if you go to booktv.org, you'll see right up there at the to be -- top there's a tab that says "book club." and beginning this afternoon we will start posting your comments. we want to hear what you have to say about

>> host: 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 you wrote. so i look forward to -- >> guest: i'll do my best. it is an unas cos tommed role for me to answer questions. it's good to be here. >> host: i'm glad. i wanted to start to just ask you a few issues that are general in nature about the book. the first question is what drove you to this topic? what made you interested in writing a book about the fukushima accident? >> guest: as a journalist, it was a very compelling story. i had coveringed the three mile island accident when i was a reporter 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, but 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 had been learned and had not been learned from three mile island, why there were so many similarities and so many differences. so it just brought me into that from that angle. >> host: well, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. i think you won a pulitzer prize -- >> guest: the inquirer did. i was part of a very large team that was sent to cover the accident. i did a lot of the writing -- i

never went out there. i had been there, but i didn't go, actually, to the scene, but was working as the rewrite person for the reporters and photographers who were there. so it, to me, was a very frightening event. the accident that we had all been led to believe would never happen was happening. fortunately, it wasn't as severe as things at talk about fukushi. i also sensed that this had caught the experts off guard too. the nrc, the utility officials, state government officials. and so it -- that was a air hell track with -- a parallel track with talk fukushima die yee chi. we had 30 some years to learn the lessons, it didn't appear that they had sunk in from three my mile island. >> host: what was different watching fukushima, in a sense

as a layperson, as opposed to three mile island with where you had a professional role. >> guest: i was taking notes constantly. and visually, it was phenomenal. as we write in the book, the people watched the reactor building explode, we saw the helicopters flying over, you saw the people being rousted 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, with a certain arm's length objectivity, but i kept taking a lot of notes because i had a lot of questions that i wanted to find out more about and just kind of put my

reporter's hat on. >> host: so talk to me a little bit about the collaboration with you and the other ucs staffers. >> guest: okay. i had worked with dave lockbaum as a source for many years, had met him just one, but 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 dave -- with ed lymon 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 put together a book. my idea of the book was a little wit different, i -- bit different, i think, that what the ucs folks had originally.

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. so i am not, i'm not an engineer, i'm not a physicist. i'm a reporter. and so i began to pull together a lot of different threads. and we put together a proposal. it was accepted, and we set about, 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, have a lot of input in the technical issues. as the book progressed and it gets into some of the background on nuclear regulation, the history of regulation in this

country, ed and dave then of course, added a lot more because they're much more familiar with that. so it was a good collaboration. >> host: and you definitely when you read it, or as someone who's familiar with a lot of these issues, i could see some of the places where it looked like those were the pieces that ed -- >> guest: their fingerprints are in that book, definitely. definitely. [laughter] >> host: well, you talked about this as a 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 and the drama. maybe tell me about the two or three people or characters in a way that stood out to you most in this story. >> guest: the, there were several. and the difficulty with this book, none of us speaks japanese. and so we did this from the u.s. and 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. but one of the stories that i, that resonated with me was the moment when they're dithering about whether or not they need to inject sea water into unit one. and it's a matter of -- the clock is ticking, and they're just about down to the wire. and maseo yushida, and i think that's how you pronounce his name, the plant superintendent, knows that it's desperate. they need to get water in there very quickly. and meanwhile, everybody wants a say. the tepco officials and japanese government officials are all just kind of hemming and hawing, and yushida gets an order from one ofç his supervisors at tepo

that the government hasn't signed off on this yet, he's got to hold off. well, he's already started. and so he basically calls one of his staff people over and says, okay, i'm going to give an order, but ignore it. so he very loudly proclaims, you know, halt the seawater injection when, in fact, they didn't. and to me, 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. and so he did. that one was a, that one was a very interesting -- >> host: he definitely stands out as unique -- >> guest: i wish i had had a chance to meet him. yeah, i really wish i had. he talked very little to the

