the government hasn't signed off on this yet and he's got to hold off. well he has already started and so he basically calls one of his staff people over and says okay what i'm going to give an order but ignore it so he very loudly proclaims everybody in tokyo can hear you now hault the seawater injection and if in effect they didn't. to me that was a human element in that story in which in japan where ignoring the rules and kind of acting on your own is not rewarded. here was a moment where a guy knew that if he didn't act things would go even worse than they were going.

>> up next on booktv "after words" with guest host gregory jaczko the former chair of the u.s. nuclear regulatory commission. this week let's are prize-winning journalist's susan stranahan and her latest book "fukushima" the story of a nuclear disaster. in it the environmental newswriter helps members of the union of concerned scientist to present the first definitive account of of the fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown after the march, 2011 tsunami. this program is about an hour. >> host: welcome susan. this is a great opportunity for me. normally i'm the person having the questions asked of me and now i get the opportunity to ask a former journalist questions

about the book that you have written so i look forward to that. >> guest: i will do my best. it's a noncostumed role for me to answer the questions. it's good to be here. >> host: i'm glad it i wanted to start just to ask you a few issues that are really general in nature about the book and the first question i wonder is what drove you to this topic? what made to interested in writing a book about the regime accident? >> as a journalist it was a very compelling story. i had covered the three mile island accident when i was a porter at "the philadelphia inquirer" and have followed nuclear issues ever since. and the first moments of that accident when the news accounts began to come out, i watched transfixed because it was the first time i think the world has ever watched an accident unfold and so i got caught up in the

story not necessarily the technical aspects of it that the human aspects and the very high drama of what was going on in japan. and as events began to continue to unfold, i saw a number of parallels to what had happened at three mile island, and was curious as to what sorts of lessons have had been learned and had not been learned going through three mile island while there were so many differences. so it just brought me into that from that angle. >> host: let's talk about the role bit. you won a pulitzer prize for your work. >> guest: the inquiry did. i was part of a large team that was sent to cover the accident. i did a lot of writing. i never went out there. i had been there but i didn't go actually but was working as a

rewrite person for the reporters and photographers. and so it to me was a very frightening event. the accident that we had all been led to believe that would never happen was happening. fortunately it wasn't as safir as things that fukushima daiichi but i also sensed that this had caught the experts offguard too. the nrc, the utility officials and state government officials so that was the parallel from fukushima daiichi. we had 30 some years to learn the lessons. it didn't appear that they had quite sunk in. >> host: was a different watching the fukushima accident as a layperson as opposed to three mile island where you had a professional role collects. >> guest: well i was taking

notes constantly and visually. i mean visually it was phenomenaphenomena l. as we write in the book, the people watched the react or building explode. we saw the helicopters flying over. you saw the people being rushed from their homes, packing their belongings and fleeing compounded with this horrific natural disaster and i think we tend to lose sight of the fact that the natural disaster would have been headline making in and of itself. so i did watch it with a certain arm's-length objectivity but i kept taking a lot of notes. i have a lot of questions that i wanted to find out more about. >> talked to me about the collaboration with the other

staffers. >> guest: i had worked with dave locke him as a source for many years. had met him just once. but he had come to rely on the union of concerned scientists and a number of other organizations as good go to people when i was writing about issues. i had not really worked that much with ed riemann until just before the accident. in june of 2011 i was asked by the union of concerned scientists to team up with dave and with ed to work together on a book. my idea of the book was a little bit different i think in with the ucs folks had originally. i came at it as a journalist. i came at it as a storyteller and i felt that if the public were to become engaged in this

issue as i felt they really should, the best way to do it was to tell it for a general audience through the drama of an unfolding event. i'm not an engineer. i'm not a physicist. i'm a reporter so i began to pull together a lot of different threads and we put together a proposal. it was accepted and we set about the task of writing the book. and so i would draft many of the chapters and then ed and dave would read them and have a lot of input into technical issues. as the book progressed and he gets into some of the background on nuclear regulation in the history of regulation in this country, ed and dave then of course gathered a lot more because they are much more familiar so was a good

