Jeff Rense: OK, and welcome back, glad you are along tonight. We are going to talk to Mr. Tom Burnett. Dr. Burnett is with us Mondays, usually, to bring us up to date on Fukushima and other things. Of course we have America's Fukushima now, or at least potentially so, the "Fukushima on the Missouri," not on the western Pacific. Are you there Tom?
Dr. Tom Burnett: I am here, Jeff, good evening.
Rense: Yes, good evening. It is getting to be crazy there. Los Alamos, of course, another crazy one. We can start talking about Los Alamos and then switch over to Calhoun if you like, and what I wanted to mention about Los Alamos is -- this is not -- people's memories are are almost nonexistent. This is not the first major -- they call it a brush fire -- it is a forest fire -- near Los Alamos. They had one years ago, not that many years ago, less than ten, and at that time, in that fire, there was some radioactive material burned, ie. ash went up into the sky and came down in the environment and is in the foliage now that it is being burned. So, if they were to measure the air now, they would find radioactivity being re-released from the last fire. This fire is now of course inside the grounds of the facility. There are 30,000 pounds -- well, 30,000 barrels I think it is -- of plutonium-based radioactive waste stored above ground under tents at Los Alamos. More brilliant thinking.by American scientists.
Dr. Tom Burnett: Well Jeff, they really don't have any choice. There is no place to put this stuff, so they just put it outside and throw a tent over it and let it go. And basically they do the same thing at every nuclear plant in the world, except the difference with Los Alamos is they do a lot of weapons research, and so their plutonium is a little bit higher grade than the stuff that comes out of a nuclear reactor.
Rense: It is trick-plutonium, it is very clever stuff.
Dr. Burnett: It is not good, Jeff, let me tell you that. It is not good stuff. So --and that fire is burning away, and I really cannot comment on it. The Radnet, the U.S. government nuclear regulatory or Environmental Protection Agency, whoever happens not to be doing their jobs today, it is not measuring it. They don't care. They say, "Well, if Fukushima was many things, so this will not be anything either." So, they just aren't going to tell.
Rense: They pulled their station out of Boise Idaho, which I mentioned a couple of days ago in case you folks missed it. They pulled their radiation monitoring and equipment out of Boise Idaho. Out! It is gone. It is not even there. Well, and remember during the -- go ahead.
Dr. Burnett: They had to do that because the readings they were getting were --
Rense: Too high!
Dr. Burnett: Yes.
Rense: They were the highest in America around March 15th, 16th, and 17th, from some sources, and they didn't go down. They just stopped reporting them. Why it went to Boise I don't know. It had to do with the jet stream going up and over and coming back down there. The geography is such that the mountain range kind of pooled the clouds up and the stuff fell down on the Boise area. But this is interesting. Boise is also the location of the fifty square mile, soon to be, Communist Chinese, self-sustained city, upon which America law no longer is effective and Americans can't go in unless the Chinese say OK. So Boise is an interesting venue for a couple of things at least.
Dr. Burnett: Well maybe I can get a visa and go there and become a nuclear engineer. [Rense laughs]. All their engineers have been trained at-- guess where they have been trained, Jeff?
Rense: UC Berkeley, American institutions of higher learning, they are the best. The University of California had actually put a cap on Asian students or they would have taken over as a majority of the student populations, so yes--.
Dr. Burnett: And Los Alamos Jeff.
Rense: Sure, of course. When -- who was it -- doggonit, several presidents ago, perhaps even Nixon, was complaining about the number of communist Chinese physicists and scientists who were in Los Alamos. Some of the top people in Los Alamos, the Americans were griping about that, and the former head of the Ft. Detrick lab said that on any given day he could go into our top bioweapons lab, and on that particular day, any day, the majority of people in there would not be Americans by birth or American citizens. There would be foreign scientists in there, so --
Dr. Burnett: That is exactly correct, and why is that? I do not know why that is, but it wouldn't be my first choice. However, I don't get to make a choice any more. I am apparently not a citizen any more. If I go to the [unintelligible] right on track, if I go to the airport at my age, with is mid-60's, and I just had an operation and I have to have some sort of absorbent lining on because I just came out of surgery --
Rense: Of course --
Dr. Burnett: The TSA will pull me out, make me get out of the wheel chair, strip, take it off, [unintelligible], not give me another one.
Rense: These sons of hell need to be removed. TSA needs to be shut down. I'm sorry. SWAT --
Dr. Burnett: It absolutely does. And you know why it is doing that? Do you know why the FBI and the TSA and everybody is going crazy? Because they can. Because the President is not exercising any control whatever, or if he is, it is the wrong kind of control. So that scares me too, Jeff.
Rense: What President?
Dr. Burnett: Well, you know, well --
Rense: We have a teleprompter reader and a partier, and an illegal --
Dr. Burnett: The golf guy, you know.
