so Wilma see how much you know a distinct idea market failure Daniel Burge is a lecturer at UCSC in the form of director of our Adlai Stevenson Program on nuclear policy actually had the honor of having dinner with him a couple minutes ago where he discussed his experience with the Chernobyl incident during that time he was asked by the house interior committee to chair the first independent team of experts to review the Hanford and reactor which is a Department of Energy facility similar to Chernobyl the problems identified in that review led to its closure and secession of US plutonium production for nuclear weapons his work has also been instrumental in the adoption of regulations to acquire protection of atomic power plants against truck bombs and the elimination of the use of weapon grade uranium in research reactors by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission in addition to teaching nucular policy he has also taught courses at UCSC and UCLA on non violent approaches to conflict resolution in light of the disaster in Japan he has appeared in numerous television interviews including ones for NBC Nightly News NBC Dateline MSNBC's the last word with Oren Lawrence O'Donnell and he is quoted he's been quoted in news articles from publications such as the Los Angeles Times The Associated Press The Christian Science Monitor the Sacramento Bee and the San Jose Mercury News he's recently been asked to testify before the California Senate Select Committee on earthquake preparedness and disaster planning regarding the implications of the Japanese accident for California's nuclear reactors some of which were located near major earthquake faults I'm honored to introduce our speaker for tonight's event Daniel Hirsch thank you all very much I'm struck by the coincidence of the slideshow that preceded me which I understand is based on photographs from Fall Creek the fall creek unit of the qaol redwood State Park not far from here in the San Lorenzo Valley I'm struck by it because I live very close to that Park and hike frequently from my home into that park and some years ago I hiked up to the headwaters of Fall Creek very very beautiful if you all know the truck trail it's just gorgeous when I got to the headwaters of Fall Creek I found a rusty 55 barrel drum with some liquid in the bottom of it and a label on the outside of it which said trichloroethylene Lockheed missile and space company I don't know how many of you know anything about TCE but the permissible concentration of TCE in drinking waters five parts per billion and that one barrel was sufficient to have contaminated if it leaked most of the water supply here in santa cruz the message of which is that you can't get away from these toxic risks even those of us who live here in this gorgeous area of Santa Cruz it is indeed one world and what happens in one part of it affects us all and that is the message of what I am going to speak about today that the extraordinary tragedy that's occurring as we speak at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant complex is in some sense something that involves us all that in some sense we all live in Fukushima so let me show you what Fukushima looked like prior to March 11th when the earthquake and tsunami hit and if I may there are six reactors at Fukushima for them quite close together two others are out of the photograph and associated with each of those reactors is a spent fuel pool what we mean by spent fuel is when you've run the nuclear fuel in a reactor for several years and take it out it's highly radioactive and still needs to be cooled so it's put into what looks like a deep swimming pool where it has to be constantly cooled for years so each one of these units has a spent fuel pool in it in fact elevated at a fairly high level as you'll see in a diagram I'll show you shortly so this is a complex with six reactors and seven spent fuel pools it has all told about 20 times the long library activity of the Chernobyl reactor that caught fire almost exactly 25 years ago and I have to say there is some irony for me appearing back here at Stevenson now I remember I was driving Ted Taylor a former nuclear weapons designer and a member of the Presidential Commission on the Three Mile Island accident from San Jose Airport to Santa Cruz to Stevenson when we heard on the radio about the Chernobyl accident and we had to do a press conference just in the Fireside Lounge across from here 25 years ago about that accident so there was Ted who had been involved in the analysis of the Three Mile Island accident speaking about the Chernobyl accident and now we have this new accident at which in the last few days the Japanese authorities have conceded is a class 7 accident on the international scale of nuclear incidents on a par with Chernobyl so this is how it looked before the earthquake you notice of course that it's on the ocean most reactors are built on or near large water bodies because they need that water for cooling as we'll discuss so looks peaceful everything's in place and then an earthquake hit brought down the off-site power an hour late of the tsunami hit and that destroyed the backup diesel generators and they lost the cooling and I'll show you a few more of these some of them are not all that clear but I think you'll be able to see that where we had four intact buildings as of a week later hydrogen explosions had destroyed three that actually been a hydrogen explosion in that one as well and I'll discuss as we go further why there were hydrogen explosions but you can see that they blown the top off of these reactor buildings another view immense explosive force leaving just the scaffolding behind you can see the water obviously that it's fronting again explosive force and you can imagine the destruction from some of these sensitive reactor components by that force of that hydrogen explosion and you will notice steam and that's me important to our discussion as well because it's not nice clean steam it's radioactive steam because to try to prevent the containment structures from bursting they're having to vent the radioactive steam there now stuck is their only way of cooling the reactors of dumping water into the reactors having to flash to steam and vents that radioactive steam into the environment again more radioactive steam again again you can see what happened when they blew off the top of these buildings and all that radioactive steam so let's discuss for a moment what happened and what the implications are to do that I'm going to need to tell you a little bit about how nuclear reactors work a nuclear reactor is an absolutely extraordinary machine unlike any other machine that any of us are familiar with you can't actually turn it off you can turn it down but even if you scram the reactor insert the control rods or control blades to try to make it no longer sustain a chain reaction about 7% of the heat that was generated while the reactor was operating continues to be released and that is because the way a reactor works is it fission's uranium producing fission products fission fragments very radioactive material like cesium 137 strontium 90 iodine 131 and hundreds of other radio nuclides and those materials through the laws of physics keep decayed they break apart they spit out some radiation they convert into another isotope and in the process they give off ionizing radiation alpha particles beta particles gamma radiation and they give off heat I was thinking as I came here today about a quote from Aldous Huxley one of the other hats that I wear as I have for the last few years served as the primary trustee for Huxley's literary works and in his last novel Island he wrote the following he said most pillars are their own samson's they hold up but sooner or later they pulled out well a nuclear reactor is that kind of a Samson incredibly powerful incredibly strong the amount of energy being released is beyond comprehension that energy is being released by in large measure the decay of these radioactive materials because when they decay they give off heat that heat then boils water to produce steam which runs turbines which produces electricity so that very thing which gives them this immense power is the very thing which causes them to be potentially catastrophic if there's an accident because the fuel has to be constantly cooled you can't let the fuel not be cooled or it will melt and when it melts a large amount of the radioactivity in that fuel can be released some of the radioactive isotopes are volatile they form go off as gas at the temperature that the fuel melts so iodine-131 for example which concentrates in the thyroid gland and can cause thyroid cancer is given off in voluminous quantities when nuclear fuel melts strontium 90 with a 30-year half-life dangerous for about 600 years in the same column as calcium in the periodic chart behaving very similarly to calcium concentrates in grass in the cow that eats the grass and the milk that the cow produces and then in the bone of all of us including children where it can radiate that bone for long periods of time and cause bone cancer or leukemia and cesium 137 also half-life about 30 years also very powerful it's a very powerful gamma emitter it can give the whole body very strong radiation dose it also volatilizes at the temperatures that these fuels melt at so so long as the reactor is kept cool the fuel remains solid the