clear picture about how disturbing to look for on the news because. these are stories that you know know. my pepto you're close to the american. west. hello i'm tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture as part of its cleanup efforts the company that runs the crippled fukushima power plant wants to dump almost eight hundred thousand tons of radioactive material into the ocean how could that possibly be safe as paul gunter just

a moment and exxon mobil lied to the public for decades about the threat of climate change should we give it the corporate death penalty on this day mccall and eleanor goldfield internets big picture. is the american nuclear industry on its last legs all across the country right now reactor projects are failing and existing power plants are sinking deeper and deeper into the red all of a sudden the so-called energy of the future is starting to look at awful lot like a relic what's going on with us joining me now is paul gunter director of the reactor oversight project of nuclear fall welcome back thank you tom it's great having you with us so the big news in the nuclear world right now to utility companies out of south carolina south carolina electric and gas and santee cooper recently stopped construction on a couple of advanced reactors maybe they're not of. your thoughts on that these are

supposed to be the future of the nuclear industry what's happened well in fact the news today is that south carolina lecture can gas never bothered to even stablished a schedule for. construction with a set of goals so you know here's an industry that is notorious when i could first got started with this in in the one nine hundred seventy s. . we understood that this that these construction projects could be bridges to nowhere and in fact the industry in the seventy's and eighty's failed on the fact that they could not control cost and they could not provide for any reliable. construction schedule completion and so they failed and now we see this industry in in an effort to bring about a renaissance they essentially fell into the same trap that shut this industry down

in the eighty's but you know they've essentially been able to get. the rate payers in the in the taxpayers to put all the financing and construction. and the companies themselves were pretty much trying to keep all their financial skin out of the game but again with out of control of the of the construction costs without the ability to predict when you would be able to complete these things you know they have essentially failed and why would one of these companies want to build a nuclear power plant to begin with the things are losing money they're dangerous the decommissioning is insanely expensive in fact we don't even know really the ultimate cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant but we're going to find out and cassie and we're probably going to have to pay it are they are they building these things these two that were built they build in them because they are making a profit just in the process of bill. being them that they're getting subsidies or

tax breaks or something i mean is there some some reason beyond the hope of future electricity well for example the the the two george utilities were getting the control the construction paid in financed through what they call a construction work in progress so they were charging a rate payers for the in the in their utility bills for the construction costs and the. down in georgia where they're building the vogel nuclear power station that had a eight point three billion dollars federal loan guarantee tied to it so they basically are using ratepayer in taxpayer money and it's all about impaired building tom this is really. an adventure that we've seen fail time and time again but this industry gets to reimage itself

and they sinned congress and the consumer chasing after these new mirage so what used to be the peaceful atom you know turned out to be a bomb what was too cheap to meter is now too expensive to matter and now they're reframing this image as as a way of addressing climate change through what they call the zero emissions which it's not sense right so but i understand that the industry at least here in the united states according to bloomberg investigation they're losing almost three billion dollars a year. how long can this this last can these things are literally bleeding cash is what the article said but this is really all about. again in an adventure in using other people's money for empire building and. what good is have. in an empire if if if it's broke i mean if

a good chunk of well the people are going to walk away with a pocket full of money i mean i'd like us you know you should also be aware that the these same utilities are now going to come back to the rate payers through a captured regulator to recover abandonment costs so they're going to look to soak rate payers for billions more and you know what we're about to see and what we should really see is i rate payers. will resist and refuse so are you expecting a massive bailout of the nuclear industry is that the next thing that's on the horizon well actually i think that what we're looking at right now is a collapse so you know they're going to play it like a specialist rather than like the banks so they banks when they collapse through their own screw ups we just said oh here's fourteen trillion dollars when the as best as companies collapsed we were like well there's no way we can resuscitate this industry so we will pay the victims of the as best as the federal fund and you