Rense: --- You mean the card-carrying member along with Rahm Emmanuel of the oldest Chicago men's gay bath house. That guy? I remember.
Dr. Burnett: Yes, that's the one.
Rense: The one with Reggie Love, his personal assistant who flies behind Air Force One out of a private U.S. taxpayer-paid for jet? I'll bet you they take the family dog -- That one? Yes.
Dr. Burnett: I can't go there because I have never seen that happen, although they do fly into Hawaii quite often, and I don't live on Oahu, I live on another island, and they send their overflow jet, the ones with the weapons on them, the 747s that are weaponized and have interesting electronics. They send them here and park them, and you can drive by, but don't try to take a picture as you are going around, because they will stop you and grab you. I had that nasty experience, actually.
Rense: Well, taking pictures or videotapes of police will soon be declared completely illegal and you will be arrested like the woman in New York, Rochester New York. The police did not like her taking images of them from her own yard from across the street.
Dr. Burnett: From her own yard.
Rense: Yes, and so they arrested her.
Dr. Burnett: That is right. Pretty soon we are all going to be in prison because I am going to be in prison the next time I go on an airplane.
Rense: I would submit that we are already in prison. Debt prison. We are physically in prison because our movements are restricted now. We are under surveillance constantly. We are being fed poisons. We are under usury laws. We are under unconstitutional laws by the scores --the hundreds, and where is Ron Paul introducing legislation to roll this stuff back? Sorry, I haven't seen it yet.
Dr. Burnett: Gosh, Jeff, you know what, you are stepping out of my area of expertise. Let us go back to deadly radionucleides.
Rense: How about Calhoun? Tell us about Calhoun and the great rubber water dam.
Dr. Burnett: OK, let me tell you about that. You notice there have been no pictures of Ft. Calhoun since May 24th --
Rense: NOT!
Dr. Burnett: No, and there was one, but it was pulled offline in about a minute from -- I think it was MSNBC that had it online for about a minute, and let me tell you something else. They -- in fact I had the whole story about that disaster that was coming down. Right at this moment they are on diesel backup power. It is not the ones that are built in, it is that little one that is on wheels that they happen to manage to get up high enough so that it isn't under water like all the rest of them are. They are not on external power at all, and let me tell you about the commissioner of the NRC who supposedly went up there and had what -- a photo op. Had an inspection? There are no pictures of him being there. He didn't go! He got in a police car or some kind of car or a limousine, and he drove on a back dirt road to within about four miles of the place so that he could see it down the hill, under water, and he said "Oh well, that looks pretty safe to me," and he turned around and left. There is a story going around -- his press release -- that he got in a boat and was driven over and crawled across the berms and crawled around on wet sand bags in his $400 shoes and $2,000 silk suit. And let me tell you something, that didn't happen. It just didn't. He got close enough to look and he said "That looks OK to me, and he jumped back in his car, and off he went, because he had an important meeting at the G-20.
Rense: That's right. In and out. Hang on a second, Tom. We'll be right back. By the way, the famous rubber water-filled berm failed because somebody with a back hoe was putting sand behind it and accidentally rubbed up against it. That was the reading I got at one story. Hilarious. They punctured it, and the thing fell like a house of cards. All right, back in just a minute. [11:20]
Rense: All right, let's get right back with Dr. Tom Burnett. How long have you known, or do you feel that you are certain enough they are currently on a backup power system, Tom, that we should begin a count-down of sorts?
Dr. Burnett: Oh, it was reported this afternoon.
Rense: Well they supposed went off, and then went back on to their primary source.
Dr. Burnett: No, no, no. Yeah, they said they did. But they have said a bunch of things but in point of fact, I believe, in fact I know, there is a report that they were on diesel backup power when the secretary, when the commissioner of the NRC drove around the area --
Rense: I read that. I did see that too, yes.
Dr. Burnett: OK, so they were on a diesel unit. Now they have two built-in diesel units, and those two units, they are about, they are air intakes about half covered with water, so I am going to take a wild guess that they aren't running, and because somebody popped the condom and seven feet of water flowed in, this is what they said, of course, "Oh, there is no danger, we have a secondary backup system." You know what that backup system is? It is a hundred sandbags around every door and every room and every entrance. [Rense laughs]. That is great, except --except -- that we are talking about a couple hundred thousand cubic feet of water a second flowing through there. So let me tell you what is going on Jeff. Everything that is below water level, is below water. It has got water in their control room, their electrical panels. They have water in them. They are running -- if they are running it on the external power, it is the external generator they brought in on wheels upon a trailer --
Rense: Wow.
Dr. Burnett: -- And if it is running at all, it has to be bypassing their entire electrical system to get power to the batteries. And in my experience people will take batteries and stick them away somewhere where they are safe, and typically they don't elevate them too far. So I called it, actually I called it yesterday. I said that 88 hours from 1:30 AM Sunday, we will know if there is a problem, and if there is, it will pretty much be too late to do anything about it. In fact, it is too late now. There is nothing they can do about this.
