with gregory jaczko, chairman of the nuclear regular rah story commission, on japan's nuclear crisis and his agency's response. then more on the nuclear situation in japan as we take you live for a briefing of the nuclear regulatory industry. and later the cato institute has a conference marking the first anniversary of the signing of the health care law and it impact on the industry, the federal budget and the economy. >> tonight on c-span2, actor harry sheerer talks about the media's coverage of his adopted hometown of new orleans. he recently released a new film about hurricane katrina and louisiana called "the big uneasy. "it examines the causes of the city's flood after the 2005 hurricane. 7:15 pacific. >> tonight on c-span3, a white house summit on bullying

featuring remarks from first lady michelle obama and president obama who discusses his own experiences with bullying as a child. >> as adults we all remember what it was like to see kids picked on in the schoolyard, and i have to say with big ears and the name that i have, i wasn't immune. [laughter] i didn't emerge unscathed. but because it's something that happens a lot and it's something that's always been around, sometimes we've turned our blind eye to problem. >> watch the white house bullying summit tonight at 10 p.m. eastern on c-span3. >> beginning april 1st and throughout the month, we'll feature the top winners of this year's c-span's student cam competition. nearly 1500 middle and high school students submitted documentaries focusing on an event, issue or topic that better helped them understand the role of the federal government. watch the winning videos on c-span and meet the students who created them. stream all the videos anytime

online at student cram.org -- student cam.org. >> joining us on newsmakers on this sunday is greg jaczko, thes chair of the nuclear regulatory commission appointed by president obama.ucle thanks for being with us. >> guest: thanks for having me. >> host: joining us with the questioning is matt wald, new york times, and steve power, both energy reporters. you for being with us. >> thank you. >> host: you're going to get a status report tomorrow on what happened in japan and lessons learned for the u.s., what do you think you're going to s learnsome. >> guest: we're going to have a meeting tomorrow with the full commission at the nrc to get an update on the current status onm the situation in japan. we'll probably have a brief discussion then about what kind of impact radiation can have for the public, and then we'll take a look at some things, kind ofei plan for a plan for how we intend to go forward to do our review and look at what, what kinds of thing we may need tod look at for the u.s. nuclear reactors. >> host: and with the fukushima

plant in particular, we're told this morning that two of the six reactors are now under control, but japanese officialsix indicating this facility eventually will have to be shut down. >> guest: welling right nowwill we're continuing to -- well, right now we're continuing to monitor the situation. we have a team of 11 nrc experts who are in tokyo, and they're working with their counterparts there to get information. right now our focus continues to be to insure cooling for three of the reactors that were operating and, again, to continue to work with the jalapeno needs to insure that -- japanese to insure that they can continue to deal with the situation in two of the spent fuel pools. it's still a difficult situation, but as time goes on, that's always something that's a positive.. >> host: do you and this administration have faith in the information you're getting from the japanese government? >> guest: well, right now wermat have this team of folks that's embedded in tokyo, they are working closely with counterparts from the nuclear industry in japan as well as officials from the japanese t government -- >> host: are you getting thest information you need?

>> guest: well, right now i think we're getting good information, but it's a very difficult situation, andin i thk it's important to remember thati there's been a tremendous disaster in japan with thet earthquake and the tsunami, so things like the restoration of emergency power will be veryin important because that will help with the instrumentation and the other sources of information. and i think as the work goes ons we'll get better and better information. >> host: matt wald of "the new times." >> mr. chairman, in the united states after three mile island your agency put many a requirement for a 10-mile zone for planning for evacuations and a 50-mile zone for checking on food and water.zo but here we are a week into this japanese situation, and we've gone to 50 miles for evacuation and they're detecting contaminated food 90 miles out.a does this suggest that our own emergency planning zones need to be adjusted? >> guest: well, i think, matt, first of all, what we want to d is take, i think, a very

systematic and methodical look at all the information we're getting from japan.lo but i think there are somere differences here in the united states versus what we're seeing the japan. first and foremost, we don't have sites that have so many reactors in one location. second, the emergency planning regulations and requirements we have are really focused on the q early phase of an event. and so what we want to do is build the system that we know at about ten miles we can activate that system quickly, and we can mobilize it quickly. but we always appreciate that there may be circumstances in a the which we would have to expand that if necessary, so, again, i don't want to go too far right now into, into analyzing what's going on in japan, but we intend to do that in a very systematic and we methodical way, and we'll t probably do some kind of short look in the near term just to, just to re-examine the existing fleet of reactors and then

probably a much longer look based on the accurate information we get eventually from japan about what really happened and what is most important going toward. >> okay.bo and if i could followut up, theo commission'srw staff has in frot of it right now issuing a license renewal for the vermont yankee plant which is a mere twin of talk about fukushima i. do you anticipate any pressure from outside to take a more careful look at oyster creek and the other reactors that resemble the fukushima design? >> guest: with regard to the licensing, that decision as already been made, and so we'lls move forward to process it. essentially, we're in the process of going through some of the last paperwork with that. but i would just remind everyone that that license renewal period wouldn't start for about anoth r year altogether, and i anticipate that we'll have our longer-term review done earlierr than that.e wi so if there are lessons, we don't intend to wait for a

renewed license period. we'll take those lessons and implement them right away if we need to, and that would apply ty all the plants in the country, not just those that are similar to the plants in japan. as i said, i really want to i emphasize it's important for us to view this in a methodical wap because we want to get this right.cal we don't want to take earlyhis information and use that and go off in this a completely wrong direction, so we really want tog get good information about what exactly happened in japan and what exactly where are the most important factors for the situation we have now. >> host: also joining us iss fo steve power of the "wall street journal." >> there have beens, mr. chairman -- reports, mr. chairman, that water is disappearing at reactor number four faster than can be explained by evaporation. does the u.s. believe there is a leak in that pool, and secondlya how confident are you in youre statement from last week that the pool is dry? >> guest: well, again, we had -- i made that statement based on what i had as the best available

information at that time, and right now our effort is really looking forward to continue toft assist the japanese in their efforts to deal with this. and right now they are taking steps to provide water into then pool and will continue to -- and we'll continue to give them some recommendations about how to do that effectively. i think when this is all done and the crisis is over, i'm sure there'll be an opportunity to go back and try and understand all the different information that y was being presented and what it all means. right now our focus is just on moving, on moving forward and getting the situation better under control. >> are you certain that the pool is dry, or is it sort of a less certain thing at this point? >> guest: well, right now i was very comfortable at the time with the statement that i made,y and i continue to be comfortable with that statement, but that was over three, flee days ago -- three days ago now, i believe, and since then efforts have been made to put water into thator pool,ts and so we're dealing wih a very different situation now

than we were then. >> and do you believe there's a leak possible? >> guest: again, it's possible. i don't really want to speculate on what exactly the conditions are, but for us the kind ofi relevant information is that are very high radiation inf fields, although we are seeing those radiation levels come down. thatth is possibly a result off some amount of spent fuel rods being exposed in the spent fuel pools as well as possibly some material that's been deposited on w the ground. pos so, you know, that's in manyin ways what's important right now because that can impact how the workers are able to do the work they need to do. and it just required extra measures to monitor their time near the site and their activities because of the high radiation levels. >> host: matt wald. >> theon american perception of how serious an accident this is seems to be more severe than thn japanese perception. per is that true, and can you explain why? j

>> guest: well, matt, i think the jalapeno needs people are dealing with -- japanese people are dealing with a tremendous crisis, and as i've had cri interactions with our team who was in tokyo, i get a strong sense that they understand b the importance of the situation and are working to resolve it. but there is, there is tremendous damage throughout areas of japan, and i certainly wantou to express my tremendous sympathy to the japanese people. this is a very difficult time, and i'm focused on one part of what is a very tragic situation, but the japanese government is dealing with many different elements of this, and we'll continue to do what we can to provide recommendations and support in their effort tos address the reactan to ors in -- reactors in particular.: >> host: matt wald contribute today a story this morning that indicated executives may have lost valuable time in part because of their concern to save this nuclear plant. was that a factor in their early

decision making processesome. >> guest: again, i think we'll have an opportunity when the crisis is resolved to go backwhn and see how decisions were madee and what, if anything, could bee done better. if there were decisions like that that were made, then i think that will be valuable information for us as we look at our process and our system to see if there are some thing we need to think about ahead of time so that we don't, we don't lose valuable, valuable time -- >> host: when will you get these answers? >> guest: i expect it'll bewhen probably at the earliest several months after the crisis is full resolved.cr as i said, we intend to do a short-term look. s i think that will be done and a much shorter time frame, just to take the available information that we have and really look at our plan and make sure there are not any immediate actions we need to take. host: how does this learning

process affect the pace and which agency can make decisions on licenses, issuing new ones? guest: i would anticipate the reviews we are going to do would be a in line with the time frames we have for possibly making decisions on reactor licenses. right now we have several new reactor license is in the design approval phase. they are and the last stage of that review. and we anticipate that we could make a decision sometime and the late summer, early fall. i would like to see as a very far along if not resolved and a lot of lessons learned by this time. guest: are you saying this will not have any effect on the pace of decisions, this will not slow anything down? guest: we certainly want to get good information. if that could information tells us that we need to make changes to our licensing process, then we will do that pared by the way, the focus of our re- licensing effort or reviews is

really on systems to deal with the aging of the equipment. that immediate safety issue, for instance from seismic event or severe accident, that is something we do on a daily basis. that is not something we wait to review for a new license or a license extension. if we get information that tells us there is an action that needs to be taken, we will take that immediately or in whatever timeframe is a proper it. guest: would you like to send some of your love the people in tokyo up to the site? -- like to send some of your people in tokyo to the site? guest: they are there and a role to provide technical advice and recommendations to what is a japanese response. i think tokyo is the best place for them and i think that is where they will stay. guest: at one point -- at what point would you like to send

someone up there? guest: i do not think it is the appropriate role for the nrc. we need to ensure that we can provide help to the japanese government. guest: , markey has called under agency to make public the daily situation or other documents that reflected and your staff's data de assessment or situation at the reactors. will you do that? what is the worst case scenario? how bad could it get? guest: i will look of their request. i have not seen it yet. there is not too much -- it is not too different and what i have been talking about. in terms of worst case, i do not want to go into speculating about those kinds of things because, right now the focus is

on trying to resolve the situation. but we are basically working to provide recommendations to the japanese government to fundamentally deal with continued cooling of the three actors that were operating at the time of the earth quaked - - the three reactors that were operating at the time of the earthquake. four of the six reactors at th e site. that is really the focus, and everyone is working to make sure that we can prevent this event from deteriorating. host: for those workers inside the fukushima, what is the long- term prognosis, as an expert on radiation? guest: we do not have information about what kind of doses workers have been exposed to. there are high radiation levels that if people were exposed to those radiation levels over long

a period of time, could be harmful, possibly fatal. but we do not have the specific information about what kinds of those is the workers have actually received, and that is something that the japanese government is working to monitor. host: at what point does it become deadly? guest: the effects of radiation is a combination of many things. it is a combination of the actual amount of radiation, and then the exposure time. so we like to think in the radiation protection world of three factors -- time, distance, and shielding. that way you ensure that the proper levels of radiation are received by workers or by emergency personnel. i would add that and the united states, as in many other countries, we have higher levels of radiation that emergency workers are allowed to receive in the event of a very serious situation like we have in to japan.

that's 25 rim. in the u.s. we do not expect the kind of lethal doses, and we get much higher up into the higher rem levels. guest: do we have independent levels of radiation rates there are related to what they are telling us? guest: there is a u.s. government effort to provide additional radiation measurement lovell's to access at the department of energy and other government agencies. we are collecting some of that information, sharing that with the japanese government. guest: and this is through overflights? guest: we are getting any attrition from a variety of sources -- informationi from a variety of sources, department of energy sources. is this and the category of, i

could tell you, but then it would have to kill you? we have a variety of different sources. it depends on him as the most reliable information. because of a loss of power to a part of the reactor site, instrumentation is not always available. so it is difficult to obtain accurate information. but we believe there right now the radiation levels at the site are high, but we have some indications they may be coming down. guest: how high are they? guest: again, the information is a little bit uncertain, right now, we have seen indications of radiation levels that are approximately and the tens of rem range per hour. but that is very, very near the site and that would not be unanticipated, given what we believe is the situation there appeare. guest: do you believe that the

contamination has been limited to a certain geographic area? how many miles of? guest: we have some information about where the radiation levels are. the japanese government is also looking at that and monitoring it to provide good information about the locales of the radiation. i would stress, we will detect radiation from this event at a much wider area than really present a health hazard. so they will likely be -- there will likely be some very low levels of radiation detected and the united states, but they do not pose any risk to human health. guest: the focus in of the united states has been on the risk from operating reactors, but as we look at japan, a fair chunk of the risk does not come from the operating reactors but from the spent fuel pools.

