Thom Hartmann: Welcome back, my friends, to the second hour of our program. In the first hour of our program we were speculating about why is it that the Iowa caucus republicans are all freaked out about the possibility that their electronic systems, their online systems for posting the results of their caucus votes might get hacked. Could it be because the Ron Paul supporters are young people who know how to use computers? I don’t know but maybe we can start a national discussion about electronic voting machines and insecure systems and you know, Ohio in 2004. Well probably that will never be brought up again. But anyhow, you get that plus the tea party clown show continues on capitol hill. So we will get into that as we continue through our hour.

But first, Fukushima was declared recently by the federal government, not our federal government, but the Japanese federal government, as being cold. “Everything’s fine, nothing to worry about, we’ve got this thing under control." It sounds a little bit like Slim Pickens, you know, riding the nuke down out of the airplane. But everything under control. Paul Gunter is the director of the Reactor Oversight Project at BeyondNuclear.org, a group that keeps track of this kind of stuff and is very well educated on these issues. Paul welcome back to our program.

Paul Gunter: Hey thank you Thom.

Thom Hartmann: So, good news, nothing to worry about, Fukushima, let’s book a flight.

Paul Gunter: No, not yet. This is Kabuki theater.

Thom Hartmann: Okay, oh.

Paul Gunter: It’s really more of the same an effort to control information. I mean even the New York Times is now reporting that this cold shut down is being declared over serious doubt is the headline.

Thom Hartmann: How do you cold shut down three nuclear reactors that have melted into a liquid puddle of white hot molten radioactive crud?

Paul Gunter: Yeah I think it would have been more appropriate if they were to have had some assessment of cold meltdown. But that’s not the, this is really more about fulfilling the Japanese government pledge to bring the accident under control by January 2012. So this is a, it’s a declaration, but there remains many experts who believe that this is not the true situation.

Thom Hartmann: Now one of the things that concerns me is that in addition to the fact that three of these reactors have melted down and continue to burn into the core of the earth and may hit water levels and we may see steam explosions, etc., etc., is that other of these reactors are built the same way reactors are built in the United States, many of them, in that they have the nuclear waste stored in their ceilings, in their roofs. And the nuclear waste itself, if the roof were to give way and it were to fall onto the ground, the zirconium rods would bust open, the stuff that keeps it from each other would break open and even though it’s spent nuclear fuel, it, you know, could it begin fissioning? And if not, could it still contaminate the environment?

Paul Gunter: Yeah. There are still experts who fear what’s called re-criticality. Clearly the situation is that the, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot more uncertainty about how the, this is going to proceed. There is this ongoing cooling operation that is preventing this re-criticality but it’s not built to any earthquake standard at all. It’s really just a patchwork.

Thom Hartmann: They’re just pumping water in.

Paul Gunter: They’re pumping water in and you know we’ve got now more than 90,000 tons of highly radioactive water accumulating on site. It’s already been known to be leaking into the Pacific Ocean. So there’s you know, an earthquake could set this whole thing off again. Let’s remember that all that nuclear waste that you’re talking about is still in these four rooftop pools and unit 4 is looking more and more like the leaning tower of Pisa right now.

Thom Hartmann: You mean the whole building itself?

Paul Gunter: The whole building is listing.

Thom Hartmann: The structure that’s holding the pool.

Paul Gunter: Structurally listing. There is about 150 tons of high level nuclear waste, you know, the full core was offloaded to the top of this rooftop pool and it’s sitting in this pool, you know six stories up.

Thom Hartmann: So this is not even spent nuclear waste, they just…

Paul Gunter: No, this is reactor core. They were refueling unit 4 when the accident happened. So we had meltdowns in units 1, 2, and 3 but the core had been moved to the roof at unit 4 and that building is now shifting. And they’ve been sending engineers in there to try to shore it up, to, you know, poles and whatever to keep it from falling over. But if that whole thing falls over, it’s just going to dump a whole reactor core right out onto the ground. And that’s, that’s a big concern for re-criticality right now.

Thom Hartmann: And what, and re-criticality is a fancy way of saying fission…

Paul Gunter: That the meltdown, the meltdown resumes.

Thom Hartmann: Right. In other words the nuclear reaction begins all over again. Now this is not the kind of nuclear reaction that we see in bombs, this is the kind of nuclear reaction we see in nuclear reactors where it gets white hot, it produces amazing amounts of heat and radiation.

Paul Gunter: Right. And hydrogen gas.

Thom Hartmann: And hydrogen gas which is highly explosive. And it produces amazing amounts of radioactive isotopes many of which are themselves gases. Iodine, xenon and what not. And those things, and those things get into the atmosphere immediately, right?

Paul Gunter: Right. So I think that, we’re still in a guessing game in terms of what’s real and what’s staged. I mean there’s a reporter who was an undercover worker who just held a news conference in Tokyo which was just reported in the Mainichi News which is a reliable and ongoing source if you want to really keep track of what’s going on at Fukushima coming out of Japan.

Thom Hartmann: Is this is in Japanese or English?

Paul Gunter: This is, they have an English version online, but it’s, the Mainichi News. But Tomohiko Suzuki is saying that he told a foreign correspondence club news conference that the work is basically a charade right now. That there is, you know, they’re just letting things run their course still, they’re pouring lots of water in and there’s a lot of hope that they’ve cooled it down. But again, let’s remember that the radioactivity is so intense that nobody can really get in there to look and see what is going on. It is really about computer modeling right now. There are some temperature gages that are tracking lowering temperatures, but whether or not they are actually projecting, you know, accurate temperatures of where that core sits, and there have been any number of projections. Some of the projections are that the core has already gotten into the earth. Even TEPCO’s own projection says that it long ago left the vessel, it melted through, dropped to the floor, and burned through 2/3 of the concrete floor and was well on its way out of the reactor basement. So…

Thom Hartmann: So that means you’ve got four reactors that are in full meltdown.

Paul Gunter: Well the…

Thom Hartmann: Or China syndrome.

Paul Gunter: The fourth, the three reactors that were operating melted down. The fourth reactor we have, unit 4, with all that fuel up on the roof, leaning to the side. And…

Thom Hartmann: Right. Can’t get they get a robot in there or is the radiation so intense that it fries the electronics of the robots?

Paul Gunter: They have been getting robots in there but we’ve not been getting any sense that they are able to do anything, you know, because of the, you know, the heat, the radiation. But you know, tracking this stuff…

Thom Hartmann: That’s right, these are millions of degrees hot aren’t they?

Paul Gunter: Well it’s extremely hot and it’s, it’s hard to locate right now.

Thom Hartmann: Thousands or hundreds of thousands.

Paul Gunter: They’re still using computers to try to locate the position of the core in these units, 1, 2, and 3.

Thom Hartmann: Amazing. So don’t…

Paul Gunter: So sit tight.

Thom Hartmann: So don’t book your summer vacation to Fukushima now. Okay you can get all the information over at BeyondNuclear.org. Paul Gunter. Paul thanks so much for being with us.

Paul Gunter: No nukes.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah, no nukes for sure. Good talking with you.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.