press. and, unfortunately, died. but his, some of his lines of the accident were very come -- compelling. the other characters in the book, and there aren't many characters, was chuck casto, and i really liked chuck. >> host: did you have an opportunity to -- >> guest: we talked to him, yes, we did. and he was very kind. chuck was the nrc expert on boiling water reactors who was brought into tokyo and was there for, as i recall, almost a year. and he became in our tale the kind of the central person who's buffeted by all the forces at work. the government of japan be and the culture -- 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 back at your office of trying to figure out what was going on and get him the best advice. and be he's working, by all appearances, 24/7, full out, struggling to keep all these balls in the air. and to he, he was a human face of a safety system that was just not ready for what it was being asked to do. >> host: and it seemed like there three mile island there were faces there too. >> guest: yes. >> host: so it seems like each of these accidents, they have people in the end that become the faces of this technology that is almost seemed to be so member nistic, and all of a sudden in these crises it becomes very personal and very human. >> guest: well, it does. and that's, that's good because if there isn't a human face on an issue, it's very difficult

for people to become invested in making sure that things are done properly. and so i think that -- and that was my goal in starting out the book the way we did. i wanted to tell a story that people begin to really become engaged in. and they may not know anything about nuclear power. they may not have any opinion about nuclear power. but by getting them to invest and understand the drama, then i think by hopefully by midway in the book we've hooked them, and they're saying i'd like to know a little bit more. >> host: uh-huh. well, you, you certainly do capture, i think, a lot of the moments, and you mentioned -- >> guest: well, that's good coming from you. [laughter] it's kind of nice to know that. >> host: it was interesting to me, i was just curious what -- so you talked a little bit about that you relied on newspapers, on government documents. can you just talk a little bit

more about what kind of sources you used and whether you were able to talk to people, if you found differences from what people said as opposed to what was kind of in the record? >> guest: well, the nrc was a treasure-trove. the e-mails, the foia materials that came out, those transcripts -- >> host: uh-huh. >> guest: -- that the nrc kept a transcript from the operations center. >> host: not by intention necessarily. [laughter] >> guest: well, thank you. >> host: but it was a wonderful, it really was a wonderful historical record that wound up being there. >> guest: it ended -- in the newspaper business there's something called a tick tock which is a way to tell a story 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 reports that were in english. but the phone conversations, the

chronology, the names of people and stuff were very useful. and as you read through that, you know, you're with the crew in the operations center because we were able to tell it that way. so that, i think, was one of the ways that i hoped to wring the story alive. -- to bring the story alive. we could write all we wanted to about tilterred vents -- filtered vents or seawater injection. but until the reader understands the urgency with which these decisions had to be made and the, just the nothing going right and these poor people scrambling against the clock to try and get something to work. so that was how we elected to do it. >> host: were those conversations surprising to you, or did they go the way that you thought they would have in something, a situation like this? >> guest: i think in all honesty

the thing that surprised me the most was how little, um, how little knowledge there was about what was going on. i think of the nuclear regulatory commission has charged with protecting the american people, and is we've never had an accident like this. and yet i got the sense and only through 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. and it wasn't just the time difference and the language difference, it was the uncertainty of the technology and of trying to divine what was

going on in these reactors and get as best information as you can to the ambassador and your crew over there and to the american people too. they were watching this. we make the point in the book that this was not a japanese nuclear accident, it was a nuclear accident that just happened to have occurred in japan. so there really was a reason for americans to follow what was going on, i think. >> host: yeah. , in many ways, very familiar but yet so completely different. because as you mentioned, there were language differences, there were time differences. we had a team here in washington that was sleeping when everyone else was awake, and they were sleeping when people were awake here. and so you had to manage that, the difference in time, and it

just added a layer of complexity to everything. >> guest: no, i'm sure that's the case. and culturally it was, you know, chuck casto talks about going to these meetings that lasted forever that accomplished nothing. and here the americans are saying we need to, we need decisions now. we need to deal with this now. and yet, as you pointed out, this is not your accident, our accident. >> host: uh-huh. >> guest: this is their accident, and we are kind of -- the u.s. experts are kind of in a, you know, on a holding pattern until they're called into ask what to do. and then when they were, it was almost too late, or the recommendations were not necessarily followed or were timely. >> host: you mention that it was one of the, actually, joys for me to read the week was to look back and see things that i had said that i had forgotten, and that was wasn't of the meants

you -- that was one of the comments i made -- >> guest: right. there was a great quote from the executive director, i've to have gotten, executive director where everybody's 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. and that was exactly the position. i think what was revealing to he also was just -- revealing to me also was just how everybody seemed to be caught flat-footed. and one of the messages we have in this book is that historically regulators have dismissed low probability/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 have thrown the script out the window. and so what you had here is a story of people who are charged with protecting the public health and safety, and many of whom have no other, no higher calling than protecting public health and safety. just completely flummoxed by what was going -- there had been no, there had never been an accident at multiple reactors. there had never been an accident where all of backup systems failed. and you could just go down this checklist. and so you begin to wonder who was making the rules? and we have a line in the book that says "the safety bar was set at x. " nobody asked what if x plus 1 happened.