do we need to redirect our attention to the safety of spent fuel? guest: that is something we have looked at over many years. we believe that fuel pools are designed to withstand the types of natural phenomena we have seen in japan. and addition -- in addition, after 9/11, we have taken a look at ways we can better reduce the likelihood of any type fof spent fuel fire. so there are some strategies we have put a dent and place. it has been an issue that we have always been aware of, and we have taken a lot of steps to ensure that we can prevent or mitigate any type of spent fuel -- guest: what we have done in this country which the deputies have not done -- the japanese have there are--

racks in place to prevent the moving of water. is it time to rethink of o?el of doenseness guest: we will take a look at lot of the information out of the japanese of said. if there are changes, we will proceed to do that. we have looked at a lot of those kinds of questions when we do our approvals for the more densely packed spent fuel pools. to some extent, the ability to cool the pools is a matter of providing a supply of water. following 9/11, we looked at spent fuel pools. we did require utilities to have

the ability and a dire situation -- in a dire situation, to have a backup to the backup situation to get water into the pools and to continue to ensure that they keep the radiation levels down. guest: we think we are better than they are? guest: we think we have a program anin place. what they are dealing with in japan is a very difficult situation. there will be plenty of opportunity when the crisis is resolved to figure out what happened and how we can all learn from it here in the u.s., or japan. guest: with the response by the tokyo electric power company, japan's nuclear industry, or the japanese government, has anything surprise you personally in the last week and a half? guest: i think this is a very

difficult situation. these situations present new information and new challenges. anytime i have been involved in any type of emergency response, i find information is more difficult to obtain and we think it is. and we always have more conflicting information than we would like. in that sense, that is a lot of what we are seeing. that is not necessarily a surprise. it is one of the challenges of dealing with a fast-moving scenario like this. when you have the devastation that you are seeing as the result of the hurricane and a tsunami. host: what can we do and the u.s.? guest: the more that you prepare a new plan, the better the decision making will be and the better your information flow will be. there always be a degree of conflicting information and just uncertainty. the challenge is to try and build in systems that reduce

that as much as possible. guest: some environmental seven accused your agency of being beholden to the nuclear industry -- some environmentalists have accused your agency of being beholden to the nuclear industry. guest: we have 4000 employees to come to work every day with one focus and that is to ensure public safety when it comes to the use of nuclear material. if i had any reason it would be those 4000 people and that would be 4000 reasons in my mind. we're all about protecting public health and safety. we want to do that in way that we think is based on good science and good technical judgment, but we will do what we need to do to ensure public health and safety. guest: earlier in to your career, you worked for congressman markey, who is an outspoken critic of nuclear power. you also worked for harry reid. to what extent did that influence your view on nuclear

power and the industry? guest: i cannot say that i have views on nuclear power. i have use of nuclear safety. nuclear safety is an issue that most people agree on. and we agree on the right kinds of approaches. and the importance of nuclear safety be number one issue in the nuclear industry. as i have talked to people in the industry, public adjusters, that is always the number one focus for everyone. it is a unique aspect to this industry. the industry itself has a lot of ways that they do that. they haven't organization called the institute for nuclear power operations that serves as an industry, self-regulatory body. focus is on excellence and safety. we have the nrc whose focus is on adequate protection of the public. then you have an industry organization that helps get

excellent in that area. the public interest groups, with members of congress, safety is something that we agree is the number one priority. guest: the commission will soon make a decision on the ap1000, a new design. you have four new designs appear to euro of them are supposed to have passive -- two of them are supposed to have the safety mechanisms and case of an earthquake. are you looking at those, again now, in light of events of japan? do you think those have a better ability to respond to this kind of challenge than a generation out there now? guest: we will take a look at everything we are getting out of japan and see if it has an impact for this design. as i said, those are designed, at the earliest, would be finalized sometime in the late summer, early fall. i think we will have some

information, if not all of the information of the japanese event by then to inform any decisions we need to make about those designs. i do not want to speculate that right now. so-called passive plants are the solution because we simply do not know what was the most relevant phenomenon there. what we do know is that in this country, through the analysis we have done of nuclear reactors and the safety issues, that this kind of situation, where you lose all of the electric power for an extended period of time, is a -- situation. they would insure they had plans in place to recover the of site power and be able to cope with the situation for it. time that it would take him to recover that of such power. right now, the exact facts are

not totally clear. when we get those, we will take a look at everything we have in front of us in terms of licensing or any other actions we may have and see if there are lessons we need to apply. host: one of your former nrc commissioner says this event will lead to a slowdown in licenses. are an you not willing to concede that? because of the need to divert manpower and strutted this accident and the lessons learned and incorporate this, will it have some affect on the pace to which you could make decisions? guest: and this will be a significant workload for the agency. we will take a look at how we can deal with this work load and if we need additional resources, we'll have to ask congress for that additional support. those are preliminary at this point. want to make sure we put the

right resources to this and adjust our work is necessary. i want to emphasize that our number one priority will continue to be the safety and security of the existing -- we don't intend to take resources away from that to help the effort to analyze what happened in japan the decisions on the new reactors are still some time away. right now they're getting public comment. that will take a few months to get all of those comments in. then we will begin the process of reviewing them. that is still several months away. i am not sure exactly how we will balance our resources. mother nature has thrown a hideous tons of the japanese, bigger than their civil a nuclear engineers and licensing authority's anticipated.

how can we be confident -- not that we are likely to say tsunami -- how can we be confident that we won't have a hurricane, earthquake and other natural phenomenon that is bigger than the biggest thing you have budgeted for it? guest: the way we think about it is we come up with what we think is the maximum natural phenomenon that we expect to occur and we designed these facilities around that with a little bit extra margin because we now there are some things we don't know. we recognize there may things we had not envisioned or thought about. we have established a program that we call our severe accident program. regardless of what the cause may be, it deals with the situation in which you get a very severe impact to the nuclear reactor site. we have procedures that the

utilities have to develop to deal with these kind of situations. that is how we build in that extra sense of certainty that even if we experience something we had not anticipated that we have an approach and a way to deal with it. the final effort we have is this effort after september 11 where we looked at a situation where you could have a very severe fire or explosion at a nuclear plant. possibly not natural, possibly coming from an external threat. the impact of that kind of situation may be similar to one of these unknowns natural phenomenon. we took that situation and required the utilities to come up with procedures to deal with the fundamental things you need to do like keeping the reactor cool and keeping the spent fuel pool cool. if they need any equipment,

required them to states that and have that identified. we would know immediately what to do and how to mitigate it. host: the benchmarks we have seen over the last week and a half, three mile island which remains operational and chernobyl which is closed and has become a tourist site in the ukraine -- what is your early prognosis for the long-term impact on the fukushima plant in the area around that plant in terms of the livability? guest: i want to speculate until we have the final situation ultimately resolved. there obviously will be contamination that has to be addressed and there will likely be difficult operating these reactors in the future. the focus right now for everyone is making sure that we can continue to bring this crisis to a close and we will continue to help the japanese government do that. host: the chair of the nuclear

regulatory commission, thank you for being with us. >> the nuclear regulatory commission is holding a status briefing on the japanese nuclear plant crisis this morning. members will hear an overview of the situation as well as the agency's response to potential threat of radiation exposure to the u.s. territories and safety of u.s. reactors. from the maryland this is live coverage on c-span2. >> good morning, everyone. the commission meets today to discuss the tragic events in japan, and to begin to consider possible actions we may take to verify the safety of the nuclear facilities that we regulate here in the united states. people across the country and

around the world who have been touched by the magnitude of scale of this disaster are closely following the events in japan, and the repercussions in this country, and in many other countries. before we begin i would like to offer my sincere condolences to all of those who have been affected by the earthquake and tsunami in japan. our hearts go out to all who have been dealing with the aftermath of these natural disasters. we are mindful of the long and difficult road they will face in recovering. we know that the people of japan are resilient and strong, and with every confidence that they will come through this difficult time and move forward with resolve to rebuild their vibrant country. i believe i speak for all americans when i say that we stand together with the people of japan at this most difficult and challenging time. the nrc is a relatively small agency with just about 4000 staff, but we played a critical

role in protecting american people and the environment when it comes to the use of nuclear materials. we have our inspectors who work full-time in every nuclear plant in the country and we are proud to have world-class scientists, engineers and professionals representing nearly every discipline. since friday, march 11 when the earthquake and tsunami struck, the nrc takeover operation center has been operating on a 24 hour basis to monitor and analyze events at nuclear power plants in japan. at the request of the japanese government and through the united states agency for international development, the nrc sent a team of its technical experts to provide an on the ground support, and we been in continual contact with them since they deployed. and within the united states, the nrc has been working closely with other federal agencies as part of the u.s. government's response to the situation. here in the united states we

have an obligation to the american people to undertake a systematic and methodical review of the safety of our own domestic nuclear facilities in light of the natural disaster and resulting nuclear situation in japan. beginning to examine all available information is an essential part of our effort to analyze the events and understand its impacts on japan and applications for the united states. our focus will always be on keeping plants and rear activators in this country safe and secure. as the immediate crisis in japan comes to an end, we will look at any information we can to gain experience from the event and to see if there are changes we need to make to further protect the public health and safety. together with my colleagues on the commission we will review the current status and identify the steps we will take to conduct that review. in the meantime we will continue to oversee and monitor plans to ensure that u.s. reactors remain safe. on the half of the commission, i want to thank all of our staff for maintaining their focus on

the safety commission throughout these difficult days. i want to acknowledge their tireless efforts and the critical contributions to the u.s. response to assist japan. inspite of the involving situation, the long hours and the intensity of effort over the past week, the staff as opposed to their responsibilities with dedication, determination and professionalism. we are all of their efforts. the american people can also be proud of the commitment and dedication within the federal workforce which is exemplified by our staff every day. and again i want to reiterate, certainly our behalf of the commission and all of us here in this room, our sympathy with the crisis and difficult situation for our friends and colleagues in japan. and we look forward to continuing our efforts to provide them with assistance as they continue to deal with a very challenging situation, not only with the nuclear facilities but with many of the other

impacts from this natural disaster in japan. i would like to offer commissioner to -- commisioner svinicki to make some comments. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i want to add my voice to the others regarding the grace of the we feel over the loss and devastation due to the earthquake and tsunami in japan. the dramatic images of the events at fukushima, images that have riveted so many of us over the course of the past week have an added dimension for us and the community of nuclear safety professionals. because for us these images are not an abstraction. many of us to travel to japan. we have to at the facility's of our japanese colleagues. we have worked alongside them in support of the shared goal of advancing nuclear safety. the sense of anguish we feel as we desire so desperately to do something, anything we can, to help our friends and colleagues in japan has been so clearly evident on the faces of the men and women working here at nrc. we are heartsick over this tragedy. someone may characterize that our face in this technology is

shaken, but nuclear safety has not been in cannot be a matter of faith. it is a must continue to be a matter of fact. so today we continue the systematic evaluation of facts of what we know about what happened and we don't know, what we'll pieced together in the coming months. our objective is to confirm that our approach to the regulation of nuclear power in this country is comprehensive and correct. while applying any lessons learned we can from these events. in taking a systematic and deliberate approach to this review that you have called for, mr. chairman, i'm certain the commission will achieve this objective. thank you. >> thank you. commissioner apostolakis? >> i joined the chairman and commissioner in expressing my condolences to the people of japan. and i also second the chairman's comments on commending the staff or its response to this accident. thanks.

>> commissioner magwood? >> thank you, mr. chairman. this is a very personal tragedy to me. i have many friends and colleagues in japan and i've been in touch with several other over the last week and a half. i have heard from friends worried about radiation and others in the north were dealing with food shortages and gasoline shortages. every one in japan is enduring continuing aftershocks, anxiety about the fukushima plant and difficulties in community with friends and neighbors. and a lot of uncertainty about what will happen next. i have one friend who lost all for utilities for several days after the earthquake and still waiting for water to be restored. but in the aftermath of the earthquake she's making new friends as people bond together to help each other and comfort each other and make the best of a difficult situation. fortunately she found a kind neighbor who has a wealth so she is able to get water and take it to her apartment on a daily basis. i'm sure there's thousands of examples of people reaching out to each other, bonding as a community and showing the kind

of resilience that will be necessary to move forward. the scale of the tragedy is staggering. but japan will recover. japan will not stand alone, has not stood alone over the last week and have. we in the u.s. are closer and with the japanese people, and i'm very, very proud how our country has responded to this crisis, and particularly proud of how the nuclear ready for the commission staff has responded as well. the status demonstrated both expertise and its selflessness over the last 10 days, and i applaud your outstanding efforts. today the commission received an update on the nuclear situation in japan. our response and our efforts to understand what has happened. there will be important lessons learned from the events of the fukushima plant which essentially identified correctly in response effectively. this meeting i expect will be the first of many commission meetings as we engage to understand issues and address

those issues to ensure the safety of u.s. nuclear power plants. and i look forward to working with my partners on the commission to do so. thank you. >> this is a vile important meeting for the commission of the country. i wanted join my colleagues in extend my sympathies to the people of japan. the consequences and loss of life of the earthquake and tsunami were simply devastating. our thoughts and prayers are with all. i would like to commend the chairman and executive staff for their efforts today and supported in nazis marching assistance, associate with these events. i appreciate the hard work ongoing 24/7 the opposite of for the last 11 days. along with other colleagues here at this table, i have been very impressed with the technical competence, professionalism demonstrated by the nrc staff. i'm also grateful to the highly competent team of nrc detainees

dispatched to japan. while dismayed by this tragedy as a commissioner, i'm also extraordinarily proud of the commitment and professionalism of our team. the events that unfolded over the last seven days are stark. on one hand, i believe that our existing licensing oversight activities of assure us that our commercial nuclear power plants in this country are safe. on the other hand, i know that we must and we most certainly will conduct a thoughtful and rational examination of the nrc's regulatory framework with the information and lessons learned resulting from the incidents in japan. as we head down this path together, i know this commission will stay mindful to the challenges that face us. several times in the last week again today as i could by the

commissioners, i fully support his call for a systematic and methodical review. we must also do this in a way that clearly communicates to the american people what this review means and what it implies for the safety of our existing nuclear power plants. thank you. >> thank you everyone. with that we will turn to the executive director for operations. >> thank you. good morning. i would like to join in your expression and condolences to the people of japan. i and many of my colleagues on the nrc staff have had many years of very close and personal interaction with our regulatory counterparts, and we would like to extend our condolences to them. we are mindful of our primary responsibility to ensure the public health and safety of the american people. we have been very closely monitoring the activities in

japan, and reviewing all available information to allow us to conclude that the u.s. plans continue to operate safely. there has been no reduction in the licensing or oversight function of the nrc as it relates to any of the u.s. licensees. contributed to the conclusion that the current fleet of reactors and materials licensees continue to protect the public health and safety are based on a number of principles, including the defense in depth. the fact that every actor in this country is designed for natural events based upon the specific site at reactor is located, that there are multiple vision product barriers, and that there are a wide range of diverse and redundant safety features in order to provide that public health and safety insurance. we have a long predatory history

of conservative decision-making. we've been intelligent using risk insights to help inform our regulatory process. and we have never stopped to make improvements to the plant design as we learn from operating experience over the more than 35 years of civilian nuclear power in this country. some have been derived from lessons learned from previous significant events such as three mile island. we have severe accident management guidelines, revisions to the emergency operating procedures, procedures and processes for dealing with large fires and explosions, regardless of the cause. we have a station blackout rule. we have a hydrogen rule for reactors, and many others which i will go into in a little more detail later. but all of these relate in one way or another to the tragic

events in japan. in addition to all that we have done in the nrc over the last week and a half, and over the many years as i alluded to on rule-making type activities, the industry is also performing many verification activities at this time to verify that all of these processes and procedures and rules that have been implemented are still valid. from a very high level, the nrc response centered from the operation center here in rockville, as well as the nrc team that is in japan, focuses on three major areas. the first is the support the japanese government and our regulatory counterparts needs a. second is to gather information and assess that information for implications on the u.s. facilities. and a third is to support the