collaboration. >> host: definitely read it you or someone who is a familiar with a lot of these issues. i can see some of the points where it look like -- >> guest: their fingerprints are in the book definitely. >> host: well you talk about this is the story and as i read through the book and having lived through a lot of these stories personally it was clear that this was about people in the drama. tell me about the two or three people or characters in a way that stood out to you the most in the story. >> guest: there were several in the difficulty with this booe so we did this from the u.s.. so it was a lot of gathering of information from official reports and from news accounts and things like that. we didn't get a chance to talk

to the people at the plant obviously. one of the stories that resonated with me was the moment when bayer dithering about whether or not they need to inject seawater into unit one and it's a matter of the clock is ticking and they are just about down to the wire. matthew yoshida and i think that's how you pronounce his name, the plant superintendent who in the end would have to make the final call know that it's desperate and they need to get water in there quickly. meanwhile everybody wants to say and the tepco officials in the japanese government officials are all just kind of hemming and hawing. yoshida gets an order from one of the supervisors at tap go that the government hasn't signed off on this yet read he's got to hold off. well he's already started, and

so he basically calls one of the staff people over and says okay i'm going to give an order but ignore it. so he very loudly proclaim so everybody in tokyo can hear you know hault the seawater injection when in fact they didn't. to me that was a human element in that story in which in japan where ignoring the rules and acting on your own is not rewarded. here was a moment where it died knew that if he didn't act things would go even worse than they were going. so he did. that one was a very interesting piece. >> host: he definitely stands out. >> guest: i wish i would have had a chance to meet him. i really wish i had prayed he talked very little to the press and unfortunately died but some of his lines of the accident

were very compelling. the other characters in the book and there weren't many characters was chuck castro and i really liked chuck. >> host: did you ever talk to him? >> guest: yes we did and he was very kind. chuck was the nrc expert on water or sue was brought into tokyo and was therefore as i recall almost a year. and he became in our tale kind of the central person who's off of it by all the forces at work. the government of japan and the culture of japanese society and government. the urgency to get the best possible advice to americans living in japan through the ambassador who was there and then the scramble that your

office and trying to figure out what was going on and get them both best advice. he is working by all appearances 24/7 full and struggling to keep all the in the air. to me he was a human face of a safety system that was just not ready for what it was being asked to do. >> host: you touch touched on this a little bit in the book. there were faces -- maxis seems like each of these accidents you have people in the end that become the faces of this technology that almost seemed to be so mechanistic and all of a sudden this crisis that becomes very personal and very human. yes go well it does and that's good because if there isn't a human face on an issue it's very difficult for people to become a invested in making sure that

things are done properly. and so i think that, and that was mike goal in starting out the book the way we did. i wanted to tell the story of people beginning to calm engaged. they may not know anything about nuclear power. they may not have any opinion of nuclear power but by getting them to invest and understand the drama then i think hopefully in the book midway we have with them and they say i'd like to know a little bit more. >> host: you certainly do capture the think a lot of the moments. >> guest: that's good coming from you. that's kind of nice to know that. >> host: i was just curious you talk a little bit about the newspapers and government documents. can you talk more about what kinds of sources you used where you talk to people and if he found differences from what

people said is supposed to what was in the record? >> well, the nrc was a treasure trove read the e-mails and the foia materials that came out in those transcripts that the nrc kept a transcript from the operation center. >> host: not my intention necessarily. but it really was a wonderful historical record that into a. >> in the newspaper business there's something called the tick tock which is the story told minute by minute by minute by minute and that made it possible for us. we didn't have quite the same level of information from japan although there were many really good records from the investigative report that were in english but the phone conversations, the chronology, the names of people were very

useful and as you read through that you are with the crew and the operation center because we were able to tell it that way. so that i think was one of the ways that i hoped to bring the story alive we could write all we wanted to about filtered vince were seawater injections but until the reader understands the urgency with which these decisions have to be made and just nothing going right and these poor people scrambling against the clock to try to get something to work so that was how we elected to do it. >> host: where those conversations surprising to you or did they go the way you thought they would have been a situation like this? >> guest: i think in all honesty the thing that surprised me the most was how little, how

little knowledge there was about what was going on. the materials that we had access to that the nrc was as confused and it was scrambling to learn, desperate to learn what was going on. it wasn't just the timeliness and the language difference. he was the uncertainty of the technology and of trying to divine what was going on in these reactors and get as best