and i think that, i think that may be one of the clear messages of this book, that we need to start asking about plus 1. >> host: well, i did read the book, and i have lots of questions. >> guest: i will do my best. >> host: but it's very helpful to hear your overview and just to hear a little bit about how you got to where you are and how you developed the material that's in here. one of the -- as i was reading, this is something that's on page 42 and 43. you have a discussion about earthquakes and what the japanese were doing over their history to deal 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 -- >> guest: and how many earthquakes? >> host: there have been at least three. >> guest: exactly. >> host: one of the interesting dichotomies is this is a country

that in many respects is viewed as being one of the premier countries when it comes to understanding earthquakes. and yet with a technology they also prided themselves on, i think you mention this in the book, that they viewed themselves as being, you know, very, very expert this be nuclear technology -- in nuclear technology. that two of their really primary technological areas of expertise failed them. tell me a little bit about what you think that -- how did you reconcile that idea that here was this technologically-advanced country that looking back seemed to have missed so many opportunities to address issues? >> guest: i think it goes to the, i think there's a similar thing here. it's cost. and it's who has the ear of those who are in decision making capacities. and i think one of the, 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 some questions about the adequacy of 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. and the day came when they were needed. so when you have a, 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 preference to the few academics or the few

scientists who are saying we're really not adequately prepared. and that really was another recurring theme not only on earthquakes, but on the radiation monitoring and some of the evacuation decisions that were made. >> host: do you think, do you have a sense that things changed in japan, do you think? changed over the time -- >> guest: i have not been there, but i don't get the sense. i mean, you look at the ongoing debate about the restart of the reactors, and you've got public opinion polls over there with a huge majority of the japanese people opposed to restarting the reactors. or at least, you know, some of the reactors. and they're marching right into a restart without fully understanding what happened at fukushima. and eventually there may be good reason to start the reactors.

but i think there's a real legitimatesty to the sames -- legitimacy tom claims being made by those who are opposed, that we don't know enough what happened, and we need to put in a new regulatory framework. because you had the old framework that clearly didn't work. and now you've got the newer one. now, whether that's going to change things, i don't know, because you've got the pressure from the abe government to get those reactors up and running. >> host: you have an interesting quote in that, in that theme if i can find it where it's the prime minister, i believe, essentially talking about the protesters. and essentially dismissing them. >> guest: exactly. they're out there making noise again. >> host: yeah. >> guest: and, again, you weigh everything in what is, what is the customary responses in

japan, and protesting in the street is not -- it might be here in the united states. >> host: i think that's an interesting point, and i'm glad you address that. maybe you could talk about that a little bit more, because you have some pictures in the book, and you talk about these protest ors in the number -- protesters in the numbers of tens of thousands. that's a huge, huge issue in japan. that's not a typical day in japan. >> guest: right. and you look at those photographs of protests, and they're not students, they're grandmothers. they aren't the kind of the typical people who just get out to protest. i mean, there are a wide swath of the japanese public by outward appearances if you look at the photographs. and so this is an issue. fukushima daiichi touched a huge section of japan, and economically, my gosh, it's an

enormous accident of consequence. and so you've got a lot of people who now have a real stake; personal, economic, health. and people who are going to pay their utility bills that really 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 the protest sign. i mean, i think that's very true in the united states as well, that the nuclear industry in this country has been very, very successful in influencing the level of nuclear regulation.

there have been some changes, but they're not necessarily adequate in terms of, for example, looking at fukushima. i mean, you have the 50-mile evacuation issue. you call, you made that call, and it was a wise call. >> host: uh-huh. >> guest: and yet in this country it's 10 miles. >> host: uh-huh. >> guest: and the nrc has said in the event that we needed to expand it, we would have plenty of time. i think that somebody who's living on long island or on the hudson river, for example, or near the pilgrim plant is going to say, uh-huh, you're going to get me off cape cod if you need, if there's an accident at pilgrim? or you are going to be able to evacuate 50 miles from indian point expeditiously?