u.s. ambassador in japan with a level of nuclear expertise that the nrc is perfectly positioned to do. we are, in fact, mobilized to support the u.s. government in responding to this event. notwithstanding the very high level of support, we continue to maintain our focus on our domestic responsibilities. and, finally, my last point of introduction, we do not expect the releases every are active material that have occurred in japan to have any affect on health and safety of the u.s. population. the next slide shows the agenda for this meeting, given the time constraints it will be a relatively high overview of activities that the room has a healthy number of nrc staff that are available to explore any questions and answers that you may have later. i am now move to a brief

overview of the events. on friday, march 11, and earthquake hit japan resulting in the shut down of more than 10 reactors. to our understanding, the reactors response to the earthquake went according to designed. there's no known problems to our knowledge with the response to that event. the ensuing tsunami, however, causcaused the loss of emergencc power to six units at the fukushima -- fukushima daiichi site but it is those six units have received a majority of our attention since that time. units one, two, and three of that six units sides were in operation at the time. unit four, five, and six were grievously scheduled outages. immediately after the tsunami

that it appeared that there was no injection capability into the reach active vessels on units one, two and three. on saturday, march 12, a hydrogen explosion occurred in unit one, and in the following monday march 14, hydrogen explosion in unit three. on the 15th of march, on tuesday, there were explosions in unit number two, and unit for from hydrogen originating from we believed overheated fuel in the spent fuel pool. at this time, it's our assessment that it is likely that units one, two and three have experienced some degree of cord damage. today, all three units appear to be in a stable condition with seawater injection being used to keep the reactors school. containment integrity for all three units is also believed to have been, is currently

maintained. some gray smoke as he made up and which has caused a site evacuation that's been reported this morning. the source of that smoke is unknown, although there is indication that there's been no increase in temperature or in radioactivity. i made a sign of some promising news, tesco has been able to bring off-site power on to the site. from a nearby transmission line. it is now at essentially at the border of units one into. there's early indications that there may be cabling problems, electrical cabling problems within the unit. so i understand that they are now the process of laying some temporary cables to some of the pumps and valves inside of units one into. over the next day or two they will be doing the same thing for

units three and four. there's two diesel generators that are currently running and supplying power to units five and six. moving to the nrc response. shortly after 4:00 in the morning on friday, march 11, the nrc operations center made the first call are forming nrc management of the earthquake and the potential impact on u.s. plans. we went into the monitoring mode at the operations center, and the first concern for the nrc was a possible impacts of this an army on u.s. plans on the west coast. on that same day, friday march 11, we dispatch to experts to japan to help at the embassy and begin interactions with our japanese raider tory counterparts. by monday we had dispatch a total of 11 staff to japan.

as i said, the areas of focus for this team of 11 to support the japanese government and respond to requests from our regulatory counterparts, nesa. to support the u.s. ambassador and his understanding of the nuclear impact of this event, and then third, to help the information flow from japan to the u.s. nrc so that we could assess the implications on the u.s. fleet in as timely a manner as possible. we've had an extensive range of stakeholders that we've had constant interaction with, ranging from the white house congressional staff, our state radio tory counterparts, a wide range of other federal agencies and, of course, the international revelatory bodies around the world. our ongoing nrc response is that the nsc operations center remains in a 24/7 posture.

this has involved the efforts of over 250 nrc staff on a rotating basis. in addition to the people that are staffing the operations center, there's hardly a person among the 4000 people in this agency that are in one way or another contributing to the response, whether it's through information technology needs for the people in japan are the region for staff in taxes which is backing up for the operations officers and our operations in to help maintain an information flow on the currently operating reactors in this country. the entire agency is coordinating and pulling together in response to this event. so that we can provide assistance in japan and not miss any of our normal activities regarding domestic responsibilities. in addition we read and -- we remain aware of u.s. efforts to provide assistance with their

counterparts in tepco in japan. the u.s. government has an extensive network of radiation monitors across the country. epa system has not identified any radiation levels of concern in this country. in fact, natural background from things like rocks, son, buildings, is a hundred thousand times more than any level that is to be detected to date. but we feel confident in our conclusion that there is no reason for concern in the united states regarding radioactive releases from japan. i'd like to focus for a few more minutes on the factors that go into assuring us of domestic reactor safety. we have since the beginning of the regulatory program in the

united states used the philosophy of defense in depth. which recognizes that the nuclear industry requires the highest standards of design, construction, oversight and operation. but even with that, we will not rely on any one level of protection for the entire purposes of protecting public health and safety. so that designs are every single reactor in this country take into account the specific site that that reactor is located, and does a detailed evaluation for any natural event such as earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, tsunami, and many others. in addition there are multiple physical barriers and fission product released at every reactor design. and then in addition to that there are both a verse and redundant safety systems that are required to be maintained

operable and quickly tested by nrc regulations that ensure that the plant is in a high condition of readiness to respond to any scenario. as i mentioned earlier we've taken advantage of the lessons learned from previous operating experience, one of the most significant in this country of course being three mile island accident in the late 1970s. as a result of those lessons learned, we've significantly revised the emergency planning, the emergency operating procedures. many human factors as it relates to how control room operators operate the plant. we added new requirement for hydrogen control to help prevent explosions inside of containment. and we also created requirements for enhanced indication of pumps and valves. we have a post accident sampling system that requires board that allows for the monitoring of

radioactive material released and possible fuel degradation. and, of course, one of the most significant changes is after three mile island, we created the resident inspector program which has at least two full-time nrc inspectors on site that have unfettered access to all licensees activities point for hours a day, seven days a week. also as a result of operating experience and ongoing research programs, we have develop the requirements for severe accident management guidelines. these are programs that are formed but what if scenario. what if all of the careful design work, all of these important procedures and practices and instrumentation, what if that all failed? what procedures and policies and equipment should be in place to

deal with the extreme and likely scenario of a severe accident. those have been in effect for many years and are frugally evaluated by the nrc inspection program. as result of the events of september 11, 2001, we did a similar evaluation and identified an important pieces of equipment that if regardless of the cause of a significant fire or explosion at a plant, we would have pre-stage equipment procedures and policies to help deal with that situation. all of these things are directly applicable to the kinds of very significant events that are taking place in japan. over the last 15 or 20 years there's been a number of new rule makings that directly relate to japan. there's a station blackout rule that has required every plant in

the country to analyze what the plant response would be if it were to lose all alternating current. so that it could respond using batteries for a while, and then have procedures and arrangements in place in order to restore alternating current to the site and provide cooling to the core. this as i mentioned earlier, there's a hydrogen rule which requires modifications to reduce the impacts of hydrogen generated or beyond designed based events and core damage. equipment qualification rules that require equipment indication equipment as well as pumps and valves to remain operable under the guise of environmental temperature radiation conditions that you would see under a design basis. and then going directly to the type of containment design that

plants in japan of highest interest have, we've had a mark one containment improvement program since the very late 1980s, which had installed system for the containment cooling and fission products striving for all mark ones, as well as enhanced reliability of the automatic depressurization system. i also mentioned earlier that we have emergency preparedness and planning requirements that provide ongoing training and testing and evaluation of emergency preparedness programs and coordination with our federal partners fema. and that entails extensive interaction with state and local governments as those programs aren't evaluated and tested on a yearly basis. over the near term, the nrc activities are, we will concur

with the event evaluation that we are doing through the operations center and the team that is shipped -- is in japan. will be enhancing inspection activities through temporary instructions are inspection staff including the resident inspectors and the region-based inspectors in our four regional offices, to look at the readiness to deal with both the design basis accidents and the beyond design basis accidents. we've already issued an information notice to the licensees to make them aware of the events and what kinds of activities we believe they should be engaged in to verify their readiness. and then we every single day assess whether or not there is some additional regulatory action that needs to be taken immediately in order to address the information that we have to date. the temporary inspection i refer

to is verifying that the capabilities to mitigate conditions that result, severe accidents, including the loss of significant operational safety systems, are ineffective operational. they are verify the capabilities to mitigate a total loss of electric power to the nuclear plant. they are verifying the capability to mitigate problems associated with flooding, and the impact of floods on systems, both inside and outside of the plant. and they are identifying equipment that is needed for the potential loss of equipment due to seismic events, appropriate for the site, because each site has its own unique seismic profiles. the information that we gather from this temporary inspection will be used to evaluate the industry's readiness for similar events, and aid in our understanding of whether

additional regulatory actions need to be taken in the immediate term. for a near-term effort we are beginning very soon a 90 day effort that will evaluate all of the currently available information from the japanese events. and look at it to evaluate our 104 operating reactors ability to protect against natural disasters. to evaluate the response to station blackouts, severe accidents and spent fuel accident progression, look at radiological consequence analysis, and also look at severe accident management issues regarding equipment. i expect that coming out of this we will have the development of some recommendations for generic communications, either to make sure that the industry has a broad understanding of the events and the issues as best we

understand them, but also as i mentioned earlier that we would evaluate whether or not someone regulatory action, perhaps in the framework of an order would be required in order to require the licensees to take some action that they have not already done. i expect that this 90 day effort will include a quick look 30 day report for the commission, and, of course, we stand ready to brief the commission as you desire. in order to accomplish this quick look report, i think we'll have limited stakeholder involvement in this activity and that it will be done independent of industry efforts that might be ongoing. the idea is to just get a quick snapshot of the regulatory response and the condition of the u.s. fleet, based on whatever information we have available. and i recognize that we have limited information now, more and more information will become

available to us as we go along. but we wanted to do at least this quick look report beginning very soon. and, of course, consistent with the commission's practices, the results of this report will be made public. on the longer-term, we will be developing lessons learned that are somewhat dependent on when we begin to get a better understanding of the events and the result of the earthquake and tsunami in japan. so to some degree, it's difficult to precisely state when the start date for this longer-term review will begin. the review may include the involvement of other federal agencies, but it will certainly include interaction with those other federal agencies because there is obviously the issue of emergency preparedness is a

prime example of where we would interact with fema to have an effective review. and we would identify the lessons learned that need to be incorporated into any ongoing long-term agency action. we will evaluate all the technical and policy issues to identify educational research, or generic communications, changes to our reactor oversight program, potential new rule makings, and adjustments for the regulatory framework. that should be conducted by the nrc. as i said we would evaluate interagency issues. and also look for applicability to non-operating reactor facilities. i expect this longer-term report to have substantial stakeholder involvement. and the outcomes are likely to be along the lines of generic

letters, bulletins, and potential rulemaking's. so in conclusion i want to make it clear that we continue to make our domestic response to those of licensees and oversight of the u.s. licensees our top priority. that there is an immediate short-term and long-term evaluations that are beginning, and that they will be influenced by our understanding of the events in japan. so with that, that concludes my presentation. ready to answer any question. >> thank you, bill, for the very thorough presentation. we have a proposal in front of the commission now to consider the options for the short-term and long-term reviews. so we will take a look at that and provide response in fairly short order.

i would again just want to reiterate my thanks to the work that you and your team have done over the last several days to deal with this situation, and emphasized the importance of a systematic and methodical review so that we do make sure that we approach these issues and really get the facts and make sure that we don't move in a direction that is based on early information which often tends to be confusing and sometimes conflicting. so i appreciate the work that you have done to this point. i don't have any specific questions at this time but i would turn to transport to begin with some questions and comments. >> thank you, mr. chairman. and thank you, bill. i second the chairman's comments about the tremendous efforts that you and all of the nrc staff neighbors have made in supporting the agency's reaction to this event. there is a lot that we don't yet know, and so that becomes a context really for the types of

questions that we are able to ask about this event today. very generally, i would ask you in the staffs expert assessment this morning, do you believe that the events occurring at fukushima have stabilize, or is it reasonable to expect that events they will continue to be dynamic in the days and weeks to come? >> in my view the fact that off-site power is close to being available for use in plant equipment is perhaps the first optimistic sign that we have had that things could be turning around. we believe that the spent fuel pools on units three and four which had been to components that were a significant safety concern, that the situation there is stabilizing, that the containment in all three units, one, two and three, appear to be functional, and that there's water being injected into the

reactor vessels and units, 12 and three. so i would say optimistic late, things appear to be on the verge of stabilizing. this has been a very challenging event for us to understand the exact situation because as was alluded to, the information is sometimes conflicting. it's certain not at the level that any engineer would like to have in order to do a thorough analysis. so we have spent a lot of a lot of time trying to piece together our best understanding. that would be my personal assessment of the situation on site now. >> is it fair to say from that than that based on what we understand now of the needs that most urgent need to be addressed there at the site, that those are being addressed and that they have a status that you just described to me? those are of course the items of

highest interest, but it sounds also like in the days and weeks to come we will certainly discover other conditions and things at the site of perhaps a lower level of priority that we just don't know about right now. >> yes. the radiation releases and those rates that we've seen on site i think were primarily influenced by the condition of the units three and four spent fuel pool. the water inventory questions, whether or not there was some fuel that was uncovered in spent fuel pool was a significant concern. the tempo, the licensee and the government of japan had been making a concerted effort to address those issues. and so that we are aware of. i don't believe we have anywhere near the clear understanding of what the plant conditions are like within the reactor building. so what kinds of electrical

cabling has been damaged, what kind of pumps and valves remain operable is significant right now. >> thank you. you gave a very high level chronology of the events that occurred as we know them, and it really ends up being a narrative of three events that are related to each other. first of course being the earthquake, the seismic event. second, the tsunami, or as we might have in the united states, a flood surge or some of the flooding event. followed by the loss of power. in terms of what went know now and given that there are these three events in succession, and do you think that our regulatory focus right now for the review we are doing is where it needs to be? >> yes. i'm quite confident. we've looked at all of the information that we're getting from japan. we look at the design basis for the u.s. reactors. we continue with the inspection program, and we have a high degree of confidence with the

