

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These things have been evident, but TEPCO is not moving fast enough,

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and the Japanese Government is not pushing TEPCO to move fast enough either.

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I think the top priority of TEPCO and the top priority of the Japanese Government should be

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to move the fuel out of that pool just as quickly as possible.

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And in the meantime, they need to strengthen that pool to make sure that it can withstand an earthquake.

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Remember, that pool is not in a containment. You can look down in a satellite and see the nuclear fuel.

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The roof is blown off. And that is what makes it dangerous.

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In America, we had the Brookhaven National Laboratory do a study to examine what would happen in a fuel pool fire.

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Brookhaven National Labs determined that there would be 187,000 people

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who would develop cancer from a fuel pool fire.

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It is a serious concern and I do not believe that Tokyo Electric,

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and I do not believe that the Japanese Government is taking it seriously enough.

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For the last year I have been working with Akio Matsumora and finally it appears

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that the world community is listening to Akio Matsumora's concerns about the pool.

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We need to tackle this as a concerned world community,

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and encourage the Japanese Government and encourage Tokyo Electric to solve it quickly.

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[Maggie Gundersen] Arnie you mentioned cesium in your earlier discussion. Why is it important?

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What is the health effect of cesium and are there any other radioactive isotopes

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that would have been released during the triple meltdown?

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[Arnie Gundersen] Cesium is one of many radioactive isotopes that are created in a nuclear reactor.

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It has got a 30 year half life which means that it hangs around for 300 years and biologically it mimics potassium.

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You might remember that if you have a muscle cramp, you eat a banana,

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and it goes to your muscles and relieves the cramp.

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Well, cesium also goes to your muscles. It is called a muscle seeker.

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When it goes to your muscles, it can cause cancer, but it can also cause a variety of other illnesses.

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The Brookhaven study only looks at cancer. It does not look at all the other things that radioactive cesium can do.

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In young children with rapidly developing muscles, especially their heart muscle,

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it can create something called Chernobyl Heart which is damage to the heart muscle,

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which once it is damaged, never ever recovers for the life of the child.

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So cesium is just one of many isotopes, but it is relatively easy to measure and also biologically causes

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almost the most damage of any of the other isotopes that are in that reactor.

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[Maggie Gundersen] Arnie, you have said that you believe the explosion at Unit 3 was a prompt criticality.

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What is a prompt criticality and why do you believe that?

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[Arnie Gundersen] I developed my concern about a prompt criticality because of the nature of the explosion in Unit 3.

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Unit 1, when it exploded, blew sideways and with relatively low energy.

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You can measure the rate at which it moves and it moves less than the speed of sound.

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And that is called a deflagration. It does not do anywhere near as much damage.

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When I looked at the explosion on Unit 3, however, it was entirely different. You can see it, it is not hard to see.

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It is called a detonation. The speed at which Unit 3 exploded was faster than the speed of sound.

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And the important thing is not how Unit 3 exploded.

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What is the most important thing is that it exploded with a detonation, not a deflagration.

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The nuclear industry is not paying attention to this now, but it should be,

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because a nuclear containment can handle the slow moving deflagration,

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but it cannot handle the fast moving detonation.

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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the international community are absolutely ignoring the fact,

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that a detonation occurred in Unit 3.

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Well how did a detonation occur? That was the question I asked myself.

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I checked with chemists and atmospheric pressure and hydrogen will not create a detonation.

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Like on Unit 1 it will only create a deflagration. So I needed to figure out how a detonation could occur.

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But there are a couple of other clues here.

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One clue is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission way back in March of last year,

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wrote a report that is on our website, that talks about nuclear fuel being deposited on the site

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and nuclear fuel being discovered as far away as two kilometers.

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How can nuclear fuel get blown out of a nuclear reactor?

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The fuel that is inside the reactor is also inside the containment,

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and there is no indication of a massive containment failure

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and a massive reactor failure that could have thrown the nuclear fuel out.

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So I had to come up with a reason that the nuclear fuel could have been released in pieces, not little fine atoms,

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but in pieces which is what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says was discovered.

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The only way that could happen is if the explosion occurred in the nuclear fuel pool at Unit 3.

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Now if you look at the video of Unit 3, the very first frames show the explosion occurring on the side of the building

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and that is the side of the building that has the nuclear fuel pool.

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It started on the nuclear fuel pool side and then worked it's way up into the massive cloud that you see.

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So what could have caused that? That is the question. Hydrogen would have been above the nuclear fuel,

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it would have been a gas above the nuclear fuel and if it had exploded, it would have pushed the nuclear fuel down.

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That is not what happened. Remember, we have fuel fragments found off-site.

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Something had to lift the nuclear fuel up.