guys just go off and declare bankruptcy and take your money and run and you leave these this radioactive ditch behind just which is just as companies left all yes this is this is you know this is criminal negligence is what it is except that they saw i mean you were out in the one nine hundred seventy s. saying this is exactly what's going to happen and you were right right it was. it actually even repeated itself and unfair tom they are talking about again reimaging this failed industry no. through what they call small modular reactor so where they sold this industry originally on a on an economy of scale with these huge facilities now they're reimaging it as you know we can make these into small modular reactors and we'll be able to simply lines so that we'll just make lots of little ones and. that's that's the new

plan and that's what we're looking at is our meanwhile over in japan tepco the company that owns the fukushima reactors. according news reports that they want to dump almost eight hundred thousand tons of riley radioactive water into the pacific ocean what's the story here well. you know the the nuclear reaction. it creates all kinds of radioactive isotopes this accident created tremendous amounts of you know of probably one hundred twenty different radioactive isotopes in the fissioning process but one key one has been tritium which is radioactive hydrogen and the industry in talking about you know what they're going to do with all this radioactive water you can't filter tritium out because it is radioactive hydrogen in it's treated water so they're talking about either dumping it into the ocean

or. the other option is to vaporize it but you create radioactive water vapor in that instance but. the industry likes to frame this stuff tritium as what they call a week amid or they like to frame it as harmless but in fact tritium because it is radioactive hydrogen you know it would it has a beta admit or it won't penetrate the skin but if you ingest it or inhale it. it will then displace the. normal natural hydrogen with radioactive hydrogen and then it starts to incorporate at the most intimate biological levels where it will start bumping hydrogen out of the d.n.a. chain and this then when it when it's. that level while it won't penetrate the

skin tritium itself is twice as affective as doing to do biological damage than x. rays or gamma radiation so the next time you hear the industry claim that this is a harmless emitter in fact once it's incorporated in the biology it's it's more effective than gamma radiation and destroying. our genetic make up which is a bad thing a for future generations and b. for anyone who doesn't want to get cancer is as absolute as we get it is tepco is also building in this ice wall we've been hearing about this i think it was over a year ago that you were kevin were first on our program talking about this this ice wall that they're building to try to constrain or or hold in the radioactive material from the. china effect kind of meltdown or are they out with that well you know they are talking about building a mile long perimeter around the. the wreckage fukushima daichi

which these meltdowns have they don't know where the molten cores are in three of these reactors but you know behind fukushima daichi is this huge mountain range and it's off that mountain range is tremendous amount of groundwater that's been flowing into these basements with these melted cores and then spilling over and back out into the ocean so the idea is to take about sixteen hundred pipes sink them ninety feet into the ground down to bedrock fill it with refrigerant down to minus twenty two degrees fahrenheit and then as the water moves up against these walls of these pipes it'll freeze and then you have an essentially an ice stamp. according to the japanese regulator the nuclear regulatory agency there in japan and they believe that tepco is lying about the. fact of

miss of these this unprecedented technology i mean you can you can use this to freeze under bodies of water you know soil so you can dig a tunnel but it's never been used in this kind of application to shore up against water moving into this radioactive wreckage and so. plus isn't it i mean if the water is passing over the reactor of course the radioactive cores are not maybe literally read up but their damn hot they not only is it the ground water moving off the millions that they have to contend with but they're having to pour water over the. into the wreckage itself to keep the cores cool and we've been doing a lot of heat and you know going to oppose the ice walls and just melt them more well you know again they're they're saying they're making claims that they're going to be able to freeze a wall but you know it might turn out to be just. a slushy yeah and not really an

ice wall at all but again how long and you know that they don't really know so stay tuned all yeah having you know nukes yeah there you go thank you coming up it's time to execute enron i'll explain why in tonight's big picture panel with dave mccall and eleanor goldfield right after the break.