Rense: They have got muddy water on the turbine building, OK.
Dr. Burnett: OK, so the turbine building is where the water from the reactor in its operating goes to transfer heat. And guess what else goes through the turbine building to transfer heat? The cooling pool for the spent fuel. That goes through the turbine building to be cooled, and it comes back in there as super clean water. And if it doesn't, then the temperature of that spent fuel pool is going up about 2 degrees an hour. And I suspect, I can't prove it -- I have no sources on site -- I suspect that is what is happening right now. I think they are running on one backup generator that they are trying to keep their batteries charged with, and they have 88 hours of backup power. But I don't really believe that they have 88 hours of battery power. So I think that somebody is up there pulling out their hair right now trying to figure out what to do, and they can't get any diesel fuel in.
Rense: Now a question --
Dr. Burnett: Sure.
Rense: Apparently it has been somehow admitted finally by the NRC that -- and you have been talking about it -- the spent fuel pool is quite a massive project. It is 40 feet below ground, and forty feet above ground. It is an 80 foot deep --
Dr. Burnett: It is thirty eight feet above ground, yes.
Rense: It is approximately 80 feet. It is a big pool and it is in a big building, a red building.
Dr. Burnett: And it is full. And it is full.
Rense: Totally full, and they had to go to the dry casks outside. And you can see the space they had allocated for future dry cask storage. The dry casks, of course, are supposedly impervious to floods, if the NRC is remotely accurate.
Dr. Burnett: Well you know what is really interesting is that the dry casks outside are the only things left that are dry.
Rense: That is true.
Dr. Burnett: So that is wonderful.
Rense: That is interesting. They did build that up high enough. The word that I have now, and many of you have probably seen it, is that we are three feet away from a hundred percent melt-down process. That's it.
Dr. Burnett: OK, and let me give you a stat. There is predicted to be five to seven feet of water rise within the next week.
Rense: Oh yeah, this is not going away folks. This is not going to peak in a day or two and then go down to some semblance of normalcy. This is not at all going to go away.
Dr. Burnett: No, no, this will continue. It is still rainy out there. And the dams and levees that are open, that is great. They are open basically all the way and they are putting more water on this nuclear plant than it should ever have had by about eight feet. But that is not the problem yet. The problem is that if one levee -- if one levee breaches -- or one other sand bag and the ones behind it start washing away, I mean, we are talking about human error here. We are talking about things that people made. We are not talking about some perfect edifice that they can just turn off. They can't turn a switch and say, "Let's just turn this whole nuclear plant off, and don't worry about it, and let it sink, and we'll walk away, and we'll come back next year" -- that's not happening. This is -- and I [unintelligible] fifty times more dangerous than Fukushima --why? well, the reactor is smaller than Fukushima. And it is offline. It is not running. It is in cold shut down. But it is still fueled, although that really doesn't matter when as long as they don't open it up.
Rense: Well, two thirds of the fuel is still in there.
Dr. Burnett: What matters is that spent fuel pool, because Ft. Calhoun is the designated storage site for Nebraska and probably three or four states around it.
Rense: It wouldn't surprise me at all.
Dr. Burnett: I found that by going to the NRC site.
Rense: I wonder -- we have to take a break here, hold on Tom, we have to pause. I wonder how many tons are in that spent fuel pool that is maxed out. It is an enormous amount. Which again, has to be kept cool. Remember that folks. Stand by, Tom, back in a minute. [19:21]
Rense: OK, back with Dr. Tom Burnett. Talking about the American situation which is obviously going to get worse. What is your projection again, or the date of your consulting about, five to seven feet over the next week, and we are only three feet away from what they are saying --
Dr. Burnett: There is a chart on the USGS web site which projects the flood level. And I looked at that, and it predicted five to seven, or five to ten feet of additional water height over the next three or four days. Of course these are predictions. They are trying to predict the future, and they can't. No one can predict the future. It might suddenly all of a sudden go somewhere else. But if those projections from the U.S. Government are correct, Ft. Calhoun has a problem they cannot avoid.
Rense: No, they can't. The story I have here is that there is a 100 percent chance of reactor core damage if the flood waters go above 1,010 feet at Calhoun. This is the NRC talking. It is right now 1,007 feet, so we are only three feet away from meltdown.
Dr. Burnett: They were actually 109.5 I believe at one point before the condom burst and they said "Oh, no problem, we have four or five feet to go, la, la, la, but you know they were fighting with the NRC for over a year because the operators for the plant did not want to spend the money to correct it.
Rense: Right. One of the worst plants in America, easily.