radioactivity stays inside that fuel and things are pretty safe but the very thing that makes the reactor so powerful this immense amount of radioactive and that's giving off both radiation ionizing radiation and thermal energy heat is its undoing because if you lose the cooling there's no way of extracting that heat the fuel temperature increases the fuel melts and that radioactivity is released and that's not the half of it that is what happens inside a reactor if it loses the cooling the spent fuel that I told you about the fuel from inside the core that's no longer usable that they pull out to put in new fuel that irradiated spent fuel is also very hot and it's put into these swimming pools where the 20 or 30 feet of water is kept above the fuel if they lose the water the water level drops the fuel gets uncovered the zirconium cladding the material that they use to surround the uranium fuel pellets can catch fire and burn a nuclear fire and that fire can then drive off not just the volatile material but the particulates as a powerful driving force into the environment that appears to have happened also at Fukushima particularly in the spent fuel pool for unit number four so let's talk for a moment about what a reactor like the one at Fukushima looks like how it operates it's called a boiling water reactor and what that means is that the nuclear fuel and the water that cools it that fuel boils that water converts it into steam and that radioactive steam directly runs turbines that then produce electricity that steam is then condensed using cool water from the ocean and goes back into the core as a loop to boil and to steam it once again a boiling water reactor has a number of features that have turned out to be important and troublesome in light of what happened at Fukushima and this is not a great drawing but it will help a bit the fuel is kept in the reactor vessel that red cylinder here and it has cooling water coming in and steam going out as a cycle the reactor vessel is surrounded by a containment structure like an inverted lightbulb you'll note something immediately that the containment structure which is called a mark 1 containment for a boiling water reactor is very small to save money they made it have not much volume to it and that means that if pressures build up inside that containment vessel it can burst and the radioactivity can be released to avoid that the designers put in what is this tourists this wet well a which is designed to have the overpressure in that small containment go in a steam and be condensed in the pressure suppression pool it's a way of trying to compensate for the small size of the containment structure so if everything works okay fuel never melts if the fuel does melt you can have releases into the containment and you try to condense things in that pool so the pressure doesn't become so great that the containment structure is burst if you can't keep the pressure down you have to intentionally vent the radioactivity into the atmosphere and that's basically what's been happening now for about five weeks we'll discuss it in more detail in a moment so another feature that is very important for our discussion is the spent fuel pool you'll notice it's in a very strange place it's elevated several storeys above ground level and it's not in the containment structure it's in a regular reactor building not too much different than just this building and it has in it several times the long live reactivity that the core has because usually they put several cores into that spent fuel pool open at the top water level above here and the problem again is if the water level drops and the fuel gets uncovered not only can the spent fuel melt but it can catch fire and it's not inside containment so it has a direct pathway for release to the environment so let's talk some numbers for a moment a nuclear power plant when its operating has in its core about 15 billion Curie's of radioactivity curie as you all remember is the amount of radioactivity that produces 37 billion disintegrations per second so there are about 500 billion trillion disintegrations occurring every second inside a reactor core is giving off a huge amount of radiation and a huge amount of heat to put that into perspective we measure permissible concentrations of radioactivity in air or water in Pico Curie's millionths of a millionth of a Curie so inside the reactor we have 10 billion curious and what is permissible in your air our water our millionths of a millionth of a curity it becomes crystal clear that we have to keep that radioactivity inside the core because there's enough radioactivity to produce very large number of cancers if it ever gets out ionizing radiation damages genetic material sometimes it kills the cell which is good it can't cause too much harm as the cells killed sometimes it causes damage to the cell that doesn't cause any significant damage but every once in a while the ionizing radiation will damage genetic material in a cell in a way that causes it to mutate rapidly and that's a cancer if that occurs in the genetic material of reproductive organs it can then cause genetic defects and subsequent generations and the important things for you to remember are that there is no safe level of radiation the National Academy of Sciences has been crystal clear that there is no basis for believing that there is a threshold below which there is no damage every amount of radiation increases your risk of cancer more radiation increases at more less radiation increases at last but there's no safe level the second thing to remember is that it's cumulative if you get a dose now and you get an additional dose your risk accumulates so to give you a couple of extraordinary numbers the San Onofre nuclear power plant in Southern California between San Diego and Los Angeles was estimated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the early 1980s that if it had a meltdown there could be a hundred and thirty thousand prompt fatalities immediate deaths in a period of a few days of the sort when saw at Hiroshima and Nagasaki what we call the acute radiation syndrome and then 300,000 latent cancers that take a period of time to develop and 600,000 genetic effects for a total of a million injured or killed from a meltdown at that one reactor and that was 30 years ago and the population is increased substantially and the official risk figures from the National Academy have doubled or more than doubled since that time so there is an awful lot of radioactivity that if it gets out it can cause an awful lot of harm now remember also that we're not talking about merely one reactor Kashima the accident has caused damage to three reactors and to up to four spent fuel pools so it's an extraordinary event that unfortunately is nowhere near over a couple of other numbers a nuclear power plant has in it about a thousand times the long life to radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb and the spent fuel pools have some multiple of that and remember again we have three reactors not one and four spent fuel pools in trouble there were three others that look to be in trouble at an earlier stage but at the moment seem to be fairly stable so what happened at Fukushima I told you that nuclear reactor needs to constantly be cooled and it's spent fuel needs to be constantly cooled you can't lose coolant well that of course means you can't lose the coolant water you can't have a situation where pipes break or you're zzz's water intake fails but it also means that your pumps that can't fail to cool the reactor you have to have pumps that push that water into the core and pull it out and keep the heat exchange systems working to extract the heat to have the pumps work you need electricity and one of the ironies of a nuclear power plant is that most of us think of it as a device that produces electricity that has power lines leaving it so that the electricity generated by the reactor can power the lights in our media home but those power lines have two functions and the second function is to bring electricity in to the reactor to run the pumps and all the other equipment and that's because as I indicated earlier even once you shut the reactor down about seven percent of the power that it was producing when it was running continues to get generated enough to melt the fuel but you're no longer producing power so you can't run the pumps yourself you need off-site power to come to run the pumps and the other equipment so on March 11th an earthquake of very large proportions damaged much of that area of Japan including Fukushima and brought down the off-site power system they lost electricity very quickly they scrammed reactor stop the fissioning and turned over to rely on backup diesel generators to produce electricity and then an hour later the tsunami generated also by that same earthquake hit and it took out the diesel generators they lost their primary source of electricity and they lost their backup this is an accident that all of us in the nuclear field have been worried about for decades it's called station blackout exactly what it sounds like you lose power to the station and they lost both the primary source of electricity the grid and they lost their diesel generators and then they were in real trouble because the pumps stopped working the water stopped entering the reactor vessel the coolant loop ceased functioning the extraction of the