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The only thing I could determine is that it was a criticality in the fuel pool that caused the fuel to lift up.

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The division I ran built nuclear fuel racks for boiling water reactors exactly like Fukushima.

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The dense fuel racks that are now in every reactor everywhere are very close to becoming critical anyway.

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And in the accident situation where there was seismic event and explosions occurring,

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it is likely that they were very near to becoming critical.

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And what that means is that they were very near to becoming a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

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Way back in college 40 years ago, we watched a movie called the Borax Experiment.

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You can find it on the web today.

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The explosion at Borax was a prompt moderated criticality.

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It looks almost exactly like the explosion in Fukushima unit 3.

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So an image I had from 40 years ago led me to conclude that the same thing happened in Unit 3.

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That a criticality occurred in the fuel pool and it pushed some of the nuclear fuel up into pellets,

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and the pellets wound up scattered around the site.

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Now, the criticality is called prompt moderated criticality. It is not a bomb. A bomb is a prompt fast criticality.

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This reaction occurs slower than a bomb, but faster than what occurs inside a nuclear reactor.

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The Borax experiments were designed to test just how violent that reaction could be.

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I think if you look at Borax and compare it to Fukushima Unit 3,

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you will see that there are an awful lot of similarities.

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Again this is a theory, but it is the only theory,

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that accounts for the explosion occurring on the side where the fuel pool is,

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and it is the only theory that creates the uplift force that caused the fuel particles to be thrown about the site

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and discovered as far as 2 kilometers away.

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Well there is one more piece of evidence and that is that the roof over the fuel pool has been totally destroyed

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whereas the roof over the nuclear reactor and the containment, collapsed downward.

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We talk about that in a video on the site as well and I think that is another important indication

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that whatever it was that caused the fuel to lift occurred on the fuel pool side of the building,

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and not in the middle where the nuclear reactor was.

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The videos after the accident and after the explosion show containment leaks as well.

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You will see in the weeks afterward, steam coming from the center of the building.

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And I believe that the containment lid lifted on Unit 3,

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and never went back down straight, so it has lifted and twisted sideways

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and radioactive gasses are lifting from that containment lid.

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But there is not enough evidence to say that that is what caused the explosion that we saw during the accident.

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The jury is still out and will be for 10 years until we get inside the Fukushima reactor to see what the damage is.

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But right now, I think my theory accounts for the damage, the speed of the shock wave,

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and also the fact that the contamination has been found as far away as 2 kilometers.

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[Maggie Gundersen] Arnie, let's talk about the Unit 4 spent fuel pool.

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There have been a lot of questions about that and a lot of concerns right now.

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Was there a hydrogen explosion at the Unit 4 spent fuel pool and if there was,

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what is a hydrogen explosion and why would it have occurred there?

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[Arnie Gundersen] One of the biggest mysteries at Fukushima is how did Fukushima Unit 4 explode?

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There are a couple of very, very grainy videos that clearly show it did explode.

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It was a different type of explosion and perhaps a fire and an explosion that went on for a period of days.

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So exactly how it did explode is one of the big questions about the Fukushima accident.

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There are 3 competing theories.

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Tokyo Electric says that the radioactive gasses over in Unit 3 went through a pipe

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that connected Unit 4 and entered Unit 4 causing Unit 4 to explode.

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So Tokyo Electric's position is that the radioactive hydrogen that was created in Unit 3

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went through a pipe, entered Unit 4, and there it exploded.

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There is one piece of evidence that supports that.

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There is some contamination in some filters in Unit 4 that would indicate that gasses did come from Unit 3.

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So that is a possibility, but I do not think it is accurate because I believe

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that the containment was so damaged on Unit 3, that there was no pressure to push those gasses into Unit 4.

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I can't understand how the gasses, what the mode of force was to push those gasses into Unit 4.

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I think the hydrogen explosion came from something in side Unit 4 itself.

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There are two possibilities there.

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One is by Dr. Gen Saji and it is an excellent analysis.

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He believes that the hydrogen in the water in the pool,

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that was dissolved because of the radiation in the pool over months and months and months,

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was enough to cause the building to explode.

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As the water got hot in the fuel pool, it liberated the hydrogen that was in the water

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and that hydrogen was enough to cause the explosion.

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The second possibility, and this is my theory, early on in the accident,

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there is some video that is up on our site, that shows that the top of the fuel racks were exposed to air.

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I am not suggesting that the entire fuel pool ran dry.

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But the top of the nuclear fuel I believe was exposed to air and I think the photos show that.

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So if the top of the fuel was exposed to air, it is possible that a reaction could have occurred at the top of the fuel

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that would have created enough hydrogen to blow the building up.

