Art Bell interviews Dr. Michio Kaku on Dec 15, 2003 [Part 3]

However you know the military is quite Careless with regards to plutonium they Often wash large quantities of ammonium Waste and pipes sometimes a criticality In the walls of the building really I Was shocked at the white building at Oak Ridge Tennessee the immaculate of the File where critical mass was attained in The wall Wow and people walking in and Outs if I were hit with the fair amount Of radiation as liquid in and out went Critical and went out of critical and Encouraged a lot of critical for period Of hours but still at all people are Doing nothing a worker required are they Not to wear badges have would have Reflected the dose they were getting With me well believe it or not in order To reconstruct these adults they put a Donkey in that same room and ananda Donkey be exposed to critical mass from The wall to calculate exactly how much Radiation the workers got huh this is How careless you’d be shocked when you Read the files they were wondering those Ominous some good were some of the work And it was not you know he was again Wartime security and people I’m in Post-war security people were very Relaxed about these kinds of things and Well I mean like for example in 1961 in Idaho there was a workers were removed Manually remove the control rod out of The sl1 reactor the stationary go power

Reactor unit one and the reactor was Super critical right under his feet and The reactor exploded I won’t hurt any of This Yaga’s idaho falls idaho january 1961 are three workers were blown apart When a reaction went super critical Forget the meltdown we’re talking about A small bomb going off right under the Feet of mr. John Burns who was shot Through the ceiling the explosion was so Great that the control rod went right to His body and impaled and buck his body On the feeling of the rack no i Remarried any of this a professor hold On Yeah I’ve heard any of this have you all Have never have you ever see stories Before I certainly haven’t I a I what a Beginning amar fell good evening I’m Arthur George my guest is Professor Michio Kaku and professor on I let’s go Right back to this internet on just Curious as I can be why anybody would March into lay reactor room grab a rod And pull it out I mean what what would Drive a person to do that lever place Well mr. John Burns back in January of 1961 was sitting on top of the Stationary low power reactor yet one Operated by the United States Navy and He was told never ever removed central Control rod number nine more than six Inches right because if you remove the Control rod which regulate the chain

Reaction dampens the chain reaction in To remove such a control rod number nine More than six inches the reactor goes Supercritical and it would in fact Explode some kind of like an extremely Serious warning that’s right the you Again supercritical tea heating would Occur water would boil and the boiling Water was in create a steam explosion Which would blow the whole thing apart Bertha yeah well that’s what happened Reconstruction to the accident show that He tampered with such a control on the Benign and removed it two feet two feet One out of there ever you have any idea Why he would do something with such a Strong warning attached to it one we do That well first of all we have to Realize the reactors will blow up under Certain conditions is often stated that Reactors does not look like Hiroshima Bomb no they don’t blow up like Hiroshima bombers but they do blow up Like Chernobyl live FL one right I’ll Explode steam explosion hydrogen gas Explosion for and created by super Cratic al cielo blower reaction blow the Roof right off dodge their two theories The dominant theory is that he flipped He was making routine repair Bob and he flipped it was New Year’s it Was right after New Year’s he was part Of a little tipsy and he removed the rod And then slipped in a jerk two feet out

Of the reactor blowing him to pieces I Mean it shot a reticle the feeling of The reactor he was impaled yeah you said It was in the hell by the rod itself and They hit the ceiling well then what then Reactor crews safety crews went into the Reactors I to find out what happened They found that radiation levels about a Thousand rounds an hour 500 rads will Kill you it was a thousand rounds an Hour oh I did a few minutes in that site You would get already the years maximum Cells the radiation right and they they Found two dead bodies on the ground and They look for the third Z worth it made Repeated entrance into the reactor look Into the third finally according to the Report one of the workers looked up and Saw the third body John Burns and paled On the ceiling now there is a second Theory that proponents of nuclear power Like to make and that is that he was John Burns was involved in a love Triangle and that he wanted to commit Suicide and therefore blow one of the Other rivals also the kingdom come and So he was apparently distraught and blew Himself and his co-workers that were his Rivals the bit using their power plant To do it the point amazing is that I Have ever one theory over the other Maudlin oh well it was New Year to a January second at nine o’clock at night And it is possibly but still suffering a

Hangover from New Year’s and so it’s Clearly possible to include slips and Get the whole thing into motion well you Know we have to realize that you know Nuclear power plants can become unstable They don’t simply melt like 2 Mile Island they can explode like Chernobyl They can explode like the sl1 and they Can go super critical and that Super Criticality accidents are more common Than you realize all right here’s one From or AC is The fast blast me in a little container Message when im gonna show from law Still Alaska said hey art ask dr. a Couple about the day and we almost lost Detroit when the only commercial fast Breeder reactor affirming one fueled in The US partially melted in fact room That’s right insula kept hush-hush in The 1960s but female island was not our First no doubt our first mill town was For me one operated by Detroit Edison ah And it was a two percent core melt two Percent of the core melt but I have Pictures of the core show i melted he’s Melted rods of uranium dripping people Down to the bottom what happened was a It was in a breeder reactor which today Would be considered a criminal to Operate did a very beer these are very Unstable reactors they operate and Highly enriched uranium twenty percent In which I didn’t even know we had any

Active breeder reactors I thought that Was just well or what if we did they Were lab experiments ongoing not Anything from scale running no it was a Commercial theater reactor tell anyone Wants to forget because it melted and Create a catastrophe a potential Catastrophe dummy I didn’t I hadn’t even Heard about it I again I thought it was Only in the lab where I would see me you Scientifical for heaven now then aha we Have created this on reaction or can be Created but they have a full-scale model Operating I had no I’m her here 100 join Today will be considered criminal if Anyone tried to make a commercial Breeder reactor they’re very unstable The very first lead to reactor the EV er Lon actually melted back in the 1950s it Was for the first major melts of a Nuclear reactor lady they were able to Stabilize in about one second before it Would have exploded well right right Then is at 60 they had a commercial not An experimental a commercial reactor how Does that happen I mean how did we get a Commercial reality is it’s something That’s not even safe in a lab for god Sakes how could it get built as a Commercial reactor well we were Cowboys In those days I guess about they were pushing the Envelope and that they were saying they Were the Cowboys that were going to tame

The animal well yeah but if you place You can’t contain this thing in the lab How can you build something commercially Based on what well you can’t but they Did they’d be stopped