heat from that hot steam stopped and the fuel began to get uncovered and to overheat they had one last measure that could still pursue which was to try to bubble some of the steam through a pool here for one of the reactors and for the other two to bubble it through that wet well and they could do that because there was one remaining pump that did require electricity but could run off of the high-pressure steam coming out of the reactor it sounds like there was a good system he didn't need electricity to run that pump you could use steam the problem was that you needed electricity to run the controls for that pump all the valves and other instrumentation and to do that they relied on batteries and the batteries were rated for only eight hours in this country our batteries are rated for only four hours wouldn't make any difference because eight hours turned out obviously not to be enough so that last system failed also and at that point the fuel began to get uncovered inside that reactor vessel water was converted into steam there wasn't liquid water surrounding the fuel there wasn't circulation and the fuel began to overheat and melt and when nuclear fuel gets hot enough the zirconium cladding interacts with the steam that's been produced it rips oxygen off of the water molecule liberating large amounts of hydrogen hydrogen is a very explosive gas and so they were in great trouble the pressures were building up inside the reactor vessel and if they didn't relieve those pressures the reactor vessel could burst they were releasing steam into the pressure suppression pools but the temperature inside those pressure suppression pools quickly reached 100 degrees C boiling temperature it was no longer able to condense the steam or provide any cooling and when that was happening the steam built up inside that small containment and they had to get rid of that pressure or the containment would burst and so they is absolute last-ditch measures started to vent that highly radioactive steam into the environment for reasons that are still not entirely clear that venting which should have occurred through a stack at the top there were leaks of hydrogen gas in the upper part of the building and that a hydrogen gas exploded when it came into the presence of air and you've probably all seen the video footage of one other actors blowing up and then a second and then a third and obviously there is some problem here that was generic to all of them because it wasn't just one reactor that had the hydrogen explosion but hydrogen explosions are something that we always worry about in a major core melt because the temperatures get high enough for the zirconium to liberate a lot of hydrogen which is explosive and then they were in it more trouble because they blown the tops of the buildings off they may have damaged the spent fuel pools there was no barrier to release of the radioactive material anymore from that secondary containment the original design is to vent that radioactive gas through filters even under the best of circumstances that doesn't work very well because the filters clogged up quickly and there are many pathways by which they could be bypassed but when the top of the building blew there was no longer an option to even release the radioactive gases through filters so things got very very desperate and they desperately tried to find some way to get water back into the reactor vessel and water into the wet well to try to cool things down and stop the melting of the fuel and while they were doing this the radiation levels became immense at Fukushima so that a worker would get his or her annual dose in a period of an hour several hours in some cases fractions of an hour the Japanese authorities quickly upped the permissible exposures for workers from five REM to 25 REM in a year just so you know five REM a year if you received it over your working life which is the standard in the United States for workers as well that's about a thousand chest x-rays a year the National Academy estimates that one out of every three or four workers would get a cancer from that radiation so the five REM figures are ready very high they pushed it up to 25 ram which is getting close to the point at which you can get actual acute radiations reactions but even a 25 REM on our you couldn't send workers in for very long because they would get that dose quickly they worked heroically to try to stabilize things but they couldn't pay much attention to the spent fuel pool it was elevated they couldn't see it the tops of the buildings blew and they were mostly concerned about the fuel melting inside the reactors and by that loss of attention to the spent fuel pools the pools began to boil because they had lost their coolant also as the water boiled the water level dropped eventually uncovering at least one and maybe four of the reactor spent fuel pools in unit number four which was actually shut down at the time of the accident and if spent fuel its fuel from its core had been placed in the spent fuel pool that's the spent fuel pool that we most believe got uncovered and caught fire and remember again nothing on top of it to stop the radioactive release from that nuclear fire I've said recently that don t could never have imagined such an inferno three nuclear reactors melting up to four spent fuel pools melting on fire when a spent fuel pool loses as coolant when that water level that's here drops below the level of the top of the fuel there's no longer any shielding left for you to protect the worker from the radiation dose and the radiation dose is so high that uncovered spent fuel pool will give someone who approached it to try to put a fire hose into it for example to cool it off a lethal dose Hiroshima Nagasaki type dose in 17 seconds it's that radioactive and so you can see that this system went that which is working well when it is working well works horrendously badly when it's working badly because every thing leads to something else the loss of cooling leads to hydrogen being generated the hydrogen generation leads to explosions explosions knock at the top of the buildings off you no longer have a mechanism of containing the radiation water levels drop into spent fuel pools you can't get close enough to the spent fuel pools to put water back in it is just an absolutely devastating prospect now I need to remind you that Japan obviously is a technologically very advanced society and the kind of arguments that could have been made about Chernobyl run by the former Soviet Union whatever you think about those arguments they cannot be applied to Japan if what happened at Fukushima happened there as it has it can happen anywhere the reactors in Fukushima are boiling water reactors with mark-1 containments designed by General Electric half of the six reactors were built by GE in the United States we have 23:23 boiling water reactors with mark one containments and five with mark two that are little better about a quarter of our nuclear reactors are identical to the reactors in Fukushima the reactors didn't cause the accident the reactor design contributed to it getting as far out of control as it has but frankly any reactor in the United States could suffer the same event as is occurring in Fukushima because every reactor has to constantly maintain cooling and let me give you a couple of examples from the United States and then will return again to Fukushima San Onofre nuclear power plant that I mentioned earlier in the Southern California high population II area is also located very close to a major earthquake fault it was discovered in 2008 that the operators of the San Onofre reactor had failed to properly connect the batteries that are designed to start up the backup diesels to the diesels and they had not been properly connected for four years a year or two later San Onofre did a test on one of its backup diesels after they had supposedly fixed that problem and it wouldn't start and at that time their other diesel was down for repairs so they had no backup power one other story about San Onofre and then let me turn to Diablo which is closer to you it was discovered a couple of years ago at San Onofre that a worker had fabricated the hourly Firewatch log they were supposed to check for fires every hour to make sure that that if the fire started they would have time to put it out because if you have a fire you can lose your electrical cabling and then you can't control the pumps in the field reactor could melt they found that for five years at San Onofre a worker had fabricated the hourly fire watch law hour after hour day after day week after week for five years without anyone catching that the reason that's important is in the 1970s a reactor called Browns Ferry had a fire you've all probably heard that nuclear technology relies on defense-in-depth backup systems for everything and so at Browns Ferry like at all reactors they had a primary set of control cables that went from the control room to the reactor and they had a backup set so if something happened to the primary set they would still have a backup set but they ran the primary cables and the backup cables through the same cable splitting room and an electrician went down to do some work on the wiring you need to understand that Browns fairy-like most reactors in the country used electrical wiring that had combustible insulation the insulation would catch fire wasn't a very smart thing but they