the information as you can to your crew over there and to the american people too. they were watching this too and we make the point in the book that that this was not a japanese nuclear accident. it was a nuclear accident that just happen to have occurred in japan so there really was a reason for americans to follow what was going on i think. >> host: it was in many ways very familiar yet so completely different because as you mentioned in and there were language differences and there were time differences so we have a team here in washington that was sleeping when everyone else was awake and they were sleeping when people were awake here so you have to manage that just the difference in time that added a layer of complexity to everything. >> guest: i'm sure that's the case and culturally you know

chuck cassoutt talks about going to these meetings that lasted -- lasted and the american are saying we need decisions now. we need to deal with this now and yet as you pointed out this is not your accident -- not our accident. this is their accident and the u.s. experts are kind of on a holding pattern until they are called in to ask what to do. then when they were it was almost too late for the recommendations were not necessarily followed or timely. >> you mentioned that it was one of -- the joys for me to read the book was to look back and read things that i had said that i had forgotten. >> right. there was a great quote from the executive director?

where everybody at the nrc is just like fussing and trying to figure out what to do and his advice to the nrc people was don't scratch the itch. that was exactly the position. i think what was revealing to me also was just how everybody seemed to be caught flat-footed. one of the messages that we have in this book is that historically regulators have dismissed low probability hike once it -- high consequence accidents because they don't fit the script and that historically at three mile island and with this accident the reactors are supposed to follow a scenario.

and they didn't at fukushima. you might as well through the script out the window so what you had here is a story of people who are charged with protecting the public health and safety and any of whom have no higher calling than protecting public health and safety. just completely flummoxed by what was going on. there had been no -- there had never been an accident with multi-reactors. there had never been an accident world the backup system failed. and you could just go down this checklist. and so you begin to wonder, who was making the rules? we have a line in the book that says the safety bar was set at x nobody asked what x plus one happened and i think that maybe one of the clear messages of this book that we need to start asking about plus one.

>> host: i did read the book and i have lots of questions. >> guest: i will do my best. >> is very helpful to hear your overview and to hear how you developed the material that's in here. as i was reading, this is something that's on page 42. you have a discussion about earthquakes and with the japanese were doing over their history to do with earthquakes. obviously it's a country that deals with these on a relatively regular basis. i've been to japan three times in the last two years. there have been at least three so something that's almost regular. one of the interesting dichotomies here is that this is a country that in many respects and the scientific community as being one of the premier countries when it comes to understanding but yet with the

technology they pride themselves on and you mentioned this in the book that they view themselves as being very expert in nuclear technology that two of their really primary technological areas of expertise failed them. tell me a little bit about what you think of that. how do they reconcile that. this country where they have missed so many opportunities to address issues? >> guest: i think it goes to. it's cost and who has the ear of those who are in decision-making capacities. and i think one of the interesting things is that this is an accident that happened in a technologically savvy very sophisticated country and so

consistently we write about this in the book, when there were calls for more preparation for earthquakes, when there were questions about the adequacy of the seawalls for tsunamis and preparations for tsunamis. these were kind of dismissed or postponed or studied and were kicked down the road for a later date. that day came when they were needed. so when you have a very influential industry which the nuclear industry in japan definitely is and very close ties to government, its wishes usually take reference to the few academics or the few scientists who are saying we are really not adequately prepared.

that really was another recurring theme not only on earthquakes but on the radiation monitoring and the evacuation situations. >> host: do you have the a sense that things change in japan? >> guest: i was not there but i do not get the sense. you look at the ongoing debate about the restart of the reactors and you have got public opinion polls over there with but the huge majority of japanese people opposed to restarting the reactors or at least some of the react yours. and they there are marching right into a restart without fully understanding what happened at fukushima. eventually there may be good reason to start the reactors but i think there is a real legitimacy to the claims that are being made by those who are opposed that we don't know

enough of what happened and we really need to learn the lessons and put in a new regulatory framework because you had the own framework that clearly didn't work. now you have got the newer one. whether that's going to change things i don't know he could as you got the pressure from the government to get those reactors up and running. >> host: you have an interesting quote and a theme if i can find it where if the prime minister believed talking about the message and essentially dismissing it. >> guest: essentially making noise again yeah. i get my way everything and what is, what is the customary responses in japan and protesting in the street is not