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Dr. Saji and I agree that the hydrogen came from the Unit 4 fuel pool. He believes it was dissolved in the water.

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I believe it came from the fuel. Only time will tell when we get in to analyze the reaction.

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But there is an important lesson here that the nuclear industry is not taking into account.

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And that is the fuel pool temperature.

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The fuel pool is a large pool and it can boil locally.

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And that is something the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the international community is not looking at.

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You can get local boiling in a pool even though the bulk temperature of the pool may be at 80 degrees Celsius.

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In portions of the pool, it can be boiling.

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That supports Dr. Saji's comment that as it boiled it would liberate hydrogen,

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even though the bulk temperature never ever exceeded boiling.

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My theory is that I do believe that the entire pool had drained to the point where there was boiling occurring.

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But the real issue here is that the nuclear industry is not looking at the fact that localized boiling can occur

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even though the bulk temperature might be less than 100 degrees centigrade.

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That is an important distinction moving forward.

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We have about 23 of these Mark I reactors in the United States and there are another 10 or so around the world.

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I think that we need to design these pools so that the hydrogen generated by dissociation

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can be accommodated without exploding the building.

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No one ever designed for that because no one ever anticipated it happening.

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But it did happen at Unit 4 and we need to prevent that in the future.

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Not just on these Mark I reactors but on the 400 reactors that all have fuel pools

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that are all susceptible to that identical type of failure.

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[Maggie Gundersen] Arnie, I want to follow up with a few more questions.

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In your discussion of Unit 4, you have talked about its hydrogen explosion.

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Is there any chance of a prompt criticality or a hydrogen explosion now at Unit 4?

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Would anything cause it to release more fuel or more radioactivity?

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[Arnie Gundersen] The fuel in the fuel pool at Unit 4 has now been cooled for about a year after the accident

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and it had been removed a couple of months before that. So the fuel is becoming cooler.

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It still needs to be water-cooled for another 2 years, but it is much cooler than it was at the beginning of the accident.

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So the chances of hydrogen generation are much, much lower now than when the accident occurred.

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So I do not believe that we are going to see an explosion in the pool now, no matter what happens.

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My biggest concern is that if the pool loses water, then it is an entirely different story.

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So if there is a large seismic event that causes the building to topple, or the pool to crack and the water to drain out,

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there is not enough cooling in the air of that fuel, and it will start to burn.

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Now the consequences of that are depending on which way the wind is blowing,

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it could mean the evacuation of Tokyo as a worst case. It could also mean cutting Japan in half

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so that the northern part is separated from the southern part by a band of contamination.

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So this is a very serious accident waiting to happen and we just all have to pray

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that an earthquake does not happen before that fuel is removed.

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[Maggie Gundersen] Arnie, compared to the accident at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl,

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how dangerous are the radioactive releases from the four reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi?

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[Arnie Gundersen] Three Mile Island was a level 5 accident and Chernobyl and Fukushima are level 7 accidents.

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That means roughly that Three Mile Island was a 100 times less

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than the accident at Chernobyl and the accident at Fukushima.

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People did die as a result of the accident at Three Mile Island.

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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says no, no one died, on their web page.

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But the evidence is clear that there was an increase in cancer.

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I refer you to Dr. Steve Wing's report that is also on our site that talks about it.

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And in addition some reports coming out of the University of Pittsburgh indicate just now,

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that we are beginning to see leukemia as a result.

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So while Three Mile Island was much less than either Chernobyl or Fukushima,

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people did die as a result of the radiation released.

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At Fukushima-Daiichi the evidence tells us that at least three times more radiation

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in the form of noble gasses were released from Units 1, 2 and 3 than from Chernobyl.

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We have seen radioactive gas clouds, noble gas clouds to the northwest,

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that are much worse than we ever anticipated to have been released.

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So we know that the noble gasses were larger than Chernobyl.

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Now iodine, which is another gas that is released,

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and also cesium and other gasses, seem to be roughly on the same level as the releases from Chernobyl.

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There are 2 issues here. As terrible as it is, it would have been much worse but for 2 things.

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The first is that most of the time the wind was blowing out to sea.

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And of course Chernobyl was surrounded by land,

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so whatever way the plume meandered after Chernobyl, it contaminated the land.

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So when we compare Fukushima to Chernobyl, the total releases from Fukushima

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are likely higher than they were at Chernobyl,

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but because most of it blew out to sea, that is a good thing for the Japanese people.

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The second important thing that happened that was lucky,

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if we can call it luck in such a severe accident, was that it happened on a Friday and not on a weekend.

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There were a thousand people at the Daini site and at the Daiichi site,

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because it was a weekday, who could respond to the accident.