had a backup set of wires but those backup wires ran through the same room as the primary set an electrician went down and did some work and after he finished he followed the normal procedure and lit a candle to make sure that the room was at negative pressure that when went into the cave of room rather than out and he ignited the inflammable insulation on the cables they caught fire the primary set of cables caught fire and the backup set caught fire because the backup set was right next to the primary set fire rage for a day or more in the lost control of the reactor and barely avoided a meltdown so in the 1970s the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered all reactors in the United States to replace the wiring that could catch fire with wiring that would have a long delay before anything would burn and two separate primary and backup systems but the nuclear utilities resisted doing that year after year they asked for extensions and said that they were put in place compensatory measures until they got around to fixing the wiring problem the compensatory measure was to send somebody around once an hour to see if there was a fire and that's what didn't happen for five years in San Onofre now Diablo for a moment Diablo Canyon for 18 months about two years ago had the key components of his emergency core cooling system disabled without the operators knowing it so if they had needed to have if they had needed emergency cooling they would not have had any Diablo is a very interesting story in another way and very relevant to Fukushima at Fukushima the reactors were built to withstand ground motion of a certain level associated with an earthquake that they assumed would be of a certain magnitude and a tsunami that they assumed would never be higher than a certain level the earthquake that occurred that destroyed Fukushima was very much larger than what they had presumed could ever occur the tsunami was very much larger than they had built it for and the ground motion the acceleration at the site was very much higher than they had built the reactor for and that is a concern we have for any reactor in the United States as well and Diablo is a very interesting case study in 1968 or 69 the Pacific Gas and Electric which wanted to build a reactor came before the Atomic Energy Commission for a construction permit and there was a hearing and the local citizens group which had intervened in that proceeding asked to be able to put on evidence for simply an afternoon during those hearings of I a previously undisclosed earthquake fault PG&E in its wisdom objected saying they didn't think such testimony should be permitted and the atomic energy Commission's licensing board voted to to once and not permit that testimony Tom Pigford who was head of nuclear engineering at Berkeley for many many years objected he dissented he said what harm can it be to have a half-day's evidence about whether it's an earthquake fault shouldn't we find out before we pour concrete but he was overruled they got the permit they built the reactor to withstand a very small earthquake it was supposed to cost about three hundred sixty million dollars and a few years later oil industry geologists discovered the Hazara fault just offshore of Diablo capable of an earthquake up to 7.5 magnitude vastly greater than they had built Diablo 2 a stand they had to go back and retrofit the facility at a four point four billion dollar cost overrun it's pretty large considering it was supposed to cost two and sixty million dollars and you all remember the next part of the story they went ahead and did the retrofitting and the problem was that the Diablo Canyon unit one was built to mirror-image blueprints of to kep Diablo Canyon unit two and they used the mirror image blueprints the wrong set of blueprints for putting in the retrofits so the pipe supports and whip restraints were all put in the wrong places and when they discovered they used the wrong blueprint they had to go back and do it all over again in the last two years the US Geological Survey has discovered a new fault called the shoreline fault that appears to be closer to Diablo perhaps even running under the plant itself may cross the has Gris and appears to be of greater risk to the reactor than even the house curry itself years ago the late environmentalist David Brower once defined a nuclear power plant as a complex technological device for locating earthquake faults in California it seems like every time we build a reactor we find a fault they built reactors at Humboldt they found these faults found that they couldn't withstand a quake there rather retrofitted they shut them down reactors of Vallecito similarly shut down because of earthquake faults and San Onofre has now recently been found to have a seismic complex that can cause potentially ground motion far greater than that plant was designed for so the lesson of Fukushima is they built the plant presuming to understand what Mother Nature was going to do that would never produce an earthquake of more than 7.8 I believe was the magnitude they built it for and never more than a small amount of ground acceleration and never more than a fairly small tsunami but of course we saw on March 11th that nature can produce a quake in a tsunami and ground motion far greater than the plant had been prepared for the same thing can be true for Diablo or San Onofre or the other reactors in the United States they give you one other example of how unforgiving the technology is in Ohio there's a nuclear power plant called davis-besse and in the kind of reactor that davis-besse is the control rods come in from the top and they penetrate the reactor vessel and when they do boric acid leaks out small amounts to the top of the reactor vessel to the vessel head that acid can eat through metal and you're supposed to go and inspect routinely to make sure that isn't happening davis-besse they found that the they failed to do these affections for long periods of time and when they finally got around to it they found that asset had built up and had eaten through six inches carbon steel leaving a hole the size of a football leaving only behind a 3/16 of an inch stainless steel interior liner that was bulging from the pressure inside the reactor and if they hadn't checked for another few weeks the acid could have eaten through that and loaned the reactor vessel in and had loss of cooling there in Ohio so what's happening Fukushima is not something far and distant from us it is something that can happen here as well so let's talk a little about the implications first for Japan in terms of radiation and then for us here in the United States and also some of the lessons we do not have a good handle on how much radioactivity has been released so far from the Fukushima reactors understand that the purpose of a reactor containment structure is to contain the radioactivity and why we're concerned about a complete meltdown is that in a complete meltdown the melted fuel can melt through the bottom of the reactor vessel burst it and then melt through and eat through the concrete base mat in the containment and then the radiation can get out but what's happening right now in Fukushima is that the even if the reactor vessels and famous structures are intact and there is evidence that one or more or not even if they're intact because the pressures are so high they're having to intentionally vent the radioactive steam the very thing you're trying to prevent with a containment structure which is to release the radioactivity they're having to do intentionally to prevent an even more catastrophic breach of the reactor vessels in the containment structures and the only way they're able to keep the reactors cool and that cool but to keep them not so horribly hot is to keep dumping water into the reactor vessel and into the wet well and they ran out of water quickly and have had to use seawater until recently so they would dump water into the reactor it would flash the steam that steam would go out into the wet well buildup in the containment structure they'd have to vent it and so there is a constant process of pouring water onto the hot fuel flashing to steam and that steam carry with it not just the volatile but much of the particulate matter into the atmosphere and the second problem is that they're building out very large quantities of incredibly radioactive water and they're having to get rid of that water and some of that has been intentionally dumped into the ocean and some of it has leaked unintentionally by various canals and channels and trenches that were found to be leaking and they were finding radioactive iodine I 131 at levels 5 million times Japan's permissible levels for seawater in ocean water off of Fukushima they were finding cesium 137 levels at one point four million times permissible levels in the seawater and what radioactive water continues to be released into the ocean now the authorities have tried to reassure people by saying that fishing is being prohibited in the area of the ocean immediately around Fukushima there was a cute letter to the editor of the New York Times a couple weeks ago that said they hope that the fish were following those rules and staying out of that area that the water followed the rules as well they found fish 25 kilometers away from Fukushima with substantially elevated levels of radioactivity and we have no way of comprehending what the