as common as it might be here in united states. >> host: to tier . and glad you address that. you have some pictures in the book and you talk about these protests. tens of thousands are 45,000. that's a huge issue in japan. it's not typical day. >> guest: you look at those photographs of the protests and they aren't students. they are grandmothers and they aren't the typical people who just get out to protest. there are a wide swath of the japanese public by our to parents is if you look at the photographs and so this is an issue. fukushima daiichi touched a huge segment of japan society and economically my gosh. it's an enormous accident consequence of you got a lot of people who now have a real stak,

health and people who are going to pay their utility bills that really you are saying this is not what we want and it doesn't seem to be that their voices are getting heard. >> host: why do you think that is? >> guest: i don't know. i think it's because as i say the nuclear industry has the ear of the decision-makers and they don't wield the same clout as the grandma with a protest sign. i think that's very true in the united states as well that the nuclear industry in this country is going to be very successful in influencing nuclear regulation. there have been some changes but they are not necessarily adequate in terms of for example

looking at fukushima. i mean you have the 50-mile evacuation issue. you made that call and it was a wise call. and yet in this country the nrc has said in the event that we need to expand it we would have plenty of time. i think that somebody who is living on long island or on the hudson river for example ordinary the pilgrim plant is going to say you are going to get me off cape cod if there's an accident or you are going to be able to evacuate 50 miles from indian point. moving that many people. one of the figures is 40% of

americans within 50 miles of a nuclear plant. that's 120 million americans. those 120 american -- 120 million americans have a real stake of reactors in their neighborhoods. so i think that you asked why change is not occurring in japan. the better question would be why his change also not occurring in the united states and i know you have spoken about this issue. >> host: how would you answer that? i know you touched on some of these issues in the book. >> guest: well again i think it's the influence of the nuclear industry. i think it's cost and the industry as a terrific ability to get ahead of the nrc on issues and say we are going to do this or that. you don't need to do this we will do it so you have got a

series of responses to safety issues that are not set by regulation. they are voluntary. we have a line and this is dave's line in the book. traffic departments don't put up a sign that says don't go too fast. they say the speed limit is 55 miles an hour and what happens through the nuclear industry initiative is that regulations now pretty much don't go too fast, don't do things that aren't safe when in fact what really seems to be called for at least in the lessons that have come out so large is a clear sense of what the industry needs to do. the near-term task force is a group of senior nrc officials that took 90 days to make

recommendations to the nrc that were very clear. their first priority was we need to get rid of this patchwork of regulations. i'm not telling you anything that you don't know but this patchwork that has allowed this mix of voluntary noncompliance, some compliance, this mishmash of regulations. the poor nrc inspector walks and and you know some of its voluntary and so i think the point that we make in this book is that what the near-term task force says is let's restructure regulation in this country from the ground up. let's get a clear set of speed limits for these reactors. the 55-mile an hour speed limit.

get those in place. learn what we can from fukushima but make sure that we can say clearly that these reactors are not -- are as safe as we can make them plus one. so i think that really is the message that we want to convey. >> host: it certainly comes out in the book. switching gears a little bit here to put the focus back on japan for a minute. i be interested to get your thoughts on this in particular. you're a reporter reporter in a talk in the book a little bit about the press clubs and i get a sense from reading the book that you put some degree of responsibility on the japanese press not investigating are asking enough questions. >> guest: i do and i'm speaking from you know no personal experience.

i have talked to some u.s., some correspondence for u.s. publications who are in japan and it maneuvered in this culture. i just wanted to talk and get some of their insights. in talking to them and asking them how this works it comes across as "don't ask don't tell" basically. but that's part again of japanese culture. investigative reporting was not until recently accorded a high priority. in japan. and the united states so there really wasn't a whole lot of incentive for the japanese media to rock the boat. they depended on the government to hand down information to them which they reported and if they win went in and started asking questions are challenging them

they might lose access. i do fault them but i don't know enough about the pressures that they were under to really completely condemn them. it's an experience that i have not gone through but i do feel, and i think that's changing. i think they have seen now what the price japan has paid for accepting the party line. >> i've had. >> host: i've had the opportunity to be interviewed. >> guest: i am sure you have. >> host: the official government which you have made it difficult for the government when they are trying to do things and it's hard because there's so much of a loss of time. >> guest: when the reporters talk to you and they ask you about this, do you say to them you know, you need to be more