what do you have for breakfast yesterday quietly to put those for. your wife or. donkey. what's your biggest fear a little bit on the hayride when celeste medical board you say if you ever met him so best quarterback. let's point the topic that doesn't belong in the piece now i've interviewed you to question more. the mission of newsworthy is to go to the people tell their side of the story our stories are well sourced we don't hide anything from the public and i don't think the mainstream media in this country can say that i think average viewer. r.t. america has a different perspective so that we're not hearing one echo chamber that mean stream

media is constantly spewing. we're not beholden to any corporate sponsor no one tells us what to cover how long the conference or how to say that's the beauty of archie america. we give both sides we hear from both sides and we question more that's. not letting anything get in your way to bring it home to the american people. why are american right wingers now copying isis and ramming their cars into crowds of people test and it's big picture panel.

with me for the ride big picture panel are dave mccall a national g.o.p. strategist and eleanor goldfield creative activist and host of act out occupy dot com thank you both for being with us it's great and both. so a still unidentified man has been taken into custody after he drove his car into a crowd of marchers last night in st louis actually the night before last those marchers were participating in a protest honoring a local transgender woman who was killed by the police earlier this month wednesday's attacks came just a few weeks after near nazi james lee. fields' jr drove his car into an anti-fascist march in charlottesville virginia killing one person and injuring nineteen is the american right turning into isis. on our. i think i think the comparison is a little difficult to make but do we have a religious right wing extremist in this country a country absolutely and as somebody who is in charlottesville and their feet away from what happened. i can definitely say that the american right is willing and

ready to take lives for their beliefs just like isis is and there are six states that have put up bills that would protect a driver's right to plow into protesters and we can't separate this sort of legislation from the impetus to you know hurt peaceful protesters that are merely exercising their free speech rights so i think the comparison is not necessarily out of place but i think it it also makes it all too easy to take the focus off of what's happening in this country and say like oh it's just these extremists that are like isis and it's actually a much bigger problem that we're seeing across the country to say that the american right is a terrorist no bill that's absurd the one difference i would draw is. you know the guy who drove the car into another hire. all of these people they're not willing to kill themselves the difference the isis guys are willing to kill themselves in the

commission of a mass act of mass murder right wing terrorists who have committed as many murders as muslim terrorists in the united states over the last twenty years are not willing to kill them so that i can include religious belief whether or not i don't see a difference whether or not ones that want to martyr themselves or not for their cause whether it's on the right or whether it's isis or whatever it is in the name of all of whatever terrorists or terrorist whether what you call them right wingers because they are right wingers ok great that's like saying that that all all muslims are bad are terrorists or they're like isis all. we are all conservatives or republicans are somehow terrorists no that's offensive that's offensive to what i think a lot of the country well i mean i'm sorry that is not the same thing as a conservative there are two different ok so i'm right wingers make me a terrorist i just said right wing extremist i don't think you're hearing the words that are coming out of my amount of credit so the second time first i know you i think the implication was there are trying to say that all republicans are all right we're only what i'm trying to say i was saying that right wing extremists are

incredibly dangerous vigilante what violence has been on the rise in this country for decades the southern poverty law center counted nine hundred seventeen extremist white nationalist groups and that's just the ones that like have facebook pages that's not all the people that agree with them a lot of those people like we saw in boston only fifteen people showed up it's not just fifteen people that agree with them there are far more and that's really what's dangerous dangerous or terrorist in the united states into a domestic or foreign doesn't matter if they're right wing great ok you know what they're bad tourism is better period so you know who you are but while the right wing media was glorified running over protesters for example back in january the daily caller's michael rouse posted a video of trucks and cars bumping into protesters and told his readers study the technique because it may prove useful in the next four years. isis publishes the same stuff in their magazine right. you know it's. terrorism is bad

ok and we have a larger chance of getting killed by a white vigilante in this country than you do by any muslim act a new study out of harvard has confirmed that fossil fuel giant exxon mobil intentionally misled the public for decades about global warming study looked at exxon's internal communications and public statements between one nine hundred seventy seven and two thousand and fourteen and found a stark difference between what they were saying internally and what they were telling the public while eighty percent of internal documents acknowledge that climate change is real and human caused only twelve percent of advertorials did so . with eighty one percent instead expressing doubt about climate change should we bring back the corporate death penalty for companies like exxon or if they're behaving in a way that is going to be destructive to the quality of life or just to life itself enough i agree i mean the general has the power to revoke a corporate charter and i think that exxon has has given reason to revoke that many