long-term effects will be abducting so much radioactivity into the ocean but remember that just as there are physical factors cause radioactivity to get diluted there are other factors that cause it to get concentrated radioactivity tends to bioaccumulate small marine organisms consume it concentrates some of the material in their body as they are eaten by larger organisms which the concentrated further and it works its way up the food chain it's also very much true on land as we'll discuss in a few minutes so they are releasing very large amounts of radioactivity into the air and very large amounts into the ocean and the consequences of all of that are extremely hard to predict at present we do not even have a very good handle on how much is being released the utility that operates the facility Tokyo Electric Power Company or TEPCO only a few days ago finally conceded that this was a class 7 accident on the international scale comparable to Chernobyl but they quickly said that they estimated that only about 10% of the radioactivity of Chernobyl had been so far released at Fukushima but then if TEPCO official went on to say that because the releases are ongoing the levels could readily exceed Chernobyl when you look more carefully at their own analyses it appears that they had much higher figures that they didn't release and that their some of their own estimates indicate it could already be 60 or more percent of Chernobyl I think we have no good way of knowing but remember again that the amount of radioactivity available for release is very much higher than Chernobyl Chernobyl is one reactor and these are three and there was no spent fuel pool involved in Chernobyl and we have four pools at risk here so what has been going on in terms of releases in Japan they initially evacuated out a few kilometers then they expanded the evacuation a bit and then there was a controversy between the US the Regulatory Commission which recommended that American citizens in Japan evacuate 50 miles whereas the Japanese authorities were still keeping the evacuation zone at about 12 kilometers this is a bit ironic because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has resisted evacuation zones in the United States of greater than 10 miles and the reasons for that are fairly understandable if you had to have an evacuation zone of 50 miles in United States the Indian point reactor outside New York millions of people close to it and the San Onofre near Los Angeles in the same situation one couldn't even pretend to have an evacuation plan that could work the evacuation plans even for the 10 miles don't really work so there's been a debate as to how far out to evacuate and how far out land will be essentially uninhabitable for long periods of time remember that the releases include some very long live materials like cesium and strontium these are very biologically active they tend to concentrate and they stay dangerous for long periods of time it takes 300 years for the cesium and strontium levels to decay by a factor of about a thousand it takes six hundred years for decay by a million so you can lose productive areas of Japan for long long periods but it's going to be particularly anguishing is a the decision as to where you abandon land and where you let people go back in even though it's contaminated and it will increase their cancer risks and that's gonna be a very political decision and one in which they'll be a good deal of ethical questions I think left unresolved so we cannot predict how many cancers will result from this we cannot predict what the effect will be on foodstuffs but the effects will be long lasting and remember this most astonishing announcement in the last several days by TEPCO which they put forward a plan as to how to bring the reactors down into what's called a cold shutdown status and they said that in three months they hope to construct some way to enhance the cooling of the reactors and fuel pools and in another three to six months they hope to be able to put in place heat extraction systems so they could reach cold shutdown perhaps nine months from now and during that period there will be continual radioactive releases for at least the first few months if that plan is as they say it they're going to have to keep pouring water in having a flash to steam and release that steam they're going to continue to have to find places to put that radioactive water and some of it they will be under great pressure to release back into the sea we've never seen a nuclear accident that lasts that long the Three Mile Island accident was a period of a few days and it got within about a half hour of a complete meltdown but it didn't they figured out what was wrong just in the nick of time and got the core covered again Chernobyl was a week or so but something that lasts for most of a year and is not just one reactor but many is inconceivable and yet there's no good answers to how to fix it you it's how do you restore these complex heat exchange systems when you can only send your workers in for a few hours at a time they're sending robots in just to try to measure the radioactivity and they're fine the robots are having trouble maneuvering because of all the damage from the hydrogen explosions and so on so it's not like there's a good simple answer that you can tell them do this and things will be okay for weeks they weren't able to restore off-site power they finally got off-site power and we all had some hope they could start up the equipment again but obviously the equipment was so badly damaged by the earthquake the tsunami the high radiation fields the venting the hydrogen explosions all of that that the equipment isn't working they can have off-site power now but the off-site power can't power anything particularly useful dumping seawater into the reactor cores does the obvious the water flashes to steam leaving behind a crust of salt and that crust of salt clogs up the cooling channels so that we they are having trouble even when they have water getting water into the fuel where it needs to get cooled the US government estimates that between 30 and 70 percent of the fuel in these three reactors suffered severe damage substantial portion of it has melted when the fuel melts it melts into a configuration with obviously are no few coolant channels anymore so even if you get water to the melted blob how do you cool it besides just on the surface and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has now said that they believes in at least one of the reactors the melted fuel has melted through part of the reactor vessel so it took years before they were able to get into the through Marland reactor and discover that a majority of the fuel had in fact melted it'll take us years before we really know what's going on inside these cores but the problem is that for much of this next year this rate these reactors will be out of control and releasing radiation the tragedy for the people in Japan is beyond what you can speak about tremendous loss of life obviously just from the just from the earthquake and the tsunami a country that still has large numbers of people missing people living in shelters an economy that is in tatters even just plain electric generation not sufficient to meet normal needs and then couple that with not knowing whether you could eat the spinach because spinach is showing up with radio tivity whether you can drink the water because water was showing up even in Tokyo for a while at levels that were beyond the emergency limits for infants it is going to be a tremendously difficult thing for the Japanese and one just has to have one's heart ache for what they are going through and will continue to go through some of you may be wondering about the situation in the United States whether there's any risk here and I want to present a little bit of data for you about that and also I think it's an interesting example of how our authorities and the Japanese authorities have tended to suffer from pressures to initially try to reassure people to lowball the estimates of risk to try to get people to not worry in some situation the fact that it took them weeks to elevate the risk level from a 5 to a 7 when they knew within days that were really at a 7 is part of this desire that we saw also with the BP problems in the Gulf you know they were saying that a thousand barrels a day of oil were being released but wouldn't release the evidence on which that was based and eventually the estimates went up and up and up partially for liability reasons he wanted to seem like you've released less oil or less radioactivity than you have partially because you can't believe it yourself partially to reassure people but those tendencies end up causing more mistrust rather than greater trust and so I'm going to give you a little bit of evidence of how that's worked here in the United States but I want you to understand that our risks are orders of magnitude below what anyone in Japan is facing so the event occurred on Friday March 11th and under US guidance the US Environmental Protection Agency is supposed to take the lead when there is a for a nuclear reactor disaster but over the weekend the White House removed the EPA from the lead weekend and place the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy in charge and you should know that both of them have radiation standards that are very much weaker than EPA's standards