Dr. Burnett: One of the three worst. One of the three most dangerous, yes? And now that their primary abatement tool, their solution, which was the rubber dam has burst -- actually it did not burst, they burst it. Welcome to Fukushima America. If something doesn't break, just go out and break it.
Rense: Just turn a backhoe loose in the area and swing that extend-a-hoe and get it anything they can reach.
Dr. Burnett: And you know, it is not funny. It is horrible. It is sad. It is terrible. But I cannot believe that -- I mean, who is in charge here? No one! No one is in charge. There is no adult supervision.
Rense: The keystone cops are in charge.
Dr. Burnett: Well, maybe they are.
Rense: How could they break the rubber dam?. Come on folks, this is absurd. The most important thing standing between us and a potential Fukushima-grade catastrophe is this rubber dam. How could they even start a backhoe up in the area, let alone somebody working near it trying to load sand on the back side. Give me a break. This is nuts.
Dr. Burnett: What people are not talking about -- they are not talking about anything. They will not release any photos. The commissioner of the NRC, I have not seen any pictures of him touring the plant, as he supposedly did today. Nobody north of -- in that part of Nebraska really understood that he was even there except that all the deputy sheriffs went up to the plant. But he didn't get into an airplane or helicopter. He drove up in a car as close as he could get, and then he says, or his press corps said, he motored across or swam across did something, and got in there and as soon as he got in they offered him a life jacket. And then he took his expensive silk suite and his $400 shoes and he was running up and down the flooded sand bags, which of course they wouldn't let him do anyway. So I suspected that story. I suspect he got near enough to look at it, because it would have damaged his reputation if he had just jumped back in his plane and left. And then he said, "Oh, I see it, that looks great" and then left. In fact, he is gone. So your listeners can judge for themselves, but I think that story is baloney. Now you can ask me at this point what we are going to do with Ft. Calhoun, or you can jump to Fukushima, because I am ready to slam the focus -- [24:30]
Rense: Let us go to Japan, because that is getting to be insane. The Areva which of course is the primary contractor of this so-called water decontamination machine they have set up there. They put it online the other day and it was shut down within an hour.
Dr. Burnett: OK, you know why?
Rense: It was put back on again today, and they found so many leaks they shut it down in an hour and a half. It ain't gonna happen, that is the bottom line. And -- and I asked you earlier today, because no one was talking about it, let me set the stage, and you can fill in the blanks. I said, "Tom, they are talking about cooling the reactors. Number one, what are they cooling the reactors with? Are they using fire hoses, or are they trying to run water, as the suggestion is, through a piping system, the likes of which they used before the earthquake. No one said anything about that. OK, that is number one. Number two, how do you cool a reactor, even with a piping system that has turned into a molten piece of lava that is eating through the concrete and heading south? So, and anyway Tom explained it, and pretty funny.
Dr, Burnett: Well, I probably shouldn't be funny about that, because that is another disaster.
Rense: You have got to start laughing. It is so pathetic, it is so over the top, we have got to chuckle, or else we will all just have to cash in. It is just that bad.
Dr. Burnett: Let's be specific. Which reactor are you talking about, because I can go down the line 1-2-3 if we have time.
Rense: Well they claim it was through all three. They said all three were being cooled with this decontaminated water. They didn't specify. They made it sound like all three had their cooling systems still operable. Bull.
Dr. Burnett: Sure, OK, none of them had any cooling systems operable, that is why they had that concrete pump shooting water in through the top of them. All right?
Rense: Right, and fire trucks, yes.
Dr. Burnett: That's a lie. Now let me tell you why the Areva decontamination system is not working. It would work fine on, maybe, it would work fine, on soup-pure water that had no contaminants in it. But the crap they are pumping out of there is mud. So they are pumping it through these tiny filters --
Rense: They are membranes--
Dr. Burnett: Basically the stuff that is in there, it is not the same thing, but basically if you wanted a comparison, you can call it [unintelligible] - and this stuff takes tiny radionucleides out. But when you start pumping mud through it, it works for about a minute, or in this case an hour and a half. Then, the filter is full of radioactive mud and doesn't work anymore, and they go "Oh! What is the problem?" Well, the problem is that you can't pump mud through a radionucleide filter. You have to pump super pure water through it.
Rense: Yep.