moving that many people is pretty staggering. one of the figures is 40% of americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant. that's, i think, 120 million americans. so those 120 million americans have a real stake in how safe the reactors in their neighborhoods are. so i think that, i think that you asked why change didn't occur, is not occurring in japan. i think the better question would be why is change also not occurring in the united states. and i know you've spoken about this issue. >> host: so how would you answer that? what do you think? i know you touch on some of these issues in the book -- >> guest: well, i think, again, it's the influence of the nuclear industry. i think it's cost, and the industry has a terrific ability to get ahead of the nrc on issues and say we're going to make these -- we'll do this, we'll do that.

or you don't need to do this, we'll do this. and so you've got a series of responses to safety issues that are not set by regulation, they're voluntary. we have a line in -- and this is dave walkbaum's line in the book -- that traffic departmentses 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's happened through the industry's own initiative is that regulations now pretty much are don't go too fast, don't do things that aren't safe. when, in fact, what really seems to be called for thiess in the lessons that have -- at least in the lessons that have come out so far is a clear sense of what the industry needs to do. and the nuclear, the near-term

task force, the group of senior nrc officials that took 90 days to make recommendations to the nrc was very, very clear. their first priority was we need to get rid of this patchwork of regulations. i'm not telling you anything you don't know, but this patchwork that has allowed this mix of voluntary noncompliance, some compliance, this-in mash of regulations -- this mishmash of regulations. and pity the poor nrc inspector that walks in and, you know, some of it's voluntary, some of it isn't. some of it -- and so i think that what the point we make in this book is that, and what the near-term task force said 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 for our reactor. get those in place, learn what we can from fukushima, but make sure that we can say clearly that these reactors are as safe as we can make them plus one. so i think that that really is the message that we want to convey. >> host: well, it certainly comes out in the book. if i could switch gears a little bit here and take the focus back to japan for a minute, i'm interested in your thoughts in particular on this issue because you're a reporter, and you talk in the book about these press clubs in japan. and i get a sense from reading the book that you put some degree of responsibility on the japanese press perhaps for not investigating or asking enough questions.

>> guest: i do. and i'm, i'm speaking from, you know, no personal experience. i have talked to some u.s., some correspondents for u.s. publications who are in japan and have maneuvered in this culture. i just wanted to talk and to get some of their insights. so in talking to them and in asking them about how this work works, it comes across as don't ask, don't tell, basically. and, but that's part, again, of japanese culture. investigative reporting was not -- until recently -- accorded a high priority. and, in japan. unlike the united states. and so there really budget a whole lot of incentive -- wasn't a whole lot of incentive for the japanese media to rock the boat. they depended on the government to hand out information to them

which they reported, and if they went in half cocked and started, you know, asking questions or challenging the official line, they might lose access. so 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 that -- and i think that's changing. i think that they've seen now what, you know, what the price japan has paid for accepting the party line. >> host: yeah. i've had the opportunity to be interviewed by a lot of -- >> guest: i'm sure you have, yeah. >> host: and there does seem to be a change and an interest to challenge and question the official government line which is made -- which has made it very difficult, i think, for the government where they are trying to do things, it's just hard because there's so much of a loss of -- >> 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, how do you respond if they ask you how should they be doing their jobs? has that ever come up? >> host: that's never really come up, but i do notice they are seeking opportunities to get a different perspective, to hear something different from what they may be hearing from the traditional sources. >> guest: uh-huh. well, we have a line in there from one of the nuclear advocates in japan, you know, for the government agency to cover nuclear, and that was a good-bye tee that it never -- guarantee that it never got mentioned. and so it was, it was a different culture in terms of journalism. and would the have done any better? i think we would have, but, you

know, we come out of -- three mile island was a great example. there are a whole bunch of reporters descend on middletown, pennsylvania, who were covering the state government. what do they know about nuclear are reactors and what do they know about radiation and what do they know about the makeup of a pressurized water reactor? they don't know. but they're good at sniffing out disparity and lies and misrepresentation and cover up. i mean, so those reporting skills come into play because they're saying we're not getting -- i don't care whether we're talking about skimming money out of some political fund or we're talking about an stent unfolding on -- an accident unfolding on three mile island, we sense there's something going on here, we're not getting the straight story. so from that standpoint to, it was kind of every reporter's butt -- gut instinct to start

poking around. >> host: in that vein, this story was covered in a way that probably no other accident has been covered. there were these visuals people could watch on tv as you talked about earlier. one of the most significant visuals were the hydrogen explosions. unit one, unit three. talk a little bit, if you would, about how those issues played out and what kind of impact they had on the recovery efforts and what was going on at the reactors. >> guest: well, i think that, as i've said, this was the first time the world had ever watched a nuclear accident. and they ran again and again and again. and they, you had, you had these, the nhk cameras from the distance photographing the explosions. and so people saw in reality what a nuclear accident was like. before the discussions, when there were discussions in the