times i mean just in the ninety's alone they paid out millions of dollars in corporate settlements for everything from pipeline ruptures to tank spills i mean not to mention exxon valdez i mean they've given plenty of reasons to revoke their corporate charter destroying both people and planet they get huge amounts of subsidies while they cause their actions cause great detriment for the economy and people and yet we pay them to do that i think it's definitely time that we revoke their corporate charter but the question is will that happen in a in a country where revoking that corporate charter comes with so much political baggage at something that most attorney generals if not all of them are unwilling to do you know we used to do this routinely dave up until the eight hundred ninety s. it was just absolutely a couple thousand a year companies would be put out of business because they were failing to function in the public for the public good or in the public you know in a way that promotes the public good which used to be required up until the charter modern era in the eighty's ninety's used to be required that every corporate

charter said that is their first step son's a purpose of her statement of purpose. why not why not clear out some space here open it up let some smaller companies blossom i mean let's have some competition competition is great absolute competition but the idea of if you're doing the idea of a government going into a business say like oh no you're no longer you know you can't do that is why we have the court system this is why you have you know you have congress this is why they can go ask questions congress why they are insured and the courts the courts have been. well. we've had this can't be right now more than half of all federal judges are federalist society people i mean you know during the obama administration mitch mcconnell would not allow bush i think over one hundred federal judges that obama had appointed or wouldn't allow the appointments or wouldn't consider them and so trump has been i think he's got up to thirty seven of them so far is just cranking them through. and that's i don't tend to trust our core that we have a republican mean we have an oligarchy which means the rule by the wealthy and the

wealthy are the the rex tillerson says now this i mean it's absurd so these people are the ones running the government so of course then the government's not going to go in and say that you shouldn't have a charter but also means that we can't trust the government to actually put down laws and regulations that will keep people safe and this isn't just i mean if you don't like people or planet that's fine but a lot of people who don't like people and planet care about the economy while exxon is draining the economy by their actions because we have to pay for their subsidies and then pay out so much money to clean up their mess regardless of the people employed by exxon. let me think i don't have the it doesn't matter i mean people who don't even know it i really enjoy you know how you get to the billion do you know how many people could be employed by green energy i mean the comparison is ridiculous that's like it's like somebody saying well if we didn't have oil spills you wouldn't be able to pay people to clean up oil spills that's an absurd argument these companies make profit off of torturing people and planet and that should stop

if we didn't have an oligarchy it would stop ok so you want to have a government go in and disband an organization oh but you don't trust govern the first place to be able to say i don't like the laws government to do that i don't think that they will but should a government that is an actual republic should it do that would it do that yes but we don't have a republic i would argue that exxon mobil has broken many of our laws many times and so then sue them and you know what that's that and that's the problem then they just pay it out and they take it out of their you know out of their stockholders dividends and it's no big deal. it's just the cost of doing business that is just and you know i think it's time for you know i'm a big fan of the death penalty at the corporate level i don't like killing people for a life or a shuffle corporate donald trump's labor department delayed for a second straight time the implementation of the so-called fiduciary rule the fiduciary rule which was put in place by former president obama requires retirement account managers to act in the best interest of the people whose money they manage

it prevents them from wind to their customers about how much of a commission for example they're making on your investments it was supposed to go to a fact back in april but an earlier delay by the trump administration push pushed its start back to the middle of twenty eight eighteen after this much second delay it won't go into effect until twenty nineteen so the trumpet ministrations excuse is that they need more time to read research the fiduciary rules impact on markets but all the research was done years ago by trying to keep it legal for your banker to lie to you about your retirement investments are just trying to find cover for an obvious favor they're doing for steve banks or buddies was draining the swamp the biggest scam in election history dave. i will say that when the president first came in and promised to drain the swamp kind of looks like that may not have happened but we're going to see little bit more of it one of the big things about this particular rule is not and i'm not suggesting that it's a bad thing what i'm suggesting is that the portion where is it talks about. for