Dr. Burnett: And I do not think that anyone in Japan, either they have no comprehension of what they are dealing with --
Rense: Are they brain dead? That is the question. I mean this is a no-brainer. We have got to take a break here, hang on, back in a minute. One of the companies involved in this decontamination equipment was in charge of removing the cesium from the water. Well it picked up enough cesium to absolutely overload its potential carrying capacity in five hours instead of thirty days, so that took care of that part of it too. So today they actually did try, apparently, to pump this water through what was left of their piping-cooling systems. They found so many leaks they had to shut it down in an hour and a half. Done, that was the end of that too, so you see everything they try is not only a joke, but it is a waste of time. There is, as you said, there is nothing they can do, except create more radioactive water with no place to put it. Will be right back. [29:02]
Rense: OK, back with Dr. Tom Burnett, we are talking about the catastrophe -- well, there are several -- but the biggie of course is Fukushima, which is not going away. If you go down to the center of my home page at Rense.com and look at the Japan nuclear disaster. It is all there. The U.S. stories are all being collated for you as well under the "U.S. Nuke Plants in Trouble," the "Japan Radiation Coming to the U.S." box is also updated regularly with radioactivity stories that impact you directly, and then the first story is the Japan nuclear disaster box, which has a real time world earthquake monitor. Take a look at that. The live cam seems to come and go. Mostly it has been going lately. The stories we have been talking about are right there. The new improved Fukushima cooling system down after an hour and a half. . Somebody wrote a very interesting essay about the melted fuel moving down toward ground sea water. This brings up, actually the author of that story was talking about building an underground, I guess like a vertical wall straight into the ground, down who knows how far. To keep the radioactive water from going into the ocean, but he missed the point. Another story talked about doing the same thing on the inland side of the destroyed plant to keep the radioactive water from going down and moving through the ground water and destroying the entire island of Honshu. Don't know if either one of them could work, kind of doubtful, we have got issues of neutron and gamma ray blasts that no one can get near. Just little details. But tell us more about the idea of building underground dams to keep the water contained under the wrecked plant.
Dr. Burnett: OK, that won't work, and I wrote that, as a matter of fact my first article about Fukushima in March was that stuff was going to melt down and hit the ground water, and this was going to be a huge problem. You know Jeff, sometimes I wish I had two or three hours on your show instead of an hour, but I am going to make this really fast.
Rense: I am going to give you another half hour tonight, so you have got time.
Dr. Burnett: OK,well .I will make it fast, but not that fast. First, let's go to Reactor One. Within a day or two, or a few days, most of the people who were akamai [Editor's note: "akamai" is a Hawaiian term for "wise"], or who were aware of what was going on, realized that they had meltdowns, because things don't explode just for the heck of it. Nuclear plants just don't explode because they don't have anything else to do. They were having fission events in there, and those fission events were separating oxygen from what? From nitrogen, no, from hydrogen.
Rense: Hydrogen.
Dr. Burnett: OK. Well -- I mentioned that because I am going to throw liquid nitrogen in in a minute. And so one blew up. A couple of months later they decided, "Well, we are going to open Reactor One. They opened it and let several million lethal doses of radioactivity out, and discovered that the core had melted through the bottom. Good, good idea. So the next thing we should think of, is just leave Reactor Two closed, but oh no, they just said they are going to open that up and throw a thermometer in the bottom. They opened it up and let several billion doses of lethal radiation out, and then that little mechanical thing they sent in either crashed on the roof or wouldn't work. Well they sent people in. Carbon-based humans. Just throw a thermometer on the bottom, well, of course it melted because it is about 3,000 degrees at the bottom. Those people came out and I'll bet you they are not in good shape right now. Now they are talking about Reactor Three. The spent fuel pools of Reactor Three. Well let me tell you something. There is no spent fuel pool at Reactor Three. And there is only about half of the core at the bottom. That stuff is blown all to heck over five or ten or twenty kilometers around Fukushima. It blew up. And so I have no idea what they are even talking about, except I do know they pulled a liquid nitrogen tank up to reactor Two.
Rense. Yes, a trailer. They trailered it in, right.
Dr. Burnett: OK, they were talking about pumping nitrogen gas into Reactor One, why would you do that? Because it displaces hydrogen and oxygen. And so it might keep it from exploding again. But now they are thinking about pouring liquid nitrogen into Reactor Two to cool it off. Well, that won't work. So hopefully they will decide that will not work, and squirt some nitrogen gas in there to displace the oxygen and hydrogen. But that is not going to help anything. because when this stuff gets through the bottom and hits ground water, it is going to start creating oxygen and hydrogen from the water, and it is going to start exploding. Bam, bam bam bam. One after another. There is nothing they can do about it. OK, your question, can we build dams to keep the ocean out? No. Can we build dams to keep the groundwater out? No. What they could do, and I suggested it,is they could get about a million people, and a bunch of equipment, and dig a hole about a mile deep, and push this whole mess into it. They would have to put a dam around the near side of the hole to keep the water table and the ocean out of it. Push this whole mess into it, and have all the people in charge of TEPCO jump in after it, and cover it up.
Rense: [Laughter] Good. Good job.
Dr. Burnett: That is all that they can do with that. But now they have a better idea. Now their idea is, "We'll take all the fish that the fishermen are catching off Fukushima --"
Rense: The glowing fish.
Dr. Burnett: Those are the ones. "We will process them and can them and either sell them at a huge discount, or give them away to poor countries to --"
Rense: To help those developing nations. I think that is a humanitarian gesture of the year!