that EPA has historically said are not protective of Public Health and Safety and both have been deeply involved in the effort to have a nuclear Renaissance to have construction of more nuclear power plants in the United States so EPA was removed on that weekend NRC and do we put in charge and on the month that Monday there was a press conference at the White House Craig Gass Co chairman of the NRC speaking and EPA nowhere to be seen and at that press conference the ASCO said that the American public should have confidence because nothing is occurring in Japan could possibly reach the United States no harmful radiation would reach the United States or could reach the United States and this was a somewhat extraordinary statement because Yasko as chairman of the NRC nose and the NRC's official position has been for decades that there is no safe level of radiation that all levels are harmful to one degree or another and there were no data yet it takes five days or so for any possible radiation from Japan to reach Alaska in another couple days before could reach the west coast of the contiguous United States and so he was making statements before there were any measurements what happened thereafter was quite interesting to me EPA began to issue some statements saying that radiation was not going to be harmful they eventually corrected that and starts that it would be way below any level of concern which again implied a threshold and they said don't worry we have a network of 120 stationary air monitors across the United States and by the way this is just the metaphor to me look at look on that child's face and that's basically what the look is for all of us right some event beyond our comprehension that poses a risk that we're told we're okay but the people checking us are in radiation suits we don't understand it because we can't see it we can't smell it we can't taste it and then we get assurances not to worry so this map you don't need to read it carefully but is was on the EPA website I took it down ten days after the accident began in Japan and it shows the network of stationary monitors in the United States I'll show you the key in a moment but I want you to notice that half or less of the monitors are dark blue half or more or light blue or white here's a blow-up of the California area and again you'll see that the minority are dark blue majority are light blue or white you'll notice a few other interesting things any of you remember where you live right there are no radiation monitors along the coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles I didn't bring it but there was a marvelous plume map produced that estimated that the plume would in fact hit the west coast between San Francisco and LA where there were no monitors but the situation gets a little worse than that here's the legend for the EPA map dark blue is that the monitors are running less than half of the monitors in the EPA system were running a week into the accident gets worse dude how long they weren't running san diego's device had been broken since November and no one had realized that or done anything about it most of these have been for months and weren't running at the time of the accident so what would you do if you were a PA and you had no coverage substantial portions of the coast you would deploy deployable monitors EPA has about 40 of these and it announced it was going to deploy a few one or two and a Hawaii one or two in Guam one or two in Alaska and then they said they wouldn't deploy them up and down the west coast to fill in the gaps and those devices are more capable than the stationary monitors they use a charcoal cartridge they can pick up gases such as elemental iodine the stationary monitors use an air filter in the most the ID passes right through it so decision was made to deploy the deployable monitors and about 10 days after the accident began you don't you can't read this probably this email went out seven o'clock on a Friday night from EPA regional office in San Francisco to the air pollution control districts around California saying in essence we know we told you we're going to deploy those deployable monitors I regret to inform you that EPA headquarters in Washington has reversed that decision and has decided that we will not deploy the deployable monitors and if the EPA Administrator changes her mind in the future we'll let you know those dozens of deployable monitors are sitting still in offices and warehouses not deployed not running okay let's talk a bit more the deployable monitors how do they work excuse me the stationary monitors the ones that are working they draw air through an air filter and twice a week that air filter is collected by a volunteer and sent by Federal Express to a laboratory of Montgomery Alabama which supposedly will measure them in a few days so under the best of circumstances the results from the filters would take a week it appears however that EPA is not actually measuring the filters in the five weeks since the accident began there should be about 800 filters that have been measured and they've released data from about for maybe a few more than that secondly the iodine as I mentioned goes right through except for the particulate and so we can't give you a good reading anyway so that's the stationary monitors you would think they'd be measuring some other things right you will recall about a week or week and a half into the accident we had tremendous rainstorms here throughout much of California rains a marvelous way to bring Fallout down to earth so what's going on with the precipitation you don't have to read the numbers oh just to show you I've codified the total number of precipitation samples EPA is now reporting and for weeks it reported none at all you will notice that they're posting them only in April that these samples were collected often two weeks before they were posted most of the samples are weeks after the accident began but this is what's most interesting the iodine-131 levels in precipitation in the United States I need to give you one number these are in Pico Curie's per liter the maximum concentration limit under the EPA's Safe Drinking Water Act for iodine 130 and drinking water is three picoCuries per liter so you're getting in Richmond California a hundred of 38 you're getting in Boise Idaho three hundred and ninety a hundred and thirty times the EPA's MCL you're getting all of these values almost all of which with that exception are over EPA's maximum concentration limit for drinking water now I admit rainwater is not drinking water but we get a lot of our drinking water from rainwater it falls down on watersheds runs into streams and rivers and lakes and obviously the other concern about rainwater is that it falls on grasslands and agricultural fields and that the main pathway of concern from a nuclear accident is often the ingestion pathway the concentration of the radioactive material in foodstuffs that we eat our children and so when these numbers were released and they weren't really released they're put up on a table that you can barely find on EPA's website there is a narrative which says that the levels are hundreds of times below any level of concern now that's very interesting because the Safe Drinking Water Act level of concern is three picoCuries per liter and this is way over that and so what's going on is that they are comparing the measurements not to any level of concern but to absolutely astronomical standards designed for emergencies and crises if there was a nuclear power plant accident or five miles from you at what level would be PA intervene to provide you with alternative drinking supplies tell you not to drink milk and so on that level is called a derived intervention level and it is 4,500 picoCuries per liter so they are comparing the measurements the United States to a standard as 1500 times higher than their own maximum concentration limit I concede it's an MCL for routine exposures but your water system cannot supply water to you with iodine over three picoCuries per liter averaged over a year now I do want to remind you that this has at half-life of eight days and with luck these levels will decline although there continues to be a very large source being released from Fukushima at times we are seeing the iodine levels continue to rise dramatically even though there is radioactive decay so there's been a bit of a spin placed on these statements about what's happening in the United States for weeks I've been here's some more data as well you see still quite elevated are the only milk samples for the entire country for the entire five weeks of the accident you will see again only posted in the last week or so only collected in the end of March fortunately many are non-detect but Little Rock has three times the drinking water MCL Phoenix over the MCL Los Angeles at just about the MCL and Memphis over the MCL there have been no measurements reported to date of strontium-90 I told you earlier that it mimics calcium it's a very important trait of nuclide to look for in milk the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere ended because some doctors in st. Louis many of you will recall put on a campaign to have parents send in their baby's teeth from the tooth fairy when the first set of teeth came out to be monitored for strontium 90 uptake in the teeth and they found very high levels of strontium 90 and the teeth therefore