104 currently operating reactors is an adequate basis to assure adequate protection. >> thank you. there's been some discussion of what we call generic safety issue 199, and generic safety issues at the program that we have at nrc for the continual evaluation of various safety relevant issues. could you talk a little bit about the ongoing nature, this generic safety issue 199 was ongoing prior to the event in japan, could you talk about what was occurring there and how the events in japan may alter how we approach that generic safety going forward? >> occasionally i think it's every five years or so the usgs does a review of information which impacts the u.s. government's understanding of the seismic frequencies and issues associated with the seismic. recently they put out a report

that talked about the seismic information for the east, central and eastern united states. that information has been given to the industry. there's no both industry and nrc evaluation of that information to see if this new information, and in some place it's been an increase i in the frequency, expect the frequency of a seismic event, would cause us to have to change the seismic design basis for the plant. we did as we do every time we get any kind of new information, seismic or otherwise, we do a quick look to make sure that we don't believe there's any immediate information on any immediate need to take any regulatory action. if there was we would certainly do that to the immediate imposition of new operating guidelines for new systems or

potentially even requirement to shut the reactor down. until the issue was addressed. in this case we did that reveal. we found no reasons to take any immediate regulatory action, and so this is an ongoing review. i don't believe that what we have learned from japan would cause a different type of analysis. it's certain he puts a brighter spotlight on the work we're doing in that follow-up. i'm confident that the approach we have been on is the right approach. >> you describe our role in the inner agency response and nrc specific actions. are the cognizance of and working to understand to make sure that our efforts do not conflict with any industry to industry assistance that is going on? i'm not aware of tokyo electric power reaching out to the u.s. nuclear industry or nuclear utility since this is a

technology we have in the united states. do we maintain a cognizance of that so we can make sure that all efforts are coordinated. >> we are aware that the industry to industry interaction has been ongoing at one level. of course, there's many vendors and companies in the united states that in the ongoing business relationships with tepco and the other generating companies in japan. so at the working level has been going on ever since the event and prior to the event. at a higher coordinated industry level, i would say we are still in the formula stages of that interaction. we have had some discussions with the industry. u.s. industry. it's still evolving. so we are cognizant of what's going on and trying to help in a u.s. government role facilitate their contacts, if you will, between the u.s. and the

japanese companies. in any way that we can because we think it can certainly be a benefit to tepco. >> thank you, and my last question to you is that you mentioned our ability to issue very rapidly a very types of generic communications to the industry. in your prepared remarks you talk about that we've already issued i believe last week and information notice. could you describe generally in that notice, what are we alerting the u.s. reactors to? >> well, the main purpose from my perspective, and i might ask in arkansas but my answer if i'm not quite complete, was to have a regulatory follow-up on the activities that we understand the industry has taken on their own to verify that the plant procedures and equipment for severe accidents for the types of things i discuss that came out of 9/11 event, that all of

those pieces of equipment, temporary hoses, fittings, procedures, that all those things are, in fact, still in place, that the operators are cognizant of them, that they have been trained for whatever reason to make sure that they haven't fallen into disuse because they haven't been used. so it was really a regulatory verification that the industry's initiatives on this front have, in fact, been taken and that we will be following up on of the results of those, and doing our own sampling checks as we always do. >> okay, and those were the items based on what we know now that we identified as being at the highest interest, at least in the immediate term? >> yes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> do you have any other questions? >> thank you, mr. chairman. bill, you mentioned -- first of all, we know that there's a

number of march 1 in the united states which is the same design as those as fukushima. but you also said that in the recent past, we have inventing vows for the containment of how the japanese tend to? >> that we are not clear on. i'm not sure. i can't really answer that question. >> i guess the question is, if they had done it, would that have affected the accident? and in what way? >> it would not have affected the loss of on site are. the hydrogen explosion aspect though, possibly is where the heart and if it would've happened if there's to be passed off the u.s. mark one containment. the preferred data path -- vent

path take section if you will or has a release path from the airspace above a pool of water is in the basement that is in the mark one containment. and i would allow for the steam that went into the doors to scrub the fission. it would release the pressure which is the main objective of the event is he want to maintain the containment can't integrity. it's preferable to vent it on purpose to get it, the pressure so you don't have a catastrophic failure of containment. and so that release path is an exterior to the plant, so it's at least, my believe, that you would have hydrogen accumulation in the upper levels of the reactor building which we believe is the cause of the explosions. now, the spent fuel pools on this design are also on that

same level of the upper level of the reactor buildings. so that it wouldn't do anything to help hydrogen that became on the spent fuel pool. >> you also mentioned we have on site equipment that were installed, that were installed after september 11 attacks. did the japanese had any of those? >> again, i'm not sure. really, we are trying get information, but i'm not personally aware of the situation in japan. >> into. -- thank you. some people are asking why did the germans shut down their plants, or some plants, after the accident and we did not hear was it prudent for the germans to? >> i'm not aware of the basis

for the germans decision to do that. 100% confident in the review that we have done, and we continue to do every single day, that we have a sufficient basis to believe, or to conclude that the u.s. plans continue to operate safely. so we have asked ourselves the question every single day, she would take a regulatory action based upon the latest information, because of the kind of things that i outlined in my presentation. we have not reached the conclusion. >> thank you. of course, a seismic risk is on the forefront of the news. and, first of all, i would emphasize the seismic design is based on the horizontal nature of the plant.

but, of course, most people think in terms of the richter scale. and also we hear about the earthquake of magnitude nine of fukushima. we say that in the united states we designed the plants by looking at the historical record, and then by margins. i understand what believe that the strongest of earthquakes in the united states have occurred east of the rocky mountains in the 1800s, and the magnitude was between seven, 7.7 on the richter scale. so immediately you get the question, okay, you design against of those, but look at japan. if you get an earthquake of magnitude nine, how does one answer that question? i mean, you can always ask what

if an earthquake of 9.5 occurred, is there a rational way of addressing that? >> well, my explanation is, i know you understand this, but we look at the faults around the u.s. we have that information. we look at the historic records, look at what the maximum earthquake has been, and then with everything we do, we add margins. but we also look at a specific location in relation to the fault, and consider the kind of soil and rock formations that are between default location and the site, and do an analysis to see what is the ground motion of what would actually be seen at the site. and we design for an earthquake of a certain size, our on going into the trap of saying an earthquake of a certain size. of a ground motion of a certain magnitude. but then having said that, all

of these other things, severe accident management guidelines, we have programs in place, equipment in place that says even if we were wrong, and the plant suffered this kind of series event, we have, in fact, the activities, the equipment ready and practiced to respond to protect public health and safety. so i don't know if i should throw a seismic life on here, if you wanted to get into any more detail on seismic issues. >> and just say your name. >> thank you. my name is doctor cameron and i met the office of research. i think i'd like to make a couple of points. the first point is related to the ground motion in japan.

recently, starting 2006, the japanese regulatory agency performed a study in which they look at increased hazards, perception of hazard at the plant. and breezily themselves to a reevaluation of the impact of that potential increase hazard at the facilities. and actually we're in the middle of this win this event occurred as a result, a number of modifications were made to the plants. at this point it's not clear exactly what modifications the fukushima plant had already had implemented. however, the ground motions for which the plant was reevaluated is about .6 2g. the original design basis was about .637 g. based on the preliminary information we have, .6 2g is in the range of the ground motions that we are expressed by the

plant. although they came from a different earthquake that was anticipated, the ground motions for which the plant was assessed was a 7.1, very close to the plant. that's what produce the ground motion of the 6.2. so, one thing that we believe is that the ground motions at the plant, even though is a different event, were not out of the range they had already considered. it's less clear with regard to the tsunami. currently, the japanese society of civil engineers is finalizing guidance, ss is guidance for japan, and it was anticipated that the japanese regulator would do a similar study for tsunami hazard assessment once that was completed. unfortunately, because the guidance has not yet was completed it's not believe they

did not initiate that were. so just to clarify, that even though this particular event was larger on a subduction zone was anticipated, it probably didn't greatly exceed the ground motion. the one exception to that may be in the long period range, because if you have a longer event farther away you get more long period of content than would be anticipated from a 7.1 close in. the second question, or the second point is regard to a seismic hazard and the united states. as was mentioned, we are undertaking a program generic issue, 199, which is looking at the potential impact to assess risk. ..

>> up to and including maximum magnitude event which, in the many cases, exceed what we have seen in the historic record. it was mentioned the most widely felt earthquakes in history were a magnitude 7, and yet we do look at particularly in portions of the question of exceeding that, of course, we also account for the likelihood that that event occurs and that also accounts for background seismicity which is common in the east which is seismicity which cannot be attributed to a specific fault. in fact, it's important to note that seismicity in the central and eastern u.s. tends to be in

what we call seismic zones which are not directly atritt bl -- attributable to fault, and we account for all of the hazard in the seismic zones. one of the questions which has come up repeatedly is how many plants are near faults or in modern or high seismicity regions, and that's a very challenging question to answer because these seismic zones are not well defined boundaries. the faults that were the causative faults of the 1811 and 1812 earthquakes have never been identified in part because they're under a very deep, the very deep sediments in the mississippi region. and so we have to account for uncertainty in the locations, we have to account for the uncertainty involved in the maximum magnitudes, and all of that is incorporated in the hazard analyses that

. >> what if we are wrong? and we take additional measures. so i think that's very important for people to understand it because, you know, probability sometimes is not easy to attack. one last question. thank you, annie. the, as you mentioned, the damage in fukushima was not really caused by the earthquake, it was the tsunami that came afterwards. so the question now is, when we license our plants here, are we considering this one-two punch? are we considering an earthquake followed by a tsunami as appropriate or a major fire or a flood? because banks holding waters, water fail? because this secondary event seems to be now very important, and we have to account for it. so how are we approaching this issue in the united states? >> well, the design basis

includes many different analyses. i would just say one thing about the earthquake in japan. we don't know what the impacts of the earthquake are inside of the reactor building specifically. that's where most of the equipment of interest to us would be located. it may have survived perfectly well, perfectly functional, or there may be damage that we just don't know about, so we need to see what the inspection results are once they have access to the plant. but our reviews for the u.s. include it's always very site-specific. so, you know, for earthquakes if you're in a very soft soil environment, there's not a very challenging review. that's required or analysis that's required on earthquakes. but it might be that you need storm surge for a hurricane or a

storm surge for a tsunami. but there are multiuntil -- multiple, you don't take every possible current event and pile them together in one event, so it's done more on an event-by-event basis, so i don't know -- >> [inaudible] >> or something else, yeah. >> well, i think -- or maybe you could just answer the question, i think it's more generally how do we -- do we consider separate design basis events, do we consider design basis events separately, or do we consider all design basis events simultaneously on a plant? >> yeah. >> eric leads, directer of the office for nuclear reactor regulation. as bill mentioned, we take into account whatever natural phenomena can occur at a particular site whether it's a hurricane, a tsunami, an earthquake, to tornado, what hae

you. and we have them analyzed site specifically. now, i'm not exactly sure if i understand the question directly. are you asking a seismic event followed by a tsunami? well, i know that we analyze for tsunami, we analyze for the maximum storm surge as mr. borchardt mentioned and also what kind of a runout would happen. typically, tsunamis are triggered by an earthquake, so one and the either, we would analyze for that, and we've done that for our plants on the coast. >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> and i would just echo, i think, bill's comments. we are at a very early stage now, too, and detailed information is probably going to be some time until we have it, and so exactly the impacts of the tsunami and/or the earthquake and what their effects on the plant will probably still take some time to, to understand. commissioner? >> thank you.

morning, bill. >> morning. >> did you get some sleep this weekend? >> not much. >> you'll get there at some point. there's been a lot of discussion in the media about, that compares what's happening in japan to three mile island. as i look at this and, again, we're still early in this, i tend not to think as much about three mile island as i do 9/11. and one reason i think about that is because it seems to me that there are, certainly, a lot of lessons learned, a lot of technical details we'll have to sort out over time. but i wonder, also, whether as the case in 9/11, is there a major conceptual aha that's sitting out there in front of us, and i want to make sure we don't miss that forest as we're looking over these trees. in the case of 9/11 it wasn't simply we need to do a better job about protecting, you know, airplane cockpits and lots of other security upgrades, there was a conceptual aha that the

threat is a lot different than we thought it was. do you, do you as you look at this at this early stage, do you see a bigger message out there that we should be thinking about? >> um, i don't see a significant weakness there, but that's why we need to do this quick look review, and my personal view is that what we need to do is take some very experienced people that are both within the staff and maybe take some even recently retired people that have expertise in broad areas of design, review and licensing and let them just focus on the question of is there something here that causes us to question these, the way we've applied defense and depth and being risk-informed and the various barriers of radiation release protection and those kinds of

things and evaluate whether or not there's something different that needs to be done. it hasn't actually occurred to me. if anything, it's, it's given me a bit of a confidence, if you will, that all of those redundancies is and all of our processes are paying off. i mean, it was, it was maybe in the view of some stakeholders overly conservative, the way we've approached it, but i think we're seeing the value and the benefit of that approach that we've used for the last 35 years. >> i appreciate that and agree with it. let me give you some just sort of thoughts about where i think there might be some larger issues to think about, and that is in looking at as we described and, again, we don't know all the details yet, but we do have the sense that the plant, you know, seemed to survive the earthquake, and we do have the

sense that the tsunami's disabling of the back-up power systems led to the situation that followed. but, you know, even beyond that there is the fact that there was so much difficulty in bringing resources to the plant to recover from that situation. when you look at our, when you look at our plants, you can certainly, we certainly have done things in b5b and other things, upgrade our ability to recover from site blackout, and we're going to be looking at those issues. but if you lose, if you lose a lot of infrastructure, if you lose the ability to get to a site, if you lose, you know, hundreds of miles of transmission line, if you lose the ability to get, to have rail transport, to move equipment around, that's something i don't know that there's been a lot of thought about. and i wonder if you can reflect on that for a moment because when i look at this event, i see

a significant struggle in over the, especially over the early part of this to get the right resources to the plant to be able to recover from this accident. and even today we haven't, we still are struggling to hook up ac power to units one and two as you described. when you think about this and, again, we'll look at this in great detail as we go forward, do we even have the regulatory scope to cover all the ground that needs to be covered to assure that there's a, that the infrastructure's in place to be able to recover from an accident like this? >> yeah, i think there's a couple levels that maybe i'd like to touch on in response to that question. the first is we -- and i'm, i have no idea what the situation is in japan regarding their regulations and what they have in place, so i'm not implying whether they had it or didn't have these kinds of things. but in the united states i mentioned the station blackout rule which is, was a rule -- is

a rule that requires an analysis of what would happen at a plant and its coping strategy for dealing with a complete loss of all ac power. so that assumes that the diesels don't, you know, that you'd lose the transmission lines and the diesels don't start, and then they have to do an evaluation, and it's a coping study how they would be able to restore the plant. that has resulted in various approaches at different sites. some have a gas turbine that is on the site that could be very quickly hooked up into the grid -- not into the grid, into the plant. there's other ors that have -- others that have nonsafely-related diesel generators. there are plants that have diesel fire pumps so that they, there is a backup to a backup to a backup way to inject water into the core and into the spent fuel pool. so there's a regulatory construct that's required and