Dr. Burnett: I think it is too. Wonderful.
Rense: It is called population control.
Dr. Burnett: A great idea. We can't poison our own nation and everything around the Tropic of Cancer, around the world, we are going to can this stuff up and poison the rest of the world too.
Rense: Yeah, I know. It is hard to believe this is happening -- hey, you couldn't make this stuff up, folks, I mean it is bizarre. To keep the Fukushima fishermen prosperous, and gainfully employed, they are going to buy their deadly fish. And they are deadly. It is all bio accumulative. They are going to process them, can them -- seafood, other types of things beside fish too. And as Tom said, give them away or sell them at a tremendous discount to developing nations. What is wrong with that picture?
Dr. Burnett: Well, let me tell you a couple things wrong. Everything is wrong with it. But again, it is because --I heard the Japanese government, and/or TEPCO have no comprehension of what is going on there. They just don't get it. They don't understand what they have created. In fact, they have got a publicity campaign going on to restart a bunch of nuclear plants that they had shut down. You did read that, of course?
Rense: All preposterous
Dr.Burnett: It is all ridiculous
Rense: Here is another one, while we are going through these things and coming to the bottom of the next hour we are going to Hong Kong to talk to Yoichi Shimatsu for his report. And he has got a lot to say as well. We are looking at now people up to 40 kilometers away from the destroyed plant measuring 3 millisieverts in their urine. Now that is not a good sign. They have also found Strontium 90 three miles off the Fukushima shore. That does not mean it is not 30 miles offshore. They just tested three miles offshore. It could be a hundred miles. It could in the Gulf of Alaska. They don't know. So when you get these results, remember, it is what is not said, and what is not tested for that is crucial. So whatever we have here you can extrapolate it almost as far and as much as you want -- so there you go with that. 40 kilometers from the plant, 3 millisieverts in urine samples. Now Tom had a nuclear medicine test recently on his heart, and if you listen to the program, he was testing himself with a Geiger counter. I think at that time it was a week after the procedure, and that Geiger counter was absolutely roaring, and they told him it would be gone within 6 hours. They lied, and they lie to everyone. All these nuclear medicine procedures, folks, are probably contributing to the early deaths of countless tens of hundreds of thousands of Americans. True. Are you still reading anything? Did you Geiger yourself today?
Dr. Burnett: I haven't Geigered myself recently, in fact, it did go away. But, there is a web site called radiationnetwork.com. And I happen to have the only 24-7 site that is monitoring in the states. There are a couple more, but they go on and off and mine tends to stay on. So -- and where I live, which is on the east side, the windward side of the Big Island, which is the southernmost island, we get the least radiation kickback from around the Gulf of Alaska. Most of the time it goes up around Kauai. But right now my instruments are reading 31 counts a minute.
Rense: I am watching that right now. Let me tell you folks how to go there, and see Dr. Burnett's station. Just go to the "Japan Radiation Coming to the U.S." box, scroll down to the third item there, the "Live National Radiation Network Map," click on that. At the top you will see AK and HI, Alaska and Hawaii. Click on that, and you will see Tom on the Big Island, on the east side, down to 24 counts per minute, and as we slide into the top of the hour break, we will come right back on the other side, another half hour to go with Dr. Tom Burnett, stay tuned. [41:19]
Rense: OK, and welcome back, talking to Dr. Tom Burnett about the issues both here and in Japan, and the issues here are not looking good if the flood waters go up another three feet. We are looking at according to what we are told a one hundred percent chance of at least a partial melt-down. And any melt-down is bad news. For reasons we have been talking about for all these many, many weeks, since March 12th. OK, where are we here? We are talking about Fukushima. No plan, no hope, and now the children there are being told that they are going to be wearing radiation dosimeters. These are kids in Fukushima. The entire Prefecture which is like a big county. They are told they are going to be asked to wear hats and to gargle. Pretty well takes care of any radiation contamination problems, doesn't it?
Dr.Burnett: No problem. The dosimeter sucks up the radiation and your hat keeps it off you --
Rense: [laughter]
Dr. Burnett: And if you just gargle once in a while, that is fine. In fact, you know Jeff, I have an analogy that I learned from TEPCO and I am starting to learn from Nebraska. And actually this afternoon I spent some little time looking for a plug-in headset and microphone so that this cell phone wouldn't irradiate my brain any more than it is. I could not find it, so I just put on a pair of sunglasses and called it good, which is exactly what they are doing.
Rense: .You are not one to learn slowly, are you?
Dr. Burnett: No, no, no. I catch on fast, and let me tell you something else. A headline just popped up on my computer and let me tell you about someone who just got fired, although the name is not mentioned, he is fired now. The headline is "Managers at Nuclear Plant in Nebraska are Concerned Floods Could Trigger a Disaster Similar to the One in Japan."