a. fair compensation if that's the actual term fair compensation it's not well defined and a lot of the banker people have questions about then whether or not it's actually a legal thing they can do so yeah ok so there may be some questions about all this all this rule requires is transparency there's a lot more to it than if. transparency is a good thing you know i completely agree but there are some aspects of this that i have been to do with fair compensation as that term applies i what i mean you know i have no idea and i don't know what you're talking about what i'm talking about is that part of the fiduciary rule that says that if i'm your stockbroker and this is your retirement funds and frankly i think this should apply to all money because this is now this is just applied to people's retirement funds the hippocratic oath for money but it's exact i think you know if i'm your general investment guy i can't lie to you about you know hey i put in this fund because it pays me a three percent commission and so this fund which will do twice as well for you but it only pays be a one percent commission the issue is is the government says that you have to be

compensated fairly for for transaction fees and stuff like that and what that's defined as it's kind of ugly but it has to be disclosed to the customer so the customer is going to have something to say about what's fair. i mean i will say that i'm not an expert on this i haven't read up on it as much as it sounds like both of you have but i will go back to what i said in the earlier comment is that we have an oligarchy and that we are ruled by wall street and i mean we've seen this for and it's not just republicans i mean democrats are just as owned by corporate money and wall street as republicans are but it's very clear that when wall street wants something then they will push it through and you basically have a company as your president so and wall street and big corporations and us when we are hillary clinton have been just as bad. and no one are not great having both you . both here with us thank you and that's the way it is tonight and don't forget democracy is not a spectator sport get out there get active tag your. your

launching an r t america special report and they love the stuff you installed me as well that's bad basically everything that you think you know about civil society have broken down. there's always going to be somebody else one step ahead of the

game. we should not be the smallest of the normalising minds. we don't need people that think like this on our planet. this is an incredibly tense situation. which the hawks founded by three young americans who love their country but we have to constantly question our government watching the hawks brings the stories the give voice to the voice. we dig a little deeper we get the stories that the average one else is afraid to touch is afraid to talk about because they don't want to upset their corporate sponsors or interrupt their government access now is the time more than ever we made to question more. we're in this post truth world current world words have to matter

again it's about educating people and giving them contacts instead of telling them what to make dialogue is far more valuable than to make. our culture is a washington. it's dominated by streams of never ending electronic hallucinations that. fiction until they are indistinguishable becomes the most diluted society on politics it's a species of endless and needless political theater politicians more than just celebrity are two ruling parties are in reality one part corporate and those who attempt to function is. run through the universal to be designed to push through that lead to an exploitation of the little or force so far to the margins of

society including by a public broadcasting system that has sold it sold for corporate money that we might as well be squeaky against an album when. we lost. on the news tonight further details are slow the emerging about the las vegas shooting case as the nation gears up for another debate on gun control and security and turkey threatens to blockade iraqi kurdistan as saudi arabia's king visits moscow and agreed to by the advanced four hundred missile defense system and the struggle between barcelona and madrid continues as spain's government suspends a set a session of the catalan parliament. i'm going to chance sitting in for edge tonight in washington d.c. you're watching our team america. including

we start tonight in las vegas where the investigation into sunday night's shooting continues while americans are mourning the tragedy officials are already rethinking the security situation in the city and throughout the country artie's natasha has more for us live from las vegas. i will as investigators are still trying to seek a motive from stephen paddock authorities have found his some of his last steps they found out in addition to the to rooms that he rented at the mandalay bay hotel this past weekend at his rented other rooms overlooking other hotels. thank you after sunday's horrific massacre. there's a painful silence in the nation's party capital very meticulously planned well planned somewhere like that is hard to stop tommy burns retired henderson police chief who now runs a security consulting company.