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If it had happened on a weekend, there would have been a small crew of people there,

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and the accidents at both sites would have been much much worse.

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Now that has an implication worldwide, because on weekends and in the evenings,

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we have very small crews at these nuclear reactors.

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And should there be a major accident, there is no way to respond quickly enough

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with the small crew of people that are working on the shifts,

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other than the main shift in the middle of the day.

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The international community needs to look at that,

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and it is not a matter of "well, we can get people there in a half a day."

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That is too late. The staff on site has to be larger at the beginning of the accident,

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to mitigate the potential for a serious accident. But yet it all boils down to money.

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The utilities that run these power plants really do not want a large staff because they have to pay for it.

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But in fact, it was the large staff at Daiichi and the large staff at Daini that likely saved the world.

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So the important take-away here is that the releases from Fukushima are as serious if not more so than Chernobyl.

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And that they would have been much worse if the accident had happened on a weekend.

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[Maggie Gundersen] Arnie, thank you. How significant is the danger of hot particles and why?

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[Arnie Gundersen] I am really concerned about the hot particles that were released after the Fukushima accident.

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Now a hot particle is more than just a single atom.

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An atom of cesium decays once and it is over, it is no longer radioactive.

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A hot particle though, contains thousands or hundreds of thousands of atoms of cesium or other radioactive material

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and they, of course, decay for many, many years and decades.

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So if a hot particle is lodged inside you, either in your lung or in your liver or in your gastrointestinal tract,

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it can cause a constant bombardment of radiation over a long period of time

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to a very small localized part of your tissue.

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And that is exactly the conditions that can cause a cancer.

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So we have seen in Mr Kaltofen's analysis to the American Public Health Association:

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he shows what an air filter looked like in a car in Fukushima and what an air filter looked like in a car in Tokyo.

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Those air filters are no different than our lung, our lung acts as an air filter,

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and that causes that radiation to get trapped in our lungs or in our livers or elsewhere in our bodies,

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and will constantly, over decades, cause cellular damage.

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It is particularly a concern in young children because they have a longer life,

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and because their cells are rapidly developing.

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So it is important that we monitor the children at Fukushima and throughout Japan over the next 3 or 4 decades

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to make sure that they do not develop cancers as a result of the hot particles that were released from Fukushima-Daiichi.

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[Maggie Gundersen] So Arnie, in closing, what do you want people to remember

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from your review of the accident at Fukushima-Daiichi?

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[Arnie Gundersen] About a month before the accident, we were walking and we were talking about an accident,

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and where it might occur. And I said I did not know where it would occur,

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but I thought it would occur in a boiling water reactor of the Fukushima design,

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I said a Mark I reactor. In fact, that turned out to be true.

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But I think the bigger lesson from Fukushima is that this is a technology that can destroy a nation.

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After Fukushima I was reading Mikolai Gorbachov's memoirs,

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and he says it was the Chernobyl accident, not Perestroika, that destroyed the Soviet Union.

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So we had that information for 30 years but yet we really did not realize that it could happen elsewhere.

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So we know that the accident at Chernobyl was a cause in the factor of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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And we know that the cost alone from the Fukushima-Daiichi accident

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will easily go to a half a trillion US dollars over the next 20 years.

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That is enough to bring Japan to its knees.

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Japan is at a tipping point.

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You have an opportunity here to change the way we use energy.

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Or Japan can go back and turn on all its nuclear reactors again,

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and continue business as usual and of course risk another accident.

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So you have a choice, you have the opportunity to change the way you use energy,

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and to change the way you distribute energy.

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You can create smart grids that share power from the north to the south,

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and from the east to the west, where the frequencies are different.

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We can distribute our generation, instead of having massive power plants,

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in locations like Fukushima-Daiichi and Fukushima-Danai.

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We can distribute those power plants throughout Japan, throughout the world, with windmills, with solar power,

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with conservation and with distributed small sources of generation.

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Those are all one way of doing it compared to the other which we are presently using, which is central station power.

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We needed central station power in the 20th century.

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Now with computers, we do not need central station power anymore.

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We can do it another way. And Japan can lead the way if it chooses to.

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If it leads the way, it will have an export commodity that the rest of the world will want desperately.

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You have an opportunity here to change your country.

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And you also have a business opportunity here to sell to the rest of the world a product that we all desperately need.

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So the Fukushima-Daiichi accident is the worst industrial accident in history: it is a half a trillion dollars.

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But it also can be an opportunity for Japan to change the way it does business

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and to create the economy for the 21st century and beyond, with distributed generation and smart grids.

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I hope you choose that choice.

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Japan is at a tipping point and it is your choice to make.

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Thank you.