very high levels phone and clearly the strontium-90 from fallout was getting into our children ourselves and that contributed to the outcry that ended atmospheric testing but there are no data that been provided yet for strontium 90 requires chemical separation and such more complex measurements and they just may not be doing it so again they're comparing the milk values not to the maximum concentration limit for the Safe Drinking Water Act but to a mergency crisis level of 4500 picoCuries per liter and telling people as well below that which it is so what does that all tell us to put that into any real perspective these are very very low risks compared to what the Japanese are experiencing this is trivial the risks of drinking water or milk at levels at this range for any of you the incremental increase of cancer risk would not be noticeable to you however we have 300 million people in United States and a small risk per person aggregated over a large number of people means that there is at least the potential for there being cancers generated here in the United States as well and I think that it wouldn't have been hard for the authorities to have simply told us the truth not to say that no hazardous radiation will reach us not to say that it's below any level of concern but to say that levels are somewhat above the maximum concentration limits for routine exposures but the individual risk remains very small and over the entire population there may be some effect all in all it means that even with 5,000 miles or so of ocean separating us from Japan we all in some sense do live in Fukushima not just because what happens there can affect us but because this nuclear technology exists everywhere and the was Nina and Fukushima can happen anywhere as well well what are the lessons first of all nuclear power is an unforgiving technology you cannot make a mistake and you cannot have a natural event that exceeds what you have designed the facility for and you can't afford an intentional event we haven't spoken about the risk of terrorism but what a earthquake and a tsunami can do to cut off primary and backup electricity a terrorist can do by intent and our reactors in this country are very poorly protected against that kind of risk research that we did here UC Santa Cruz in the mid-80s disclosed that the design bases threat the level of terrorist attack you have to be prepared to defend against for use at u.s. nuclear reactor at that time was an attack by three terrorists on foot acting as a single team carrying weaponry no greater than automatic rifles the work we did identified the fact that there was no protection against truck bombs and that eventually we got changed after 9/11 some of us petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to upgrade security requirements so the reactors would have to be protect against an attack by at least the number of terrorists we saw 911 which was nineteen and be able to protect against a air crash as we saw on 9/11 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in its wisdom turned down that petition and upgraded the security however to five terrorists the argument being that 9/11 was not one terrorist attack but four separate events and there were no more than five terrorists on any individual plane they also rejected any requirement that our reactors be a to astad an attack by a plane I had a conversation with chairman Jackson about this several years ago and he said that he was opposed to upgrading the protections for existing reactors but was open to having designers of new reactors consider additional protections for the new reactors and I asked Greg tell me Greg if you were terrorists and there were 104 old reactors with poor protection why would you aim at one of the three or four that had better protection and he had no will answer to that so what a terrorist can do a terrorist is essentially given the equivalent of a quasi nuclear capability to use against his or her adversary we've emplaced nuclear power plants with a thousand times the long life reactivity of the hiroshima bomb and spent fuel pools ten times larger than that often near large population centers and when I told you at the beginning that all it takes is for loss of cooling to cause a massive release of radioactivity that's true not just by a tsunami or an earthquake it's true also by a terrorist so oh I have one other thing I need to mention beforehand this is some work that was done by some of my students several years ago during the last days of the Bush administration the Bush administration EPA proposed relaxing radiation protection standards in case of nuclear accidents these are called tags protective action guides and this is for drinking water and it's a log chart and these are the radionuclides and they proposed permitting much larger quantities of each radionuclides in drinking water than is currently permitted first strontium 90 841 times the concentration permitted under current law for nickel 63 24,000 for this tellurium isotope more than seven million times higher concentrations isotope by isotope immense increases and so in the last days of the Bush administration literally actually the last full day in office EPA sent this over to the Federal Register to get published but they were a little late because as you probably know it takes five days for something to get published in the Federal Register and by that time they've been an inauguration and a new president and we were able to get the new administration to pull this proposal back and promised to review it and fix it but what seems to have happened in this Fukushima response is that they have abandoned their own existing drinking water levels and gone to levels that are many thousands of times higher in essence doing in practice what they had overturned the prior administration trying to do so I am going to close this off and try to draw a few conclusions as I may and these are personal reflections as to the lessons I draw from Fukushima and that I've drawn from roughly 40 years of involvement in this issue nuclear technology is the capturing of an extraordinarily powerful means of generating energy we okay okay thanks I want to remind you how this era began first at Alamogordo then on August 6th at Hiroshima in 1945 in August 9 at Nagasaki quite small amounts of highly enriched uranium or plutonium were fissioned over those cities I often bring a little prop to remind folks the amount of plutonium that was in the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki was six kilograms about the size of a grapefruit and work that bill Matthews and Don Cory can schema and I did years ago here demonstrated that for highly enriched uranium and a primitive bomb design just a couple years beyond the Nagasaki design you could you make a nuclear explosion with considerably less in Nagasaki even with the six kilograms only one kilogram of plutonium fissioned and yet it produced a yield of more than ten kilotons more than 10,000 tons more than 10 million kilograms in the woods one kilogram of uranium or plutonium fissioning had the explosive yield of 10 million times the same amount of dynamite of TNT and at Nagasaki the actual amount of that one six kilograms in the bomb one kilogram visioned do you know how much matter actually was converted to energy in that bomb about a gram there you go about 1/3 the mass of a penny converted into energy was able to bring down a city we now have obviously vastly more powerful weapons a hydrogen bomb can't have an explosive yield a thousand times that of the Hiroshima bombs we still have about 10,000 nuclear weapons in the United States despite the claims that we were having deep reductions those reductions actually are about 1% of our personal not 30% the world still has something on the order of 23,000 25,000 nuclear weapons it takes the feud a hundred or so to destroy a country of the size of Russia in the mid-1950s President Eisenhower tried to reassure the American public about this huge risk associated with the power of the atom and he gave a speech on the peaceful uses of atomic energy and said that we would tap the atom for peaceful purposes and that began the effort to use reactors to produce power and essentially what a reactor is is it takes something on the order of a thousand nuclear bombs worth of material and tries to control that reaction in a slow fashion the bomb is obviously a very fast release of energy try to slow it down they use water or carbon to moderate the neutrons to slow them down they use control rods to try to keep it just critical and to tap that energy for peaceful purposes and it was a marvelous dream the idea of converting swords nuclear swords into plowshares but the reality was always somewhat different and that is that there is no such thing as the peaceful atom every nuclear power plant when it operates produces enough nuclear material for about a hundred nuclear bombs so here in California the two diablo units the two San Onofre units are producing hundreds of bombs worth of nuclear material a year and the technology needed to make nuclear reactors which is enrichment of uranium or reprocessing of plutonium is the same technology you need to make nuclear bombs and in fact in the last decades it has been civil nuclear technology that has spread nuclear weapons that's how most countries have been acquiring their nuclear weapons Iran for example is simply using