Rense: Send it to me, will you? What is the source on that?
Dr. Burnett: I will have to send it to you. It is too long.
Rense: All right, send it, please, I will put it right up. So this is, look, they are three feet away, this is an acknowledged amount of water, and now that the condom is gone, they are at the mercy of the dams and the Corps of Engineers, the melting of the snows in the upper Rockies, and the torrential rains which are common, and even more common this year than usual, according to some people. So it looks as if Dr. Burnett is right, within the next week or so, flood waters may rise seven to ten feet. And then we have a Fukushima melt-down. It is one reactor, it is not three. It is a 484 megawatt reactor, but that is all it takes, folks. We don't need three.
Dr. Burnett: The reactors are not going to melt down. Well [laughter] --
Rense: Let me write that down.
Dr. Burnett: I'll walk that back in a heartbeat. The fuel pool is what we are worried about. Now once that goes, and the truth of the matter is Jeff, is if that fuel pool goes, so goes Omaha Nebraska.
Rense: And many points east, sure. 17 miles from Omaha.
Dr. Burnett: That's right. And when this stuff starts bouncing down the bottom of the Missouri River, and irradiating all the -- I mean it would be such a --
Rense: They will just change the syllable, the accent in Missouri. It will be the Misery River now.
Dr. Burnett: Well, it will take out everything from South Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico, and there probably is not much left in the Gulf of Mexico. It will go down and connect and continue to connect, and all we can do is hope this won't happen. We can hope that somebody was smart enough somewhere, some time to say "Wait, we can't allow this to happen." Lets take precautions, but from what I see, they just argued about how much money it would take them to do it, and they didn't begin to take precautions until June 6th.
Rense: That is right, it was just a few weeks ago. They started, and then stopped with their efforts to deal with potential flooding . They were still putting things together just 12 days ago, 13 days ago now. They were just working up to the last minute. This is one of the crummiest plants in America. The top three worst. The NRC, as corrupt as that is, has been arguing and fighting with these Calhoun-Cooper people for a long time, and they are now going to potentially see the chickens come home to roost. This is a real big issue folks, because Tom, as I see it, they are either out of options, or they are running out very quickly.
Dr. Burnett: They are out of options. They used their options between June 6th and June 20th. They did everything they could. They brought in another diesel generator on wheels. They put in the rubber dam, filled it full of water. They put in sand bags, and that is the extent of their plan. And once that plan failed, they basically have no other options. They are talking about reconnecting to external power. That is not happening.
Rense:Why not? What is the problem? They claimed -- they were boasting that they had both overhead power and subterranean power to the plant.
Dr. Burnett: Well originally they did. Subterranean power came into the plant because there were no power lines. OK, it was all underground. Well, that is all well and good, and that kind of washed out or got trashed, and then between May and June 6th, or June 20th, they put in overhead lines, and that is well and good too until the switch is flooded. We are talking about 345 kilovolt lines, and those lines are now inoperable. The only thing they have going for them right now is one diesel generator that was recharging their batteries. They don't have any external power because their electrical systems has -- their panel room, their whole electrical infrastructure was in the basement under water. And that is just the bottom line. So unless somebody put a breaker box on top of the building, and they can switch this stuff on and off to the cooling pool, which they can't, they don't have many options left. They are basically out of options. So once you run out of options, you just start putting out good news. Oh yes, everything is safe, no problem. But when the commissioner of the NRC gets within a couple of miles and says, "Oops, that is it, I am out," and leaves, just like figure the odds. They have got a problem, but nobody will admit it. But let me tell you something about mid-America, the corn belt. These are real Americans up there. These are people in Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota. These are people who are not going to put up with it. In fact, I have had a bunch of emails saying, "You know what, if these people lie to us --"
Rense: They already have.
Dr. Burnett: Oh yeah. There is going to be a huge problem out there.
Rense: Yes, pitch forks and torches in that part of the country.
Dr. Burnett: Oh please. So they had better be telling the truth. You know, I believe that in Japan you can get away with a whole lot of stuff that you can't here. But you had better be telling Americans the truth about something that is serious, because if you aren't --
Rense: Well, we will see. The EPA has already proven itself quite competent in terms of lying, directly. Bald-faced lying. The NRC, the same way. You name the federal agency, and every damn one of them is a liar. So I don't -- I admire these people for being conditional in their anger, well if -- if we -- that's fine, but it has already happened, folks. You have been lied to. You have been had. They had the ability to make this plant safe. They didn't. This is a simple choice. They didn't choose to spend the money to do it. And one rubberwater-filled berm, and one back hoe, and all the best-laid plans of mice and rats -- you notice that I didn't say men, are gone. Just that quickly.
Dr. Burnett: The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Yes Jeff, that is correct.