aggressive? i mean how do you respond if they ask you how should they be doing their jobs? does that ever? >> host: it's never really, but i do notice that they are seeking opportunities to get a different perspective, to hear something different from what they might be hearing from traditional sources. >> guest: we have a line in there from one of the nuclear advocates in japan who said that the best way not to get your story covered was to take it to the press, to the press room enough for the government agency to cover new year and that was a guarantee that it it never got mentioned. it was a different culture in terms of journalism. with the u.s. have done better i think we have come out of --

three mile island was a great example. we talked about radiation and what did they know about the makeup of a pressurized water reactor? they are missing a disparity and they lied and misrepresentation in the cover-up. so those reporting skills come into play. i don't care whether we are talking about skimming money out of some political fund are talking about activism unfolding on three mile island we censor something going on here and they are not getting the straight story. from that standpoint every order is a gut instinct. >> host: in the rain of thinking about how this story was covered in a way that no

other action is being covered. there were these visuals as you watch on tv as you talked about earlier. one of the most significant visuals for the hydrogen explosions. you had one and three. talk a little bit if you would about how those issues played out and what kind of impact they had on the recovery. >> guest: as i said this is the first time the world had ever watched a nuclear accident. you had the nhk cameras from a distance photographing and so people saw in reality but a nuclear accident was like. before the discussions when they were discussions in the general public about hypothetical you know there was no clear

understanding in the public's mind was a nuclear accident involved and on everybody's television screen again and again where these explosions. you have to admit it's a pretty compelling visual, and so all of a sudden the public now says holy smokes what about that reactor over there on the river? that could be you know my backyard. so the visuals come i think the visuals worked to raise public awareness. they may not have understood what was going on or why there were these explosions but there are reactor with a roof loan off

and the repeated rebroadcast and the -- from around the plant were pretty awesome. >> host: you devoted in detail what was happening on the ground or what kind of impact do you think those hydrogen explosions had on the japanese that were trying desperately -- >> guest: i can imagine the working conditions in the plant. you asked if there were characters that stuck with me. i don't know a name but those workers in there, they didn't know if their families were alive or dead. they did know if their community had been washed away but they stated that plant paid they worked and it was dark. they did know if they would have another tsunami or earthquake. they were power lines down and manhole covers off. they had no clue. they had no clue of what was

going on and they were incredible. they did every single thing they could. all their work is for naught. i just can't imagine and you recall the time when there was the word that they were abandoning the plant and the panic that set off and rightfully so. the place would have been more than catastrophic. so you have the human interface of chivalry and did the humans wrestle it to the ground? no, they tried. >> host: i think there is a dichotomy where the world is watching and these explosions

and the seeming inability to bring the reactors under control and it portrayed a very different picture than what was aptly happening on the ground -- this heroic effort of people working under these tremendous the difficult conditioncondition s to try to save the planet plant and try to save the people but things were in many ways down the control. >> guest: it was like dominos bubbling. you raise an excellent point. it's something we have to keep in mind, is that of the three nuclear accidents that we have experienced chernobyl and fukushima daiichi and three mile island there really is no commonality. they there are three different accidents and yet we have not gotten off the belief that, the likelihood of a severe accident is so low that we don't need to plan for it.

there still is this belief that the best way to prevent another accident is to look backward and fight the last war. to say okay we need some choices and chernobyl is not particularly relevant and we don't have to worry. we are covered. nothing is going to happen but we can't plan for and the likelihood of the beyond design basis accident and i just picked up some of this. [laughter] is so low we don't need to plan for it. i don't think if you asked the japanese people today whether that's an acceptable attitude to take with upwards of $250 billion in economic consequences and say oh yes it is.

you need to plan for the unexpected and i think that's the message that has to resonate in this country to matt created there have been some changes but the cam and a commission after tmi talked about the mind-set that prevailed in the nuclear industry and the nuclear regulatory commission and that is that a severe accident is unlikely that we got to plan for it. i would argue and i think we make the point in the book but that mind-set has not changed. we talked to peter bradford a former nrc commissioner who was on the commission after tmi and was a pretty outspoken critic. he talked about what is needed is regulatory skepticism. i think that's what we need.