enrichment technology which it claims to be using for civil reactors and we are concerned quite rightly that they could enrich it to a higher level and use it for bombs so there is no real separation between the peaceful atom and the explosive atom but what we've also seen it Fukushima is that it's very very hard to control the atom you can't with high certainty guarantee that you can slow it down capture it use it and harness it for productive purposes without something potentially going wrong the core of each reactor 104 in the United States and these four reactors in trouble at Fukushima and all the others around the world contain an absolutely immense amount of energy and if something disturbs the equilibrium a chain of events can occur in which absolutely unbelievably large amounts of radioactivity can be released and can devastate an area for generations even under the best of circumstances the waste from those reactors is dangerous for about half a million years and we've been unable scientifically to find a place or method of disposal that will keep that waste from migrating back into the biosphere during those periods of time I remind you that if you have to keep nuclear waste safe for half a million years our government has only existed for a few centuries recorded history for a few millennia we as a species only for a couple hundred thousand years and yet we're talking about maintaining this material for half a million years so I think from my own personal view is that the lesson of Fukushima is that it is a technology nuclear power is the technology which perhaps can be safely operated but in my view it might require a different species than ours to do it the problem is not purely scientific if you had Nobel Prize winners all running the reactors maybe everything would be ok maybe not but human beings make mistakes there's always a Homer Simpson and there are tremendous pressures on regulators to allow industry to cut corners to build a reactor to withstand less ground motion that can actually occur to only have to have an eight-hour backup battery to not have to have a plan as to what to do if your backup Diesel's fail to only protect against five terrorists all those kind of pressures which we see in every other sector of our society business putting pressure on regulators or legislators the corruption of a political process by the power of campaign contributions and lobbyists we can live with those problems although we shouldn't have to but when it comes to a technology such as nuclear power deregulation and cutting of corners leads inevitably to through my Island Chernobyl and Fukushima and it seems to me that maybe we have an excuse as a species for not having learned our lesson after Three Mile Island first time it occurred we got they figure that they had misread the instruments than that what they thought was a covered core was actually uncovered at the last minute they pumped more water in saved the day lost the reactor turned a billion dollar assets into a billion dollar liability in a overnight but Amy it's understandable that we didn't fully learn our lesson after through my Ireland Chernobyl okay was in the soviet-designed reactor so we could say okay that's maybe that doesn't apply here even though as you heard we had reactors similar that I was involved in reviewing the safety of Hanford Washington but I don't think there's any excuse for us as a species not to have learned the lesson of Fukushima these were GE reactors they've built and designed by company that builds and designs them here in the United States a quarter of our reactors are identical the problem that occurred at Fukushima of a major earthquake can happen to our reactors here in California easily and the Provos station blackout losing your off-site power and if Diesel's could happen tomorrow at any reactor in the country and so I think that the question for us as the species is what does it take us to learn once we have an excuse twice maybe an excuse but three times you know we're out just strike out if we haven't learned that lesson so my hope is that out of this terrible tragedy we will book end the nuclear era that the Japanese who suffered so much from the dawn of the nuclear Enterprise at Nagasaki and Hiroshima will through their suffering be the instrument by which that era actually gets transformed that it began with Hiroshima and ends with Fukushima and what does that ending mean it would mean that we would decide as a society that we are going to build no more nuclear plants and no more coal plants and that all new energy generation will be renewable sustainable safe if the tsunami and earthquake that hits Fukushima had hit a wind farm or a solar thermal facility or a photovoltaic array none of us would be in this room talking about the matter now there simply would be trivial environmental consequences and I think we all know that eventually we're going to have to make that transition uranium is a finite resource it will not last much longer than wood oil or natural gas anyway we're going to have to move at some point to reliance upon that nuclear power source that has in my view the appropriate exclusion zone and it was the Sun enough millions of miles between us and that reactor for us to have some safety and since we're going to have to do that anyway maybe we should do it now and that means transition from reliance on carbon and reliance on plutonium to reliance on the Sun the Sun obviously drives the wind drives the temperature differential in the ocean that drives hydroelectric and it simply doesn't have the problems of proliferating nuclear weapons of waste that's dangerous for thousands of generations or the risk of terrorism or of a meltdown so out of this tragedy my personal view is that I hope that it is a wake-up call in teachable moment where we decide that we can't keep warming the planet by burning carbon-based fuels and we can't keep proliferating nuclear weapons and spewing out radioactive poisons by expanding nuclear power that we need to build no more new ones start shutting down the existing ones that we have in orderly fashion starting with the ones that the oldest the most dangerous that most badly located near earthquake faults a large population zones you know we're doing the opposite we were extending the licenses of reactors that were designed to run 40 years that they now run 60 or maybe even 80 were upgrading their power from what they were designed to supposedly safely operate at we're going in all the wrong directions so Germany announced that it was going to accelerate the phase-out of its nuclear plants and accelerators transition to renewables it seems to me that that is a sensible approach for proliferation reasons and for these accident reasons that we see in Japan so tragedies are immense amounts of human suffering but would add to that suffering if that's is if that suffering doesn't have meaning if somehow the world doesn't improve doesn't enhance doesn't somehow learn from that suffering so my hope is that the people in Japan as much pain as they are going through may end up nonetheless be able to look back on this event as an event that was a turning point in human history we only have a very small window to be able to resolve the two central problems of the human race one is the proliferation of nuclear weapons you cannot live in a world of 23,000 nuclear weapons for indefinite periods of time without some of them going off without there being a full-scale nuclear war we have got to come to terms with that or it will end life as human life as we know it on this planet if we do not bring that under control and nuclear power exacerbates that problem the second problem is the problem global warming and the nuclear industry has in my view callously used the concerns about the second problem as a way of enhancing the first set of problems and in the end that the choice is not between carbon dioxide on the one and plutonium on the other which gives new meaning to the phrase pick your poison it really is between those poisons and the alternatives of safe and renewable energy so let me close before we take questions with a story that I like from the late anthropologist Ashley Montagu he used to tell a story about an ape that escaped from the New York Public zoo and the Apes keepers the zookeepers looked all throughout the zoo trying to find the ape looked everywhere and could not find him anywhere so he searched throughout New York City and eventually they found the ape in the basement stacks of the New York Public Library with a book in each hand in one hand was the Holy Bible and in the other hand was Darwin's Origin of Species and the people from the zoo said what are you doing we've looked all over for you we looked throughout the entire city of New York what are you doing in the basement of the New York Public Library with the holy gospel in one hand and the Origin of Species in the other and the ape responded I'm trying to figure out if I am my brother's keeper or my keepers brother I think that ape is smarter than any of us that ape understood that we are all brothers and sisters and that we are all kin to all life and if Fukushima can teach us that can get us through this transition before we take these irreversible steps that will leave the world in a condition that's not very livable then Fukushima will be not solely a tragedy but also a great gift to the future thank you