general public about a nuclear -- were all hypothetical or they were the china syndrome. there was just, you know, there was no clear understanding in the public's mind what a nuclear accident involved. and so on your, everyone's television screens again and again and again were these explosions. and you've got to admit they're pretty compelling visuals. and so all of a sudden the public now says, holy smokes, what about that reactor over there on the susquehanna river? what's, that could be with, that could be, you know, my backyard. so the visuals, i think the visuals worked to raise public awareness. they may not have understood

what was going on or why there was the explosion, but a reactor building with the roof blown off is pretty -- and then the repeated broadcast, rebroadcasts of those and the photos from around the plant were pretty awesome. >> host: and you go through in the book kind of in pretty good detail about what was happening on the ground. what kind of impact do you think those hydrogen explosions had for the japanese who were trying desperately to save those reactors? >> guest: i can't imagine what the working conditions in that plant -- you ask if there were characters that stuck with me. i don't know a name, but those workers this there, they didn't know if their families were alive or dead. they didn't know if their communities had been washed away in that tsunami. they stayed in that plant. they worked. and it was dark. they didn't know if they were

going to get hit with another tsunami, another earthquake. there were power lines down, manhole covers off. they had no clue. they didn't have enough do similarrer thes, they had no clue of what was going on, and they were incredible heroes. and they did every single thing they could. and then there's the explosion, and all their work is for naught, and they have to start all over again. be -- i just can't, i can't imagine what -- and you recall the time when there's the word that there abandoning the plant, and the panic that that set off. and rightfully so. if those guys left, you know, the place would have been more than catastrophic. so you had, you had the human interface with machinery. and that's, that's -- and, you know, do the humans wrestle it to the ground? no, they tried.

>> host: uh-huh. and it's interesting that you say that because i think there is a dichotomy there where the world is watching all of these things happen, these explosions, the seeming inability to bring the reactors under control, and it portrayed a very different picture than what was actually happening on the ground which was, i think as you said, this heroic effort by people working in tremendously difficult conditions to try and save the plant, to try and save the people, to try and prevent these releases. but things were just in many ways beyond their control. >> guest: well, it was like dominoes falling. and you had raised an excellent point this one of the interviews that i hadn't seen before, and it's something we ought to keep in mind is that of the three nuclear accidents that we've experienced, tmi, chernobyl and fukushima daiichi, there really is no commonality here. they're three different accidents. and yet we've not gotten off the

belief that the likelihood of a severe accident so low that we don't need to plan for it. and we, there still is this belief that the best way to prevent another accident is to look backwards, to fight the last war, to say, okay, we made some fixes at tmi, and chernobyl's not particularly relevant, we'll make some fixes with fukushima, and we don't have to worry, we're covered. because nothing is going to happen that we can't plan for. and that the likelihood of a beyond design basis accident -- i've picked up some of this lingo -- [laughter] beyond design basis accident 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, what, --

$250 billion in economic consequences from this accident they're going to say, oh, yes, it is. you need to plan for the unexpected. and that's, i think that's the message that's got to resonate in this country too. >> do you think it is? >> guest: no! not yet. [laughter] >> guest: there have been some changes, but after tmi we talked about the mindset that prevailed in the nuclear industry and nuclear regulatory, and that is that a severe accident so unlikely we don't need to plan for it. i would argue, and i think we make the point in the book, that that mindset has not changed. >> host: uh-huh. >> guest: we talked to peter bradford, a former nrc commissioner, who was on the commission after tmi and was a pretty outspoken critic for, of

safety. and he talked about what is needed is regulatory skepticism. i'm not sure that that exists today. but i think that's what we need. >> host: well, it's one of the challenges, and i know you talk a lot in the book about different people at the nrc and the roles that they played. and one of the challenges is to try and figure out where those issues can best be addressed, whether it's at the commission level, whether it's among the -- because, obviously, most of the very good things that the nrc did during the accident were really driven by the staff. and you have a very interesting assessment of the book about the work that was done in the '80s and dealing with hardened vents, bwr plants or boiling water reactor plants in the united states. that same debate in many ways then played out in fukushima in realtime because the efforts to address that issue in the '80s ultimately didn't, weren't successful because we saw the