>> host: is one of the challenges and you talk a lot in the book about different people at the nrc and the roles that they play. one of the challenges is to try and figure out where those issues can best be addressed. obviously most of the very good things that the nrc did during the accident were really driven by this path and you have very interesting assessment of the book about the work that was done in the 80s dealing with the events that boiling what are reactor plants in the united states in that same debate in many ways the played out in fukushima in real-time because the efforts to address the issue in the 80s ultimately weren't successful because we saw fukushima and yet it was stripped and by the staff of the

nrc and then decades later the task force was created after the accident which came to very similar conclusions. so there is an effort and their people at the agency who were there with no other mission than two protect public health and safety but somehow the collectivism in and the agency is in driving that forward. >> guest: i agree but i have been asked several times since this book has come out and talking to people and a common question that is asked is what can we do? what can we do to change the dynamic? and i don't know the answer to that. is it changing the makeup of the commission? i don't know that is going to happen. certainly there has been no sign that that's going to happen. is it putting pressure on congress? i don't know.

they're there are good voices in congress that are saying we don't need to go down this road again. is it putting pressure on local state officials who are ultimately responsible for getting people out of harm's way when things happen and could they say we are not going to play this game anymore. i'm not sure. where the leverage points are that you hope that their voices are going to be heard. >> host: one of those issues that does play on and really touched people is something you touched on which was the evacuations and one of the signet -- defense was the u.s. government's decision to recommend to the americas that they stay 50 miles away. talk about what you found when he looked into that issue and how that compared with what the japanese were saying? >> guest: well the japanese

were very slow to move the effectuate -- evacuations zones outward and like the u.s. the evacuations zones are concentric circles that take no consideration of wind velocity and direction. the belief is no accident is going to necessitate more than a 10-mile evacuation zone and the commission just said that's what we are going to stick with. we think that's still good. fukushima dai-ni daiichi droop droop -- blue holes in that. the wind in the early days blew out to see so the half circle of the concentric stone quickly shifted him began to blow to the northwest. those people were sitting -- were sitting ducks. the radiation levels were very

belatedly moved. i know you took some heat for that 50-mile evacuation zone. it was a wise move. it was a good call and i don't think there were that many americans around the plant but then we come right back around to the issue if it's good for the japanese why is that good for the americans and why shouldn't be there ability to plan for if not 50 miles, 25 miles? get an evacuation plan in place so if need be you can move. moving people is terribly typical. we have a reference in there to the evacuation of a hospital late in the accident and they left behind a whole bunch of people who many were elderly and bedridden and they died. i'm not sure the u.s. planning is any better that you wouldn't

leave some nursing home people are prisoners or schoolkids or old-age homes whatever. >> host: you bring it up and there are are accidents and crises and their things are that happen that you plan for and planning does make a huge difference. there's one line in here that i took a little bit of section 2 they talk some out some of the exercises that were done in evacuations. i think they do more than that but there is ultimate limitation >> guest: well but isn't the compounding factor here that persistent view that nuclear power, the nuclear industry doesn't want to frighten people and if you go through these i any exercises india move people out and you have this planning, the people are going to say wait a minute i'm getting my

electricity from something that requires an evacuation plan? that's the last line of defense to get me out of my house and who knows when i can come back? think of the poor japanese people who may never feel the come back to their homes so i think it's also like the fukushima daiichi big could have built a higher seawall to protect from the tsunamis that people were predicting might hit but the fear was it will create create -- the public i get a little scared if they have this huge seawall in front of the nuclear plant and i think it's the same thing now with the emergency planning. people don't want to think about having to leave their homes and their farm animals behind in their pets and never get back. >> host: you touch on this again in the human stories in the book at the people who were

evacuated, how many people were evacuated? >> guest: i think there were 160,000 people evacuated. i think that is the correct number. i know that there are some that are bad but not all and they have created these zones where people may never be able to get back and kind of to rub salt in the wind they are going to store nuclear waste in the communities because they are abandoned. postcode one of the legacies is the cleanup will go on for a long time so there's no easy answer for simple solution. >> guest: and the japanese are like the u.s. doesn't have a national depository to put all this stuff so where are they going to put all this? host that makes a very big difference.

i have a couple of notes but there is a big i think discussion in the book about the worst case scenario and you talk about some of the challenges of the interagency and this is all the activity going on in the united states trying to figure out what are the implications of this accident. walk me through what you found and what you saw. i'd be interested in your personal thoughts. is this how you thought the government would work and did you he think it was successful and the demonstration of good governance? >> guest: you are talking about the u.s. response to fukushima? >> host: the efforts to develop a model with a lot of focus on this source.