mandated, that type of activity. on the u.s. government perspective coming out of 9/11, we had the department of homeland security which is positioned to orchestrate the entire federal response to an event of magnitude that, you know, you might be suggesting. that would happen so that the full resources of the u.s. government would be able to use, you know, different resources to get temporary equipment to a site in order to provide electrical power, you know, temporary diesel generators, that kind of thing. and then the backstop for all of that, and i'm now leaving the kind of federal regulatory requirement perspective, is that the u.s. industry, i think, is unique in, in the world but also

within industry in this country in that while on the one hand they're competitors, on the other hand they share operating experience, they share -- they have programs that they all contribute to, and they have an inventory of spare parts and equipment that can be very quickly brought to bear in be -- in responding to this kind of event. and this is outside the regulatory purview, i want to make clear, but that is yet another backstop that helps, would help a site that had a similar kind of problem respond to it in a quick and effective manner. >> appreciate that. and let me also echo the, your somewhat positive words about the industry. i think in this particular instance, actually, i think the industry in the u.s. and internationally has responded very, very well to this. i particularly congratulate the efforts to work with

international partners and also to take positive action here in the united states. i think they've done a good job, and i think, you know, nei and others have worked together, and i think individual companies have done a lot. so i congratulate the industry for reacting that way. um, let me, let me move on to, well, move on to a little bit different subject. we've talked a little bit about hydrogen already this morning and the sort of measures we have to deal with hydrogen. is it your understanding that all the hydrogen that led to the explosions came from the spent fuel? >> i, um, i wouldn't want to hazard a guess. certainly a likely source. whether it's all of it or not, i couldn't guess. >> you've talked about this a little bit, but i want to give you a chance to give a little more holistic response to this. what measures are in place to prevent hydrogen from collecting and exploding in u.s. plants? marked ones or others? >> the hardened event, of

course, the u.s. design approach is to protect the containment. it's to ensure the integrity of the containment. and if you can do that even if you have fuel damage, then you can prevent the uncontrolled release of radioactive materials into the environment. and so this is three mile island, for example, had, had core damage, a significant amount of core damage. yet the radiological releases were very limited from three mile island. so there was, you know, negligible health effect from that accident. so the hardened vents will allow the primary containment to stay intact, and that's probably the most, single most important thing. the other thing to maintain the containment is for this particular design of containment we've required, i think since the late '80s again, inerting

of the containment. so it's filled with nitrogen. so if you don't have oxygen in the containment, even if you did have hydrogen in there, you're not going to have an explosion or a fire. those are, i think, probably the two biggest ones. i don't know if there's anything you need to add? >> appreciate that. one more question, mr. chairman. just also just to give you a chance to clarify, there's been a lot -- i noticed a lot of chatter in the press over the weekend about the impact of 50 mile evacuation zones around u.s. nuclear plants. could you sort of give the nrc's position on what the emergency planning requirements are and why we're confident in what we have today? can you, please, elaborate? >> we have as part of the emergency preparedness construct in this country a 10-mile emergency planning zone that completely encircles every reactor plant in the country. that in coordination with fema

who has off-site emergency preparedness role throughout the country is routinely practiced. there are, we have models that would do an analysis of what the release paths are. we take into account the meteorological conditions, and the nrc does -- i should be clear, the nrc does not make the recommendations regarding evacuation or any other protective action guidelines. that's the responsibility of the state government. so it'd be the governor that would be ultimately making that decision. but we're in a position to provide independent assessment and advice to the governor in those kinds of circumstances. the situation that led to the 50-mile guidance in japan was based upon what we understood and still believe had existed, that there was degraded

conditions in the two spent fuel pools at the site, and in all like hi hood some core damage -- likelihood some core damage in three of the reactor units. based on the situation as we understood it at that time, we thought it was prudent to provide the recommendation to the ambassador to evacuate out to 50 miles in japanment it was not in japan. it was not based on the existing radiological conditions, but what at that time was a possibility. and so we thought it was the prudent, conservative suggestion. if those conditions existed in the united states, we would have made the exact same recommendationment -- recommendation. the idea that there might be some misunderstanding that because we have a 10-mile epz, that would be the extent for what we would consider and what our emergency planning recommendations would be limited to is not true at all. we would have done the exact same kind of analysis and gone

through the same thought process to consider extending evacuation or whatever protective measures we thought were appropriate. >> thank you. thank you, mr. chairman. >> [inaudible] >> thank you, mr. chairman. bill, again, i thank you for your leadership and the hard work and professionalism of your teams. it's helpful in your opening statement where you talked about the history of the nrc post-three mile island, post-9/11 as to what steps or additional measures were considered or, in fact, implemented. so i think that history is very relevant to the near term and longer-term efforts. certainly, various hurricanes, andrew, katrina that have, this country has faced also provide data points for various steps taken whether they be specific to the nuclear field or external to the nuclear field.

does any of the experience from your time, your career at nrc, do you have any significant lessons learned from the process or not the substantive technical details, but the process that was employed following these other significant events that would help inform the task force execution of its mission? >> well, i think it's very important that the task force keep the broad perspective of the regulatory framework that exists within the nrc and the legal framework that exists within the united states. because there is a temptation to, i think, try to pile in every good idea that exists into something that becomes unmanageable, and the ultimate could actually end up being counterproductive to safety. there was a degree of that, in

my opinion -- only speaking my personal opinion -- after three mile island. because when i started with the agency in 1983, we were still in the midst of following up the actions from three mile island action plan. it was a new reg 0737, and anybody who started in the nrc has that number burned into their brain because we spent enormous amounts of resources following up on those activities. sop of those fixes that -- some of those fixes that i alluded to were instrumental in improving the safety in this country. some were, i believe, actually -- if we had carried them all out, might have actually been counterproductive in a way at just not contributed to safety. they might have been a good idea in somebody's mind. so there needs to be a after you go through the brainstorming and identification of all possible things to change, i think there needs to be a good evaluation,

thorough evaluation of what's the right thing to do and in what kind of sequence and in what kind of timing. >> okay. well, i'll just make two comments on that. one thing just for information, and you may be aware of this, but about a year ago the national academies undertook a significant study for about nine or ten federal agencies to look at disaster resilience in this country specifically from the context of interagency coordination, roles and responsibilities. nothing there was or to my knowledge is currently nuclear-specific. the extent of interagency coordination for various types of events in this country is a prime subject of that study, and there may be some value in looking at that. and referring to commissioner magwood's questioning on the transportation logistics support which i completely agree are, have been issues here so far in this particular response one might take mote of the -- note

of department of defense's efforts since the loss of the uss thresher back in 1963, there's been a very operationally-ready deep sub her generals rescue vehicle, dsrv, on standby close to airplanes on the the east and west coast of the united states to provide a response so other agencies, the point is, have gone through similar analogs in looking at how they might deal with particular responses, and that's something just to note. also kind of maybe staying a little bit on the big picture historical nature of some of the prior nrc responses to these big events, it also strikes me that perhaps the audience or the recipients of these reports would be representing a broader cross-section than typical commission meetings. we have nuclear industry, we

have many of the same stakeholders from issue to issue, but it just, my personal opinion is that this is one where how we communicate to john q. public, the person that doesn't have a stake in industry or is not part of one of the normal stakeholder groups but also deserves and needs to receive a reply that they can understand is really essential. is there anything from your prior experience here at nrc either 9/11 or davis bessie or the 2003 blackout that you think would be in your initial thoughts on how we communicate so that people in the american public understand what the results are of these near term and longer-term efforts? >> well, again, this is just my view, my public -- my assessment. i think that especially in the long term review that we do we need to build in a meaningful engagement with all the stakeholders. they have an enormous capability to understand the most technical

issues. sometimes we think that capability doesn't exist, but it's, in fact, not true. and we get, have had enormously valuable input from a wide range of stakeholders. this is a little bit off of event response, but when we established the reactor oversight program, we did it 10 or 12 years ago, we used just that kind of approach. we brought in all kinds of different stakeholders from are all different perspectives, and it was a very impressive end result that had everyone's buy-in. people who came from pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear, and they all agreed that this was a good approach to perform regulatory oversight. i think the same kind of mindset is important to enter into this long-term activity and start at the beginning, you know, where we get into trouble as a regulator is when we have our mind made up or even if we don't

have our mind made up, there's a perception we already have our mind made up. and then we begin the engagement. so i think we need to do it right from the very beginning, have it be a very open and transparent process. >> okay, thank you. i know as the chairman indicated in his comments earlier, there's much we don't know, and it'll be significant periods of time before we have full granularity of a lot of the details of what happened at fukushima. there's one area, if you'll just bear with me, that i do want to ask you about. i've been here not quite one year, i've spent very little time looking at spent fuel pools. when i go to visit a plant, i'll go see the pool on some of these visits, i've probably seen four, i think, in the last year. but i certainly don't have much background at all in the spent fuel pools. in the recognizing that that's been the focus of a lot of concern over the last ten days and that perhaps, you know, compared to our discussions we

have on emergency core cooling systems and gsi 191 and other issues that we don't spend a lot of time as a commission really talking about that. is there any initial area of u.s. reactor plant spent fuel configuration or operation that comes to mind as warranting particular exploration in this task force? >> well, i -- clearly, it's a very simple problem. all you have to do is keep water in the pool. the pool is an open vessel. and the only objective is to keep water in it. even if in a bad situation it were to heat up and you had boil boiling in there, as long as you kept the water, the fuel covered with water, you're going to prevent the high radiological release. so i think what the task force needs to do is to, you know, go down the specifics of what happened in japan and then

evaluate that to make sure that, in fact, these things that we put into place after 9/11, for example, really would work under that scenario. i mean, we have thought about things like making sure that the equipment you're going to use wouldn't be damaged in the event that caused the first problem. so you can't have everything staged exactly where it's ready to be used. there has to be some staging areas. but, for example, on the tsunami or a flooding issue, you wouldn't want the equipment now stored outside, right? because it would be swept away. you know, it's yet another what-if to really help us explore and probe what the various scenarios are and make sure we have the most, the highest probability of success. i think that's really the box we need people to be thinking in. >> that's very helpful, thank you. thank you, mr. chairman. >> i'd ask at this point if there are any other questions that any of my colleagues have. well, at this point --

>> i'm, i'm not going to ask you a question. [laughter] >> i'm not sure i'd answer it if you did. >> i do want to just take a moment and thank all the nrc staff that have respond today this event or the people that are in the op center. we're doing our best to have a rotation of people in and out of that, but they're working very hard, very long hours. they're still doing their real job too. like i said, that's got to be our first priority. but i want to just make special note of the team of people that volunteered to go to japan on no notice that have been there working incredibly long, hard hours, working in a way that there is no operating procedure to operate. they have had to develop it on the go. so chuck casto happens to be the team leader, but there are many people that have worked very hard.

we have sent another person to help chuck in that team leader role, and there is the next wave of nrc employees that have volunteered, and they'll be leaving beginning, i think it's tomorrow, and then the last element of that group on thursday. so i just want to make special note of their commitment and professionalism. thank you. >> well, thanks for that, bill, i appreciate that and your work as well, i think, as ohs have -- others have noted. at this point i would just offer that we do have a proposal that's been circulated that i think captures at a high level some of these ideas for a path forward, and i would certainly encourage that we move on that as promptly as possible, but i thought i'd offer at this time an opportunity if anybody wants to make comments on that or any of the other issues that we have in front of us. commissioner? >> i just thank you for convening this meeting today. i think it's been very helpful, and i know that we're all ready

to move forward to take the actions needed to take. >> okay. well, again, i want to thank everybody for their efforts so far and, again, i just want to reiterate as we close that as many people on this side of the table have indicated, we have had, many of us, very close and personal relationships with colleagues in japan, and our hearts go out to them as they continue to deal with this, with this very difficult event, and we will continue to work to provide our colleagues and counterparts in japan with assistance as they need it to deal with the situation. so, and i think as commissioner magwood indicated, this is likely the first of many discussions we will have on this topic, and i look forward to continuing the discussion and continuing our focus on our important health and safety mission. with that, we are adjourned. thank you.