problems we saw at fukushima. and yet it was driven by the staff at the nrc and then decades later a task force was created after the accident which came to almost very similar conclusions. >> guest: right. >> host: so there is a, there is an effort, i think as you said, there are people at the agency who are there with no other mission than to protect public health and safety. but somehow the collective isn't working in the end. the agencyn't is driving that -- isn't driving that in the way that -- >> guest: i agree. i've been asked several times since this book has come out and i've been talking to people, and a common question that that's asked is what can we do to change the dynamic? what is it? and i don't know the answer to that. is it changing the makeup of the commission? i don't know that that's going to happen. it certainly has, there's been no sign that that's going to happen. is it putting pressure on

congress? i don't know. that's a -- there are good voices in congress that are saying we don't these to go down this road again -- we don't need to go down this road again. is it putting pressure on local and state officials who are ultimately responsible for getting people out of harm's way when it happens? could they say, huh-uh, we're not going to play this game anymore? and i'm not sure where the leverage points are, but you hope their voices are going to be heard. ..

were very slow to move the evacuation zone outward. and like the u.s., the evacuation zones are concentric circles that take no consideration into the weather conditions, wind velocity and direction. and so the belief is that no action is going to necessitate more than a 10-mile evacuation zone. and the commission just said that so we're going to stick with. we think that's still good. fukushima daiichi will all of that. the wind for the most part of the early days actually blew out to see, and so a half circle of the concentric zones work but it quickly as is it shifted and

began to blow to the northwest, those people were sitting, like we're sitting ducks. the radiation levels were very high and very belatedly were 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, well, if it's good for the japanese, why isn't it good for the americans? why shouldn't there be the ability to plan for, if not 50 miles, 25 miles? get the evacuation plan in place so that if need be you can move -- moving people is terribly difficult. we had a reference in there to the evacuation of the hospital late in the accident, and they left behind a whole bunch of people, many of whom were

elderly and bedridden and they died. i'm not sure the u.s. planning is any better that you wouldn't believe some nursing home people or prisoners were school kids or old age homes, whatever. >> host: you bring it up, the importance of planning. they are accidents and they are crises because things aren't happening that you plan for. but ending does make a huge difference. it was one line in here where i took exception we talk about some of the exercises that are done, being an illusion of evacuation. i think they do more than that but there is also limitation. >> guest: isn't a compounding factor here the persistent view that nuclear power doesn't -- that the nuclear industry doesn't want to frighten people. and if you go through these by any -- biennial exercises and you move people out and you have

whatever all the planning is, 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 he knows what i can come back? think of the poor japanese people who may never get back to their house. so i think part of the motivation, it's also like the fukushima daiichi, they couldn't build a higher seawall to protect from tsunamis that people were predicting might it, that there was a would create, the public might get a little scared if they have this huge seawall in front of a nuclear plant, and it's, i think 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 and

the pets and never get back. >> host: and you touched on this again, the human stories in the book, all the people who were evacuated. about how many people were evacuated? >> guest: i think it were 160,000 people evacuated. i think that's the correct number. i know that, i know that there are some that are back but not all, and that they've created these, you know, zones where people may never be able to get back. and, and kind of to rub salt into wounds they will store a bunch of nuclear waste in the communities because they are abandoned. >> host: one of the legacies is the cleanup will going for a long time, so there's an easy answer or simple solution. >> guest: they don't have the repository to put all the stuff. >> host: and unlike the united

states they are a much smaller country so it makes a very big difference. i have a couple of notes. there's a big, i think, discussion in the book about the worst-case scenario, and to talk about some of the challenges of the interagency. this is all activity going on in the united states, trying to figure out what are the applications of this accident. walk me through which he found and what you saw. and i'd be interested in your personal thoughts. again, is the site is not the government would work? did you think it was successful? did you think it was a demonstration of good governan governance? >> guest: you are talking about the u.s. response to

fukushima? >> host: yes, the efforts to develop models for what the impact could be and a lot of focus on the so-called source. >> guest: right. we are getting perilously close to edwin lyman's level of expertise on this, but i found it, i found interagency debates, from what little we know about them, the nrc release a lot of information but we don't know what was going on in the white house and these debates. and it's my understanding from some for your information that we've gotten is that there was a great level of debate -- foia -- and the nsc model and the only one -- alderwood out to 50 miles. defense department, i forget which agency, could go up quite a bit further and it was a lot of scrambling to come up with the best combination. this was like, you know, 55, 85