Rense: Mice and rats. OK, back in a minute with Tom, as we continue [51:45]
Rense: OK, lets get right back to Tom Burnett. What I am going to do Tom is play the story you just sent me. The CNN story. It is only two and a half minutes or so. I want to hear what he has to say about the management at Calhoun. This should be interesting. So here we go. [News clip] At the two nuclear power facilities here in Nebraska, officials are struggling to keep this historic Missouri River flood water at bay. This plant behind me is where the need is most urgent. This is the Fort Calhoun nuclear power facility just outside Ft. Calhoun. Our photojournalist Mark Biello is going to zoom in where you can see the floodwaters very, very close to the main building there and really engulfing some of the outer buildings around there. Now this is the facility where yesterday a worker accidentally punctured a hole in a three quarter mile long aqua berm that had been built to protect this facility. That berm had been filled with water. A hole was punctured in it. It allowed that water and some of the flood waters to creep closer to the building and surround the transformer. That is a key development because at that point this plant had to go offline and be powered on generator power for a few hours. It is back on the power grid now but officials here are keeping very close watch on it because as the water stays near the power transformer it does run the risk of a repeat of that Japanese Fukushima Daichi plant situation where the flood waters knocked out the power, they couldn't power the pumps that put water in there to cool the reactor, to cool the spent fuel rod at that plant, and three reactors melted down. Obviously they are trying to avoid a repeat of that here, and they say this plant is in a much different situation. They say it is much more safe right now, and they have this under control. But they are watching those transformers because again, they power the pumps and send in the cool water to basically cool the reactor to cool the spent fuel rods. If the transformers are flooded, if they get knocked out, that is going to be a pretty dicey situation. But they say that right now, this plant is safe, and they are operating off the regular power grid right now. This plant was shut down in April for refueling, so it is not actually functioning to power electricity around this area, but they still need the power to cool those rods to cool the reactor and that is what they are watching very closely as the water creeps towards that transformer. At another plant about eighty miles south of here, that is the Cooper station plant, that is built on higher ground. That is a lot drier. But again the water, the Missouri River water is fairly close to that plant. They are keeping a close eye on that now. Now at this plant here we are told we are going to get access to this plant within the hour. We hope to get inside to see the real damage where it is at the worst point, and what officials here are saying about it. If we can get out in time, we'll of course come out in time and show our viewers the pictures of what we saw inside. Either way we'll show viewers those pictures. Again, this is pretty much the most urgent area where officials are trying to keep the floodwaters from compromising this nuclear power plant.
Rense: I don't believe they got in, but that is kind of irrelevant. He said two interesting things. Until yesterday, Sunday, that plant was still online and producing. I have read this several places. Now it is claimed it was in shut-down and yet other stories claim it was actually producing electricity. And one report said it was producing electricity at full bore. So there are some real contradictions there, and I have seen both in print. You figure it out. The other thing is Tom, if they are sending in water to cool the spent fuel, and the fuel is still in the reactor and it is muddy water, what is that going to do?
Dr. Burnett: Well, Jeff, I heard a couple of things there. The first thing was a confirmation of what I said earlier in the hour, or last hour, that the same cooling process handles the reactor and the spent fuel pool. So they just confirmed that. So all the people who are going to send me nasty emails can just back off on that. I am not certain they are back on external power. I don't really understand how that is possible. However, it might be. And if they get pictures from inside the plant, and inside the control room -- is a little bit higher, but if they get pictures from inside the electrical bus room --
Rense: They are not going to let them go anywhere near that stuff. We know it, you know it, and it is not going to happen. They won't put anything out that is going to compromise their position to be the absolute arbiter about what is or is not going on in there.
Dr. Burnett: OK, well let me give you two examples then of what we know. In 1952 the Missouri River peaked twelve feet higher than it is now. And, because -- I am going to switch from Nebraska to Fukushima -- and because the Japanese government said they are going to start canning --they said they were going to check radiation, but of course that is not true. They haven't said anything so far that is true. They are going to start canning fish and vegetables and produce from Fukushima and northern provinces and selling them. What they don't understand, or what they didn't think of when they said that is that no one is going to buy any Japanese exports from this going on because they have no way to check them for radiation. So I believe they just shot themselves in the foot by even saying that ridiculous thing. And I believe, although I could be wrong, I believe that there is a problem, and I will switch back from Fukushima to Ft. Calhoun --
Rense: Yes, you have thirty seconds.
Dr. Burnett: OK, I believe there is a problem at Ft. Calhoun, and I believe all the stuff about how it is OK, everything is safe, we are fine, we are good, I don't believe that is the case. And we will find out within the next, let's say, 40 hours.
Rense: I'd say.
Dr. Burnett: So Jeff, thank you for the evening.
Rense: Thank you for the input, the information and the analysis, and we shall see what we shall see, sooner rather than later. Thanks Tom, talk soon.
Dr. Burnett: Bye.