>> guest: right and we are getting perilously close to ed lyman's level of expertise on this but i found the interagency debates from what will we know about them the nrc release a lot of information but we don't know what was going on in the white house in these debates. it's my understanding from foia information we have gotten is that there was a great level of debate and the nrc modeling only went up to 50 miles. the defense department was in iraq and i forgot which agency could go up quite a bit further and there was a lot of scrambling to come up with the best combination. this was like you know 85 different factors that all had to be figured in with multiple reactors.

so i found that whole debate fascinating in that nobody had ever really said what's going to happen if we have three reactors that meltdown, a couple of spent fuel pools at risk, the possibility -- i mean all these reactors have been shaken and flooded and battered by a natural disaster and it was like whoa we never thought this would happen. and so you have got the best and brightest in the government going wow now what do we do? and i know there's a lot more to it than that but i do think that it was a little offputting to me that there was such a pushback historically that we don't need to plan for worst-case scenarios. and you got a lot of computer

modeling and you got all these probability risk assessments and all of these estimations of what would happen that were consistently, consistently, consistently watered down. adding also to probabilities and we are going to factor in so many things that the risk keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller. and so computer modeling aside here you have got real life accident unfolding in the computer models to my knowledge aren't really providing that much reliable information or good information and i gather there was a fair level of disagreement among the decision-makers as to what the best course of action was. fortunately the west coast was at -- not at risk that could have been

if that was the case that probably was the worst-case scenario. >> host: i think i'll through a lot of what the challenges weren't necessarily with the models but really the lack of. the models are knowingly start playing with it game of monopoly. you start ago and everybody puts their pieces randomly around the board. that was the failure and the weakness because people just didn't really know was coming out. >> guest: was that because she didn't have the basic information from japan and you kind of came in midstream? or was it the japanese just didn't have the information or work sharing the information? >> host: it was initially it was not the right information because as you talk about in the book he lost power. if you lose power in the reactors you lose the things that tell you what the temperature of the reactor is and what the water levels are so without that basic information

it's difficult than to know where to start a model from. that was a lot of the back-and-forth discussion that went on was what do we assume is really going on? we can measure at a large distance how much radiation is coming out but again it goes back to the assumptions. everything is built around the assumption that we know what's going on in the reactors because we have extensive programs that require licensees to tell us the condition of the reactors and when they are undergoing abnormal accident or something like that again at fukushima all of that was lost. >> guest: how forthcoming were the japanese? >> host: i get asked that question a lot and i think they were pretty forthcoming with this given all the circumstances. >> guest: as being the u.s. or us being the nrc? >> host: the u.s.. this was an accident as you have

said in the look and it wasn't our accident. it was their accident. it was ultimately bears to deal with first and foremost and i think in the end the row question was how forthcoming were they with their own government in their own people and that's a different question. i wasn't there so i can't tell you but we are getting near the end here and i did want to ask you one last question. you ended the book with a quote from one of the characters that you talk about shock which is a very poignant quote and if you could talk a little bit about that and tell me why you chose to end the book there. >> guest: i think chuck caso is a good character in the book and he is the guy who is saying we have had tmi. we have had fukushima daiichi and we have not learned their lessons and what we need in the

debate is to be able to say to the american public we are doing everything we can. we don't want any more heroes and that to me is the message that we have to all take out of fukushima and what i think is the message that the nuclear industry and regulators in this country have to work toward and that is we are never going to put a plant operator, workers in a position where they have to risk their lives to do what they can to stop a severe accident. >> host: with that last comment i vitiate and if enjoyed very much this discussion. >> guest: i have two. this was good and thank you very much. >> host: thank you very much. ..

>> >> hello.