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[inaudible conversations] >> just as soon as the vote is available, the office of public affairs will let you know -- >> when will we be able to see the proposal? >> first, the commissioners immediate to see it, then when that is done, that will be made public. it is, it will not be unlike what you heard laid out today by the staff. >> okay. >> you had a question. >> yeah. the longer term review will that be launched or initiated once -- [inaudible] >> well, we don't have a specific start date for that.

the staff wants to be able to see how much in the broad sense can be, can be obtained before they totally frame out what it is they want to do over the long term because a lot of the work will hinge on what is the available -- [inaudible] [inaudible conversations] >> the nrc is getting data from any and all sources. we will receive it from the government, we will receive it from the -- [inaudible] we will look at news reports as we have been doing. >> [inaudible] >> well, i don't know. we had one individual who has -- [inaudible] in a tradeout -- >> could have any information on -- do you have any information on the way --

[inaudible conversations] >> it will go on for quite some time. there is a wealth of information that will come from this disaster, and we will take a substantial amount of research here to, first off, to coa late all the data and then match that up against our program, see what things we can learn. >> and the proposal, it will talk to that as well? >> it will really look more to the short term, and the longer term will evolve. >> okay. >> from that. >> the short term is 90 days, correct? and the longer term has not been

established? >> yes. >> okay. >> just to be clear, i'm sorry to ask again, but especially, like, the readiness inspections, those are going to go on -- >> those are ongoing. >> those are ongoing. >> so everyone understands for those of you who are not familiar with this agency, the nrc has resident inspectors who workday in and day out at every nuclear plant many this country, so from -- in this country. so from the beginning of this, we have been aware of what's going on and looking at nuclear plants as part of our routine, day-to-day business. that will continue, and any information that comes in with respect to japan will be factored in at the management level in terms of directing staff and what particular things to look at. >> and there are two full-time partners at every plant? >> every site, and some sites have more than one reactor, have at least two and often more resident inspectors. >> [inaudible]

there and the operators are aware where they are? >> that would be the first line of checking, but we also have inspectors who are based regionally who supplement the on-site staff, and we have inspection staff residents here at headquarters as well. >> did -- [inaudible] kind of details for what the 90-day review is going to uncoversome. >> he ran down in this a broad sense -- >> okay. >> -- the sorts of things that would be looked at. >> okay. thank you. >> i have one more question. the safety blackout rule, the -- >> station blackout rule. >> sorry about that. >> that's okay. >> does the nrc check that annual, you know, whatever site-specific -- >> i don't know, i cannot tell you the period with which those particular items are examined,

but alls aspects of a plant's operation and be its ability to respond to one particular type of incident or another are reviewed on a regular basis by the nrc. >> okay. okay. >> is the proposal, the chairman's proposal, is it his proposal or someone else's? it's before that? >> the staff has prepared a collection of approaches. the chairman, i believe, will make a recommendation -- make a proposal to his commissioners -- excuse me just a moment. [inaudible conversations]

>> i don't know who's going to write the initial paper, i would anticipate it would be the chairman. [inaudible conversations] >> our live coverage will continue at 1 eastern today. the cato institute is hosting a conversation about the anniversary of the health care law. staffers will join health care policy experts to discuss how the law has changed the health care industry, legal challenges to the law and current opposition to it. again, live coverage begins at 1 eastern here on c-span2.

president obama continues his south american trip today. he visits chile, and he'll meet with the country's president. president obama will also deliver a speech meant to address the entire latin american community. we'll have live coverage at 3:20 eastern, that will be on c-span. and tonight here on c-span2 the senate commerce committee looks into online consumer privacy. participants include the head of the federal trade commission and officials from microsoft, intuit and the american civil liberties union. that's live -- actually, that is at 8:30 eastern right here on c-span2 tonight. >> beginning april 1st and throughout the month, we'll feature the top winners of this year's c-span student cam competition. nearly 1500 middle and high school students submitted documentaries on the theme "washington, d.c. through my lens," focusing on an event, issue or topic that better helped them understand the role of the federal government. watch the winning videos on

c-span, and meet the students who created them. stream all the winning videos anytime online at student cam.org. >> japan's ambassador to the u.s. spoke friday about the nuclear crisis and recent natural disasters in the his country at a brookings institution forum here in washington. following his remarks, several brookings scholars discussed the ambassador's remarks and be look at what the disasters mean for the future of the japanese economy and society. thisthis is about an hour, 15 minutes. >> good afternoon, everybody, i'd like to welcome you all and thank you for being here this afternoon. like pretty much all of the gatherings that we have here in the brookings auditorium, today's panel is intended to give us a chance to discuss a major event that's both in the headlines and, of course, very

much on our minds. and also to discuss the challenges that this event poses to our political leaders, to their ingenuity, their fortitude and their wisdom. but today's event actually goes beyond that. it gives everyone in this room and everyone who is watching on television or listening on the radio or following the proceedings on the web a chance to inform and intensify our compassion for the brave and grievously-stricken people of japan. the japanese people and the japanese government are very ably represented in the united states by ambassador ichiro fujisaki. he is a very close friend of a number of us here in this room,

and that makes it all the more fitting that he should be representing a country that is a close friend and partner and ally of the united states. i think that all of you can imagine what the last week has been like for ambassador fujisaki, for his wife and for their family. he has been working literally around the clock with numerous agencies of the united states government to coordinate as much as possible in the american and international support for the japanese people. he is continuing that important work today, and we are all very grateful to him for taking just a few minutes out of that very busy schedule in order to be with us to make a brief opening statement. i want to stress that because of the urgent, onerous and

important work that he is doing, he can only be with us for a few minutes. so after he speaks i'm going to ask all of you, please, to keep in your seats. you have a very good panel to listen to after he leaves, and this message is directed particularly to the our friends in the media in the back of the room. i don't want to see anybody do anything that will impede his departure given his busy program for this afternoon. so i will accompany him out after we have a chance to hear from ambassador fujisaki. mr. ambassador, the lectern is yours. [applause] >> thank you very much, everyone, and thank you very much especially for, mr. talbot, for offering me this opportunity. yes, this has been

unprecedented, never experienced. natural disaster accident that we have experienced. earthquake, tsunami and this nuclear accident as well. we are now engaged in search and rescue. we are now engaging in supplying basic human needs to people; food, water, shelter, blanket and all those things which you need every day. we are trying to cope with this nuclear reactor situation. i do not want to prejudge the situation now, but what i can

say is we are trying our best, and we we are very grateful to united states for the support you are giving to us. president obama was in my embassy signing the condolence book and made a statement at rose garden and spoke to prime minister kan. he said u.s. will do everything it can. american people are sending us assistance through your red cross, ngo and other channels, and you are sending your

sympathy, expressing your friendship the us. to us. your forces in japan and pacific fleet are heroically engaging in search and rescue and transporting goods to the affected area. your experts are working with our nuclear experts as well. we are working, as strob said, in washington as well as in tokyo every hour to try to come to better solution. it's not an easy situation, but as president obama and prime

minister kan said, we should overcome the situation, and we will cover overcome the situation. again, we are grateful to american people for your solidarity and being with us at this very difficult moment. i thank you very much. [applause] >> good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to

brookings. i'm martin, the vice president directer of the foreign policy program at brookings. i want to add my words of sympathy and condolence to the japanese people on this to case of such horrendous disasters. with me on the panel this afternoon are are four brookings scholars, each of them with expertise on the issues that are on so many of our minds as we watch the hour or record show unfold -- horror show unfold on our television screens. to my right here is richard bush who is the directer of the center for northeast asian policy studies in the foreign policy program at brookings. he has a distinguished career in

government, serving on the hill and then as national intelligence officer for east asia, then as the directer to the american institute in taiwan which handles america's diplomatic relations with taiwan. and then as the directer of cneps as we call it. the author of many books on asia, his latest book is -- which came out just a few months ago -- is called "the perils of proximity: china/japan security relations." next to him is barry bosworth, senior fellow in the global economy and development program andbe the robert v. russo chair of international economic here at brookings. his research focuses on the determinants of economic growth in developed, developing countries. he's the author of many studies

in this area. he was the directer of the president's council on wage and price stability back in the 1970s and has taught at berkeley and at harvard. next to him is bether ferrence, focusing particularly on the impact of natural disasters. her latest book is "the politics of protection: or the limits of humanitarian action." and finally, on the far right is charlie evanger, the directer of our security initiative, who is the expert in a whole range of

security issues in if south and east asia and in particular an expert on nuclear energy issues. so i wanted to start first by having a bit of a conversation between the panelists, and then we'll go to your questions. i'm sure you have many questions. i thought i'd start first with beth and ask you to give us a sense of the nature of of the natural side of this disaster that is, of course, the earthquake and the tsunami. what impact it has had on the japanese people, in particular the issue of displacement which seems to loom so large. and perhaps you can put it into some kind of comparative perspective for us so we get a sense of just how much of a disaster this is. >> thank you. i'm sure that many of you, like all of us, have been following the tv images relentlessly, the

stories of the earthquake followed by the tsunami, the story of people forced to leave their homes, people killed, missing or very brave and valiant rescue missions seeking to rescue people. the numbers are daunting. as of this morning there are about close to 7,000 confirmed dead, over 10,000 missing. we expect those figures to go higher. they always do. about 400,000 people have been displaced, evacuated and living in 2,000-plus evacuation centers. millions without water, electricity being restored but still over a million people without electricity. the situation is serious humanitarian needs remain, even for a rich and competent government with very high capacity. in comparison, a country like haiti which experienced a less severe earthquake in january of last year had 300,000 casualties and three million people who were directly eafected. affected.

relief in japan even with a strong government and strong civil society capacity has been slow and complicated. complicated, first, by the number of aftershocks. today there is a report that there have been 262 aftershocks in the past week of a richter scale five or higher. the terror that causes the people staying in shelters which are often dark, often cold, the weather, the snow, the cold weather has been an impediment, damaged roads, ports and airports have hampered the delivery of relief supplies. japanese government and especially the military has done a terrific job of getting those up and operational to enable relief to be delivered. fuel shortages have been a major issue and complicating the delivery of relief items. you know, trucks and lorries need gasoline to be able to deliver supplies even when the roads have been repaired. the national response has been impressive. you know, we say these things

and look at indicators of good, strong government response, but you have a high-level interagency emergency response team, and japan has that within the prime minister's office. there were disaster response teams who were ready to go, who went out throughout the country. red cross mobilized 134 response teams that were, you know, had planned where to go, what kinds of services would be needed in a very impressive national response. the international response has also been strong in this first initial phase, particularly in the search and rescue missions which the ambassador mentioned, the u.s. military has been active, foreign governments have provided assistance. most of the ngos who have worked so far have done so through local japanese counterparts. that's the way it should work. the japanese government has said they want to assess the needs, determine what is needed before allowing many international ngos to come and set up operations. that's the way the system should

work. we have, in contrast, in haiti where thousands, tens of thousands of ngos went in and set up operations without much coordination by the government or, indeed, with each other. another point that japan response indicates is that prevention pays off. some of you may remember that in 1995 there was a serious earthquake in hobi, japan, where 7,000 people were killed. at the time there was criticism of building codes and regulations, and since then japan has led the world in developing earthquake resistance architectural structures, and not only inside japan, but, indeed, has shared that expertise with countries around the world. ..

>> this is a whole new ballgame for humanitarian. in the past, problems of humanitarian access had been the result of damage infrastructure, resulting from natural disasters which is all that rubble in haiti. are the result of armed attacks on workers. but never before has humanitarian agencies had to think about radioactivity, of how close come how certain it is, what kind of danger staff may be placing with her when they are trying to carry out their humanitarian mission. an article in today's "new york times" said some 10,000 people have left their home, not

evacuated, as a direct result of the natural disasters. but because a few of the radiation. those are internally displaced persons. something to watch for. one thing we've learned working with internally displaced persons for 20 years is that when people are frightened, when they are uncertain, particularly when they are uncertain about information they are given, they seek safety elsewhere. >> this a follow-up. say 400,000 roughly 400,000 in displays. where are they, what's happened to them? >> their living in shelters, about 4000 living in shelters that would be office building for the idea they will either temporarily until some kind of temporary or transitional housing can be built. but to put that into perspective, japan's population is over 120 million. so even though it's a large number of people, as a percentage it is smaller than

the pakistani floods or the haiti earthquake. >> how many were displaced in haiti? >> about 1.9 million displaced afterward compared to the three but who lost their homes or work affected. out of a population of 9 million. >> interesting. charlie, let's talk about the nuclear disaster. >> thank you, martin. >> can you give us an update on where things are and your assessment, please come and just how much of a disaster it is? >> thank you. i have some recent reports, these were released at 5:00, 5 p.m. friday tokyo time. and you may have heard that the overall evaluation of the incident has been raised along the international atomic energy scale, one level towards the chernobyl disaster.

but in reality that should not be seen as a worsening situation. but that reflects his we now have more information about what happened previously. it looks as if the major problems is the number two reactor were the primary containment vessel, unlike secondary and tertiary vessels, was apparently breached to some degree. but the radiation level, while high, just to place and context are measured, i won't bother you with the technical terms, but they were measured at levels that would be roughly at 240 yards from the plant gate, roughly half the equivalent of receiving a cat scan. i don't mean to minimize this because the situation can get very, change very quickly, but it does appear that that's the major problem. it looks as if and several of the other reactors we still have a major problem that fuel rods and over spent storage pools are not covered. looks like they're still on

average about five feet below where the water level needs to be in each of those. the significance of that, of course, as uncovered, the heat builds up, eventually the inside of the rafters with a few is located begins to melt. that takes up to 1200 degrees centigrade. and if you get up to 2400 centigrade, you begin to have a serious meltdown of the reactor core. it doesn't look like -- it does look like one of the neighboring utilities to tokyo electric in the region is bring in a powerline as rapid as fossil. it may even be up and running by tonight, japanese time. i guess we are already tonight japanese time. that will be significant because commercial power can then be brought in to restart the diesel bombs that were knocked out of course by the tsunami. let me just say one final thing on kind of the technical issues. i think it's very important. this may seem like an arcane point at this horrific point in

time, but i think it's very important given a lot of information that families coming wrongly out of much of the international media, that the reactor technology has not failed. it failed at chernobyl. there's no question about that. granted, because some operators made errors, but the reactor technology close down at the time of the earthquake as it was expected to do. and the tragedy has risen because then the tsunami came and knocked out the diesel pumps for backup waterpower. one can argue about the design of the plant, whether the diesel function have been there, but it has not been a failure of nuclear technology. and i say that because around the world we've got certain voices arguing that this is the end of nuclear power and we have to slow nuclear power, et cetera. longer-term i think we need to start thinking about what the implications would be if we even slowed the developer -- development of projected nuclear

power. this has not got a lot of attention in the media because the near-term impact, particularly like countries in china, india, south korea, would be for much greater fossil fuel consumption. those of us were concerned about climate change, this would be devastating if the chinese were to reduce their program even by a third entrance of the amount of coal that would be released into the atmosphere. i think a lot of people have not rationally thought about what the overall implications of using this incident, the death knell for nuclear power might lead us to do. >> will come back to that in a moment, but i'm not -- just give us an answer, maybe it's not a simple answer, but is the nuclear disaster under control at this point in your judgment, or are we likely to see things get out of -- >> i do not think -- it's not under control in any way, shape, or form.

the numbers on the unit two, primary containment say that maybe 70% of the primary containment was knocked out. so if that leads to a major buildup of pressure and a massive meltdown that could potentially affect the other plants in the region, we could indeed be looking at a catastrophe. but it does appear at least with the power being brought in, with more workers now able to be there, and these are the most courageous people in the entire world who are fighting this incident, it does appear that the situation right now is getting better than it might have been 24 hours ago. as i said, it's not that something is happen with the primary core being shut. it's just that we now know that's what we're fighting. so i would hope that the situation will improve, but you cannot rule out a much more serious event. >> just one quick question. about what we all saw on our television screens. helicopters dumping water on the

reactors. and my reaction to that was, that sure is a sign of desperation. does that actually have any affect? >> it has affected. it's very difficult, particularly in that part of japan where apparently the weather is very windy at the moment. so a lot of the water from the helicopters miss the sites. but the good news is we have evidence that from a lot of the steam that came up, that the water did in deed hit some other plants and probably improved the situation. but if we are talking about water levels five feet below where they should be, you're not going to solve the problem with helicopters. >> barry, let's talk if you will about the economic implications first of all, for the japanese economy, and then for the global economy. how is it likely to be affected?