different factors that you all had to figure in with multiple reactors. i found that whole debate fascinating in that nobody had ever really said, what's going to happen if we have three reactors in meltdown, a couple of the spent fuel pools at risk, the possibility of -- and me, all these reactors have been shaken and flooded and battered by natural disasters, and it was like we never thought this would happen. and so you've got the best and brightest of the government's going, now what do we do? and i know there is 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, on we don't need to plan for worst-case scenario. you know, and you got a lot of computer modeling and you've got all these probability risk assessments and all of these estimations of what would happen that were consistently, consistently, consistently pushed down, watered down, probabilities would add also to probabilities. we're going to factor in so many things that the risk keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller. and so computer modeling aside, here you've got real life accident unfolding and the computer models, to my knowledge, aren't really providing you that much reliable information, good information, and that i gather there was a fair level of disagreement among the decision-makers as to what the best course of action was. fortunately, it doesn't appear that the west coast was at risk,

but could have been. if that was the case then that probably was a pretty worst-case scenario. >> host: i think a lot of what the challenges weren't necessary with the models, really the lack of. the models were built around kind of knowing where you start. it's almost like playing a game of monopoly. now starting ago and their bridges puts the pieces rained around the board. that was vacated in the week is in that situation because people just didn't really know what was coming out. >> guest: was that because you didn't have the basic information from japan and you kind of came in midstream? is that what it was or was it the japanese just didn't have the information or weren't sharing the information? >> host: it was, initially anyway primary just because there was not the right information. as you talk to in the book, you lost power. use out of all the reactors, you primarily lose all your

instrumentation to use the things that say what the temperature of the reactors, with the water levels are. so without that basic information it's difficult than the kind of, you know where to start the models 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 try to measure a large distance how much radiation is coming out, but again it goes back to the assumptions that you talk about, everything is built around the assumption that we all know what's going on in the reactors because we have extensive programs that require licensees to tell us the condition of the reactors, when they are undergoing abnormal accident or something like that. but again at fukushima all of that was lost. >> guest: how forthcoming with the japanese? >> host: i get asked that question a lot, and they think that they were pretty forthcoming with us, given all of the circumstances. >> guest: us being the u.s. or the nrc?

>> host: the u.s. recognizing they are a sovereign country. this was an accident, you quote me in the book saying it wasn't our accident. it wasn't their accident. it was ultimately theirs to do with first and foremost. and i think in the end the real question is how forthcoming were they with their own government, their own people. that's a different question. i wasn't there so i can tell you, but we are getting near the end here and i did want to ask you one last question. you into the book with a quote from one of the characters that you talked about, chuck, which is very poignan poignant quote t the chocolate about that and tell me why you chose the end -- chose to end of the book there. >> guest: i think shock -- chuck is a good character, and he is a guy, what he's saying is we've had brownsburg, we've had

tmi, we've had fukushima daiichi, and what we've not learned our lesson. and what we need as we debate is 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 ought 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 a, and that is we're never going to put a plant operator, workers in a position where they have to let risked their lives to do what they can to stop a severe asks of it -- said the accident. >> host: with that last comment i appreciate and very much enjoyed this discussion. >> guest: i have, too. thank you very much. >> that was "after words,"

booktv signature program and which authors of the list nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policy makers, legislators and others familiar with the material. transport fares every weekend on booktv at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9 p.m. on sunday and 12 a.m. on monday. you can watch "after words" online, go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in the booktv series and topics list on the upper right side of the pa page. >> booktv is live today from chicago, home of the 30th annual "chicago tribune" for derose lisbeth. we bring us oval office today from the auditorium at jones college prep high school including illinois, africa come world war ii and much more. first will kick off our live coverage from the printer's row lit fest with monique brinson demery, author of "finding the

dragon lady: the mystery of vietnam's madame nhu." >> are going undegood morning, . welcome to the 30th annual "chicago tribune" winters road lit fest. i want to give a special thank you to all of our sponsors. the authors book will be told in the main lobby and son outside of the auditorium. book signing will immediately follow the program. today's program will be broadcast live on c-span2's booktv. at this time at the end for a q&a session with the author would ask you to please use a microphone located here on the stairwell to my left. this way the home viewing audience can hear your questions. if you like to watch his program again, please note that i covered will re-aired tonight at 11 p.m. central time.