Worst-Case Scenario: Fukushima Fuel Pool

to this new maximum level that's been rated at talk to nuclear engineer, Arnold Gunderson he's in there, Vermon in US. Mr Gunderson, thanks for being on RT. You've described yourself before this, the Fukushima disaster has chenobled on steroids. Now, how worried should the world be that this disaster is now officially rated as highly as what we saw in Ukraine 25 years ago? Well, the sad thing is that it should have been recognized three and a half weeks ago, and more people should have been evacuated out sooner. I think it is an indication now that the Japanese both the Tepko and the government understand how severe the accident is, but it's really three weeks too late. So why is it taken so long? Why is it taking the government this long to put this official status on it now if you like it's already jumped out once before, isn't it? I think there's a lot of things for the Japanese who are really committed to nuclear, and so there was a lot of vested interests that wanted to downplay it. I studied the three mile island accident, I studied Chernobyl, and now this one. It's pretty standard practice that when things are breaking, you seem to look for the best alternative as opposed to the most realistic one. I think the Japanese wanted a nice outcome and believed whatever instruments gave them that indication. So what are we looking at here? I mean, taking what you said earlier on about the comment you made about Chernobyl on steroids, and I mean, are we likely to see huge areas of wasteland around the Fukushima plant that no one's going to be able to inhabit for decades? I mean, Japan's a very densely populated country. It's got a huge impact, if that's the case, isn't it? Well, the luck, if there's any luck here and really there isn't, but if there's any luck here, it's been that most of the time the wind has been going out to sea. Had the wind been going the other way, I think we see that scenario you just described already. The worst case is the unit for fuel pool, which is, has enormous amounts of plutonium and depleted uranium, like you had in the last segment. If that catches fire, it could devastate a larger area. This far down now, the power back to that plant is the redanger that that could still happen, then, the things still very not in control there, as you see it. Yeah, they don't have power to the fuel pool cooling systems at any other reactors, and unit for us, the worst because that fuel pool has the freshest fuel. It's the most physically hot. And in addition, unit for us got a crack in the side of it. So even if they have water to cool it, it's going to run out to crack. That's the toughest problem on site right now. What's your view over who is the best person to deal with this initially and as the weeks have gone by, should it have been kept, I've drawn, I guess, the other people that know all about it, but they're again, they, I guess, want to look at their profits as well, don't they? And they want the best outcome for their company. The government may be have done more and stepped in and diverted more central resources. I'm not easy for us to sit here and say that now, but of course, Japan was in a heck of a state at the time. Yeah, it's hard to second guess in an emergency, but again, I think that, you're right, they had a tsunami to worry about too, but the government should have stepped in sooner more aggressively. You know, the data we were getting out of, Tepko was not good. You know, wrong numbers kept coming out for weeks and it's hard to make good decisions when you have bad data. Well, I don't go to some things to be in the program, nuclear engineering, as you are talking to us from a firm on the US that appreciated. Thank you.