>> i think the economic challenge is extremely manageable. it's really not the problem. they should be focusing on the human loss and the social cost of this. this is a manageable economic problem. we've had a lot of historic experience with it happening before. it takes a while for things to get going. but japan is probably the most experienced group of people in trying to do with the economic effects of this. a reference, the colby disaster was estimated to be about a loss of about $100 billion. this one looks like it's going to be in the neighborhood of 200-300 billion, but those are pretty crude estimates. people are just guessing. but at that magnitude you are talking something went four to 5% of gdp, one or 2% of japan's well. it's not a great big number that you get. in the short run, the effects

will be that the infrastructure has been disrupted, transportation, but it is being restored, within a few months ago so that should be completed. there was a huge loss of thousands. he will have to move these people somewhere in japan to find an at least temporary housing. but those are all solvable problems. there will be a supply-side disruption. it looks like -- the industries that were most affected is electronics. they were in the northern part. most of japanese industry is in the south, the south side of tokyo. therefore, largely unaffected. so i think the overall, the lesson is this is not the big problem. in the short run it will have a depressed effect of the japanese economy. second growth may be negative with all the disruptions that are occurring. in the longer-term actually it gives a country that is in trouble on its economy a chance to show maybe it can do better. there will be a big stimulus.

if there's one thing japan can do, it's a very rich country and it is easy for them to afford the rebuilding costs that they will have to pay. in the short run, that will end up having a stimulus effect on the japanese economy. it will give them some energy over the next year or two. so i don't think the economic problems are substantial. there's a couple of weird things going on. i think the strangest one that has got the international comment, who would have thought that the country had a disaster that the demand for its currency would rise and exchange rate would appreciate? that does seem a little hard to understand, and i think economist are a little puzzled as well. there's a little bit of experience with it with kobe, the same thing happened. and the explanation back then was that the japanese insurance companies had invested abroad, and they had to bring money back to try to get funds inside japan to pay off.

also you should differentiate it from these stories you see in the newspaper about the bank of japan issuing lots of money. that's just liquidity. the moment one of these things happen if you thought about having in the u.s., would all rush to the atm and we want money. that's what's happened in japan. and so the bank of japan quite easily just accommodates that by pumping a lot of money into the domestic economy as evidence that it is working. you see no signs of rising interest rates inside japan, no shortage of funds. and also i think what's happened on the exchange rate is they are thinking that this money is going to have to come back from abroad. i think it's exaggerated for a bunch of reasons. if i was in japan and i was running a japanese company, i would not liquidate might overseas holdings in order to come back to rebuild in japan. just borrow it in japan at a zero rate of interest. so japan does not have trouble

as a country raising the funds they need to rebuild their industrial base. that's very easy for them to do. i think this is driven by speculators and, therefore, someone says why do other countries intervene? i think japan was concerned about it, and this is an easy gesture for the united states and the other allies to make. why not? that's painless to do. to intervene. i think it's a very thin market. as i said i think driven by speculators, so it's crazy -- it's pretty easy to overcome it. i would argue it's the right thing to do economically. so i don't think that's of much consequence either. i would think outside japan there will be some of these very isolated little supply shortages. >> will we be able to get our ipad2? >> what was when i heard about, and china there's a concern about baby for not which comes from japan, and babies get

attached to a certain kind of on the. i think that's a solvable problem. [laughter] so i think the message still is, that this is not a big economic crisis. this is manageable. and what people ought to focus on is just the tremendous loss of human life that has occurred in japan. >> what about debt levels? is that a problem? >> japanese debt differs from american debt. the japanese only to themselves. they can handle this either by issuing some more debt to the citizens or raising taxes on their citizens. and their citizens can easily afford to pay it in one way or the other. it's not an international debt holding for japan, as the way the u.s. is. most of our debt is held abroad and we worry about this. but not in the case of japan. so i think that's overcome. it does mean, i think

realistically, the japanese will probably continue to run large budget deficits for a couple of years. although personally i would raise taxes to pay for this. i think the emphasis on trying to sustain large deficits as a stimulus to the japanese economy is overdone. so it's about time maybe to be more restrictive on the fiscal policy. >> one negative drop in japan have any negative effect on global economic growth. it's not going to be big enough to affect that. >> we're talking something that would probably be less than half of a percentage growth on the japanese growth rate. japan estimate economists perspective, japan has lots of problems. and the economy has not been doing well for years. this crisis in the short run ads to that, but in the long run, it's largely a wash. some stimulus effect of the

economy providing job opportunities to people that would go the other way. but i think we are still worried about japan and a longer-term sense, that the japanese economy has lost a lot of its energy. but that's nothing to do with much of this crisis. >> thanks, barry. richard, tell us about lyrical fallout in tokyo. and the foreign policy of the disasters. >> i'm a little bit more pessimistic about this situation than barry is, sort of on the economic side, because i do think it represents a serious challenge to the japanese political system. granted, everything that barry said i think we still have to be, have to recognize before last friday's earthquake the parameters governing japan's future trajectory were not great. it has a declining working age population and a growing elderly

population. and so, they are the over the long term, how -- caring for the elderly is going to take place. and that's off of a base of gross national debt of 200% of gdp. moreover, we have the rapid growth of chinese power at a time when japan's power has been relatively stagnant. that poses twin dilemmas. how is japan going to maintain its economic competitiveness? how is it going to preserve security? i think that over the long-term, the recovery from the recent disaster will only make those problems more daunting for japanese politicians. it appears that the earthquake, the tsunami, the problems at the

fukushima nuclear power plant have already works in japan, the japanese low public confidence in their government. they are reminded over the last week of the weaknesses in terms of crisis management, the dysfunctional relationship between elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats, and economic entities like tokyo power. and there's the problem of lack of transparency. it was this lack of confidence and that led voters 18 months ago to throw out the liberal democratic party, which had ruled for 50 years, and though in the untested democratic party of japan. and so, the political class is somewhat on trial here. now, i think that in the short

term the crisis actually encourages a certain amount of political stability. you know, 10 days ago, prime minister kan was considered a dead men. he was going to leave office within months. now he may get to 2011 -- or 2012. just week there was little or no cooperation between the ldp on the one hand and the democratic party on the other. and the fate of the administration's budget related bills was grim. now i think the opposition parties will not dare to oppose for the sake of opposition. but we still have to ask the question, how long is this cooperation going to last? the danger is that japan's political class will go back to business and politics as usual. the opportunity that this crisis presents is that political

leaders can use the crisis atmosphere to address more fundamental and long-standing issues. national debt, were the workers are going to come from, overregulation, reengineering, the national government to make it more responsive and effective. the question is will the political class rise to the occasion. on the foreign policy side, the near-term consequences have generally been good. countries have reached out to japan in its time of need. china is really interesting here because it probably has the worst relations with japan at any country in the world, but you have the chinese red cross sending aid. you have different provinces sending aid to their sister prefecture in japan, sister cities helping each other. and such generosity may need the strong negative feelings that japanese have towards china.

the united states of course is a special case. ambassador fujisaki described the ways in which we are trying to help, and that's what a good alliance is all about. i am a little bit worried about these divergent attachments, japanese government on the one hand and the u.s. government on the other, about the severity of the crisis. that may lead to a certain amount of resentment in japan. that we lack confidence in their institutional capacity. i think if one looks beyond the immediate situation in a speculative way, and that's all political scientists do is speculate, we could ask, you know, to the extent that any country is going to be helping japan, which one is it? i don't think it's the united states to -- beyond what we are already doing because we don't have financial capacity. china on the other hand has

resources. and china has a strategic interest in weaning japan away from its reliance on the united states, and encouraging tokyo to be more accommodating to its interests. the big question is whether china's leaders would have political will to export the earthquake for strategic advantage, and then there's the question of whether japan would choose to go in that direction. my guess is that china is unwilling to play that game, and chinese nationalism is a factor. but the fact that this strategic opportunity even exists should remind us that to an extent we are on trial as well. thank you. >> i just want to clarify one thing because there seems to be a little tension between what beth was saying about the efficiency of the japanese government's response to the disaster and your own suggestion that the japanese people have

some questions about the effectiveness. is this, in fact, a question about the way in which they have handled the information flow, rather than the way in which they have handled the actual disaster relief? >> i think it's partly that. i think it's also that japan learned the lesson of the last earthquake crisis, and they're certainly doing well on the shock. the tsunami appears to be something maybe they were less prepared for. and then the nuclear problem is one that you get the impression that they really are scrambling and at hawking it. and information problem is particularly severe there. speaker you know the japanese quite well i think. what's behind that, that

concerned about, the sense that they are not being, honest to the people about what's happening? >> my guess is that tokyo power is not be totally honest with the bureaucracies that regulate it. and then the prion disease may not be totally forthcoming with the prime minister's office. and then you have certain cultural aversion to being blunt about the reality. and japanese are a lot more skillful at interpreting vagueness than we are, but in certain instances, you appreciate clarity. >> charlie, let's go back to this question that you raised at the end about longer-term role of nuclear energy in countries, energy mix, and let's start with japan. japan has what, 30% --

>> 30% from reactors. >> from the reactors. they have about 54, 55 plants in operation at the moment. do you expect that this will, that they will shut down other plants now? with a be a change in energy policy in japan? >> i do not foresee any change in energy policy for the simple reason that japan basically has to import all its fuel besides nuclear power. it imports its liquefied natural gas, it's oil, it's cold. and so, i think they are so concerned about energy security, when there is a somber moment to reflect they may put in much greater redundancies and safety in the reactors. these were very old reactors. i can see the japanese changing their view towards nuclear power. it's also of course a very important export industry for the country. so that would have a double whammy as well.

>> and in the united states, what conclusion are we likely to draw about nuclear energy in our future? >> well, all the people traditionally opposed to nuclear power have come out of the woodwork. some have been heard from since three-mile island, but they are all bad. i think we'l will have a negatie impact in the united states, but i personally thought we were not going to have the great nuclear expansion even before this incident, largely because of the cost of nuclear power in the united states, with a new plant costing nearly $10 billion. there are very few utilities particularly now with the availability of natural gas abundance that would make that move. but i think that number, even if it is as low as i thought, may be six, seven reactors over the next 15 years, that may be cut in half. mac moves in the congress which have already been introduced to cut back some of the proposed loan guarantees that would therefore the next generation of plants. that would not be good for the domestic industry. >> how many are rebuilding out in the united states?

>> we have about 24 the nuclear bigotry commission for licensing, but we only have to that are actually under construction, and they are as a result of the energy policy act of 2005 which set low guarantees for the next for reactors. they are being built the southern company. >> if i could just make one final point though. the resilience of the japanese people has been startling. they were having rolling brownouts to try to do with the crisis and asked people to conserve. all this overnight in japan cut electricity consumption by 25%, just like everybody responding to the national charge, to please help your fellow citizens. i think that's an extraordinary accomplishment. can you imagine that happening in the united states, particularly during march madness? [laughter] it would not happen anytime, anytime in this country. so i think when we talk about the tension between the japanese people and maybe their government leaders, clearly on

the call for them to conserve, they rose to the occasion quite dramatically. >> if i could add to that. i had a note from a japanese friend of mine, and he said to describe this as the worse crisis japan had a since world war ii, which was a fundamental sort of threat to national survival. but he also expressed a sort of deep confidence in the resilience and perseverance of the japanese people to meet a challenge like this. maybe not as much confidence in the government, but i think that there's a feeling that this is a very strong society, and it can overcome. >> i just have to speak up on behalf of the american people, charlie. i think you underestimate our willingness to sacrifice, but we have to be asked first by a political leadership. sorry, beth. >> i was also struck when you look at katrina or haitis or

most natural disasters that happens. but if i could ask the question to charlie. you seem to think things are going to be basically okay. don't you? .. >> you know, if china and india said we're going to not burn nuclear and burn more coal, we might as well not worry about what we do on fossil fuel consumption, because it won't make any difference. we will have climate change. and i don't think people realize the degree to which you're not going to replace the nuclear plants with wind and solar in

the near future, so you're talking about a fundamental change. you'd see up yard pressure on petroleum -- upward pressure on oil prices, and this would not be good on the economy. >> let's go to your questions, please, and i'd appreciate it if you would wait on the microphone when i call on you, identify yourself. yes, right here in the middle here. >> thank you. i am japanese, and the japanese made ya -- media accuse the japanese government -- [inaudible] nuclear facility stuff, so what do you think about japanese current policy on nuclear issues? do you think japanese government disclose all information to the japanese citizen or just little by little?

>> richard, do you want to start? charlie? >> i'll just say i think any government confronting a nuclear accident particularly should be as fully transparent as possible. because there's enough reason for people to panic, a lot of it is misinformation or lack of understanding of what really happens in radiation and different types of radiation. but for goodness sakes, you don't want any question that the utility involved is not being fully transparent both with the government and with the japanese people. of it's a disaster. >> i agree with that. >> yes, please, sir. >> thank you, i'm a former japanese diplomat, i started working at the embassy 26 years ago. i have a question to richard. >> yes. >> you mentioned that in terms of which country can contribute

most to this incident, you argued united states or china and so forth. in the long run, maybe so, but i think the short run i have no doubt that there's only one country. that is the united states. when the incident occurred, i was still in japan, and i have immediately thought that this is a golden opportunity to show the fundamental nature of the alliance. why? because on one hand there's a growing recognition in japan about the importance of alliance given the china phenomenon, but at the same time -- [inaudible] came into power, it's clear that the alliance has difficult difficulty in relation to the -- [inaudible] now, this earthquake and tsunami clearly gives an opportunity that the marines in okinawa have

a totally different role to the play. but the image i have then is a kind of massive flying of helicopters of the marines. and supplying, well, blankets, food to all those refugee areas. as the ambassador rightly mentioned, the sense of gratitude in japan. at the same time, i can't help wondering, is it the maximum extent of the assistance which your military can provide to us? i may be wrong, i may be wrong about my questions, but at least in my view the extent of the assistance is not shown enough through the television screen in japan. it has to have two sides. real assistance and the fact that it's been shown through the television screen that the marines can play a totally different role than being just a

nuisance in okinawa. and my question, do you think that there are sufficient, satisfactory cooperation and whether if there's cooperation, do you think it is sufficiently shown in the japanese media through their screen? because japanese people now should get -- [inaudible] instinct that the united states' military can and does play a totally different role than creating difficulty in oak -- okinawa. >> i have no question,, togosan, to be helpful in this situation, and i think we moved very quickly. we have demonstrated, again, that we're the only country in the world that has this kind of capacity to move quickly in this kind of situation. i expect that the united states

is not getting enough credit yet for our assistance and for our desire to assist, and that doesn't surprise me because i think that the japanese people are most focused right now on the tragedy that's occurred and the what's going to happen with the fukushima plants. i hope that once the immediate crisis has passed that japanese political leaders will remind the public that although the japanese people made the primary effort, that the united states helped out a lot. i also agree with you that the united states is the most influential in the short term, but, you know, china does have opportunities in the medium term

and the long term that we should be aware of. >> second part to the ambassador's question as i understood it is are we doing enough to show our support? is it visible enough? >> um, i would rather that japanese leaders be the ones to -- i expect that we're not doing enough, but i think that, you know, there's a media overload at this point, and, you know, we can take credit later, but it's, i hope, japanese leaders give us credit. >> is there something else we should be doing? >> there are teams there now that are assessing the needs and looking for the gaps that could be filled. i think there's a possibility for an outpouring of support from american organizations, ngos, etc., once it's clear what the needs are. some of that might be in the area of shelter down the road. but just to remind the people that, you know, some of the most desperate needs come later. they come six months down the road when the tv cameras have

moved on to the next emergency. and sometimes that sustained support can have more impact than an immediate, flashy, media-visible initiative. >> like what, permanent shelter? >> yeah, transitional shelter, permanent shelter, help with long-term reconstruction might be more effective. >> uh-huh. barry, on the economic front is there something the united states should be doing that it's not doing? >> no, i don't think so. i think -- i don't really think this intervention of the exchange rate is any great significance, but i understand why the u.s. did it. i think it's perfectly appropriate, but, no, there's no, there's no big challenge on the economic side. the challenge is on the human side to deal with the people who have been displaced, and so that's a completely separate matter. >> okay. let's take another question. down in the back, please. the lady in black. >> carol richmond, a historian of japan. i had a political question.

there's been criticism of the democratic party of japan for its handling, but it seems to me for there to be long-term implications with the government comparison needs to be made with the ldp. in other words, people are unhappy, but do they think the ldp would have done a better job? >> um -- >> it seems to me they would have to think the ldp would be better in order for the democratic party of japan to lose out seriously. >> well, i think that the jury's not out on that question. you know, if -- >> still out. >> is still out. i'm sorry. [laughter] i think that prime minister kan and his government have a tremendous opportunity to prove that they are through this, their response to this crisis that they are capable of being a ruling party that is as good or percent than the ldp. if, on the other hand, they fail to meet that challenge, then,

you know, the sentiment grows that maybe the ldp is the only one we can rely on for whatever their faults. >> i ask partly because i have a friend who is rather more of a supporter of the jdp in that i think she's comparing their reaction to the earthquake with the ldp's notably inadequate reaction to the kobi earthquake, for example, and i think she feels they are at least trying to do better than the ldp in terms of getting the information out, although they've been heavily criticized for that. would you agree with that? >> i'm not close enough to the situation to know, and, but a i appreciate the difficulties of getting the information that's needed in this very complicated fukushima situation. >> thank you. >> yes, please.

>> rob warren. i have a question for mr. bosworth. as i understood your comments that you see this as a wash as far as the impact on the economy in the long term, perhaps, decline by half a percent or so during the short term, could you address the broader problem and that is the resiliency and growth of the japanese economy, the need for restructuring greater competitiveness and the just greater enthusiasm in the economy? what will be the impact there? >> um, i guess you might say this gives an opportunity a little bit to see if government could try to come up with a policy. if it works for this, it would build public confidence, and you could maybe use that as a base for moving on. i think the problem in japan is a deep one. it's not like people sitting outside here in the united states have lots of ideas about how to solve the japanese

economic difficulties. in fact, i think the concern here in the united states is growing that we're headed down the same road. we're facing a lot of the same stagnation problems after the financial crisis here that japan had in adjusting to the one in the 1990s. but they do need some leadership, they need to develop some effective economic program about what to do, and there may be some stimulative effect that would come from this. but i, i think the bigger problem is -- i have not heard anybody come forward with a real successful idea about how to get the japanese economy growing again at a rapid pace. we're all sort of puzzled about what's the fundamental problems that holds growth back. >> so there's no bosworth plan either. >> no, i don't think so. i think the remarkable thing about japan is that 25 years ago

everybody pointed to japan for this incredibly high rate of safing that they had -- saving that they had. they now save less than american households. but the offset on the other side is japan invests less than the united states does. in the last two years, physical investment by the household sector's been negative, by the government sector's been negative, by the business sector's been negative. households don't safe anymore, but corporations do, and the money just piles up in the japanese corporations, and they don't use it for purposes of reinvesting. they just hang on to it. and that's what people mean there, just doesn't seem to be any energy in the japanese economy where there's people are actively investing in if new ideas. there's not a very strong spirit anymore of entrepreneurship inside japan. a lot of people are sort of stagnant in terms of new business ideas. how do you get that going again? >> richard, is it possible that

the disasters could stimulate that kind of energy in the japanese people, a sense of rejuvenation and rebuilding? >> well, i think it's possible. i think leadership is required. good ideas are required, incentives are required. i hope that the political leadership will seize that opportunity, but i see the danger of just going back to business as usual. >> i think there was a question on this side. yes, please. >> sir, in the context of the question, i think that mr. togo had and the impact on the security alliance. >> could you identify yourself, please? >> i'm sorry, sir? >> identify yourself? >> oh, clay fisher, i'm up at the pentagon. the impact this will have potentially on the defense policy realignment initiative and the restructuring of all the forces in the west pacific, principally in japan, okinawa

and the movement to guam. the very same forces right now that are directly involved with humanitarian disaster relief operations in the mainland with the current crisis, but it's been, also, very difficult to judge tangible progress from the government of japan on this large realignment initiative. do you anticipate that this crisis is a catalyst for the doj to reapproach the secretary of defense and the secretary of state in the upcoming two plus two to clean the slate and start all over? what's the impact at dpri? >> it's a great question. i guess my fear would be that the japanese government both political leadership and bureaucrats would be so focused on issues related to relief, reconstruction and so on that they would not have time to the face what is politically

controversial questions in japan. we had the road map agreed to five years ago, basically. and very little progress has been made. there was a setback. i, ambassador togo referred to the use of assets on okinawa, and for the american contribution here, and that is probably not trivial. i hope it improves the environment. i think americans have also learned in the last couple of weeks that it's better not to say too much about okinawa at all. [laughter] >> thank you. >> yes, please. >> thank you very much. i noticed two things. the first one is that -- >> could you identify yourself? >> i come from --

[inaudible] , and my name is jin. the first thing is that president obama nominated nuclear actor to the secretary of the doe and the nuclear crisis, the stock market of europe dropped more than the stock market of usa. so my question is, actually, what kind of reaction there will be to the energy policy of usa and europe respectively? and my colleague also wants to ask you another question. this crisis will have, what kind of impact about u.s. economics?

thank you very much. >> charlie, do you want to talk about energy policy? >> well, i think in europe it will have a profound impact. you've already seen mrs. merkle come out very strongly about not only inspecting a number of reactors, but now she's gone further in saying perhaps the whole german nuclear program should be phased out over time. you've seen negative responses in be sweden and italy where they were just beginning to reverse longstanding anti-nuclear policy and restart, so it's going to mean the italian debate. i think the u.k. you will see continue their various vigorous program mainly because they can't meet their climate change goals using wind alone. they have to use nuclear and wind to further reduce their dependence on coal. france and belgium, i think you'll see continue with their nuclear programs. and if you move farther out in the former soviet union, east european states, i think the combination of wanting to

reduce -- thinking of the baltic states, for example, and the balkans, they want to reduce their dependence on russian gas, so, and also get away from their dirty coal, so i think you'll see them continue to push slowly, but for nuclear. the united states, i think, you know, we get can 20% of our electricity from nuclear power. because of the slow growth i mentioned i already believed was going to happen even before the accident, i think -- excuse me -- i think between retirements of aged facilities we'll be lucky to keep that 20% contribution 10, 15 years from now. >> and natural gas, how much? >> well, natural gas is also about 20%. a lot of people are now saying we could probably raise natural gas to 30-35% of our electricity consumption and keep it there for a long time. >> barry, the u.s. economy? >> almost no impact whatsoever. stock markets go up and down,

they always overreact. i wouldn't pay any attention to them. and one way or the other. >> i thought it's interesting -- >> the only part that makes sense is the japanese stock market is the one that dropped the most, but it looks like it's way over -- if you took seriously their estimate of the cost to japan, you'd claim that the wealth loss was almost a trillion dollars. and that's clearly not realistic at all. so the stock market has dropped in value way too much. i think one reason is the market's been kind of thin, and can there is not much confidence in it. and in europe there's also been a drop in the stock market, but i would have the same story. i don't see where it's easy to get much economic effect in europe. the u.s. stock market's been pretty resilient, nothing much has really happened. maybe it's unfortunate, but japan's is simply not a big market for the united states. we don't export much to anybody

anymore, and in particular we don't export a lot to japan. so we worry about japan probably as consumers, about whether or not there'll be any sprung to some of our electronic -- interruption to some of our electronic and automobile supplies, and i don't expect that to happen. but that's something which i don't think what goes on in this japan will have a big effect on the u.s. economy. >> okay. yes, sir. >> yeah, correspondent -- [inaudible] there's not much talk about radioactive effect on human being. should we have environmental monitoring radioactivity in the air and in the ocean? and also should we look about food chain, agriculture food

chain and fish in the food chain for the radioactive material? and also over the years there's a problem many -- in russia, in u.s., in france, in argentina and now in japan. should iaea have oversight of the country in the nuclear activity? thank you. >> charlie? >> in the terms of radiation monitoring, we have a fairly sophisticated global system to register changes in radiation. most of that was developed against the potential for atomic weapons, but it can pretty well pick up what's happening. within japan there is definitely concern about the food chain as this incident gets worse. the first place it often hits is in dairy products. >> [inaudible]

this is going all over the world. >> right. oh, i'm sorry. but radiation, nearby radiation event the first concern is about dairy products in terms of the food chain. as this radiation goes over the world, the amounts that we're talking about at least from what we think is going to happen right now is infin tez mall by the time it reaches any other land mass other than japan. but it could have a very serious impact on japan were it to get noticeably worse. we're not expecting, you know, we're not expecting -- there was an erroneous report the other day that it was going to hit southern california, move towards las vegas. that report has now been shown not to have been issued by the organization that it was said to be coming out of a very prestigious organization in australia. that was on the internet. it was not released by that. it has been discredited by both the australians and by the international atomic energy

agency. the second part of your question, you know, the iaea i'm not sure i understood where you want to extend their authority. of course, we try to get all nuclear plants from a proliferation standpoint under iaea safeguards, and with the additional protocol that we're trying to get all nations to sign, the right of the iaea inspectors to make, you know, snap inspections without warning of any nuclear facility in a country. but in terms of saying that the iaea should have authority over all radiation, environments and local countries i think -- >> i mean, to make sure the country do the right thing. and also in japan's case, i cannot understand why there's no cooling tower there. is japan just get the water from the ocean and then get it back to the ocean? the there's a particular one about fish in the chain food. >> it's a very good question,

but the iaea has no authority over questions like that. they will send in teams to advise on safety, to advise on greater knowledge of radiation potential. >> [inaudible] >> but they have -- >> [inaudible] >> they don't -- what i'm saying is they do not have the authority. whether they should have the authority, i think, is a very good question, but you'd have to go back and probably modify the iaea treaty to give them that enhanced authority and get the existing members to agree that they were willing to give up sovereignty in those areas. but it's a very interesting question. >> [inaudible] >> okay, let's get to another question here. thank you. >> hi, i'm bob rich with american chemical society. i'm wondering if you could comment on either the engineering or, perhaps, shoddy engineering in some cases in terms of the nuclear facilities and also in terms of the preparedness at the nuclear plants from your observations. i know it's early yet.

>> this was a very old, this was a very old set of reactors, you know, generation, early developments of general electric. those boiling water reactors that are being built around the world today are very difficult with much higher con b tapement standards -- containment standards, so you can't compare a boiling water reactor built today or five years ago to one of these plants. i think you can certainly question, i don't know whether i'd call it shoddy, you can certainly question the wisdom of having, civil ri pumping stations at a station if there were a tsunami get wiped out rather than having them on higher ground. water does tend to flow downwards if you direct it that way. so that design we now know was challenged by people at the atomic energy commission back in the 1970s as an unsafe design. apparently, at the time because it was a new, fledgling industry

it was decided that it would be cat pick to require -- catastrophic to require nuclear vendors to completely change their design because we were trying to get the industry taking off. so the warnings out of the aec were not heeded. but i don't think in terms of safety that there's any country that has any better record, maybe the united states, but japan has an extremely fine record on paying attention to safety, on evacuations. and, obviously, on earthquake protection because the earthquake did not trigger the reactor accident. so i don't know. i mean, it's always easy to second guess. we may find down the road that there were mistakes made, but i think right now it's premature to suggest that we know that for sure. >> so let me just clarify, you're saying there was criticism at the time these plants were built? is. >> back in the -- several memos have surfaced by howard denton, a legend in the nuclear field, and john ahern, former nrc

commissioner, that they both warned that this design in a catastrophe could create big problems. >> and what about location, charlie? you know, this is located right on the coast. we've -- >> well, you know -- >> we've got a few nuclear reactors right on the coast. >> in japan, i mean, the problem is there's not a lot of spare land. but we try to put reactors on the coast because particularly if you're shipping components for their construction, it's easy to land on the coast, and, you know, you're talking about big vessels and tubes, and you put them on the back of a flatbed truck, you know, you disrupt entire community bees even if you can get them through. so this is why we tend to build reactors predominantly near the coast. likewise, it's easier to ship out if we go to long-term nuclear waste storage in a geological repository somewhere, you can ship it out without having to transit the dangerous fuel through populated

communities. so this is why we do it, but, obviously, maybe you don't want to do it where there's a history of tsunamis and earth quakes. earthquakes. >> well, on that note i think we might conclude this session. i want to thank the panelists for their very informative views in this regard, and again, we wish the japanese people all the best in coping with this horrendous disaster. thank you all very much for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] ..