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Endowment's nuclear power program and he joins me now. james, let's start where bob just left off, which is whether or not there is water in these storage pools that contain the spent nuclear fuel rods. as i understand it, this is absolutely critical. because when you're talking about the spent fuel rods, there's a higher concentration of them, because it was in a reactor that wasn't operating at time of the earthquake, and the fact that you don't have as much of a containment vessel around them. i mean, potentially, this could be catastrophic. >> well, good afternoon, savannah. and these spen...

That's the spent fuel rods that were sitting in those storage pools. they were still hot, still radioactive. now do you know where they are? >> they are in the building. they are slightly below the place where the explosion took place. almost like we lost half -- we lost the facade of an old west movie theater, you know? you go and take a look at an old western like "gunsmoke." the buildings are here and there's a big facade on the building to make it look taller. that facade is gone. that was actually the attic where some of the gases and vapors were pumped up into. that's where the explosion...

Informed the hill is that once that pool -- that fuel is uncovered by the water -- see, the water serves to both keep it cool and as a form radiation shielding. >> right. >> so if the spent fuel sun covered, then the radiation nearby becomes life-threatening. >> robert, the obvious followup -- we were just talking about this yesterday, is this was a concern yesterday as well with the spent fuel rods and they had talked about sending in the helicopters and dousing these storage pools with cold water, but those helicopters had to bail because of the steam coming up. the steam was full of radiati...

The world. and certainly across theç country, in storage pools without containment. there is no long-term storage. there isn't even an idea of how to store these things long term. and what we're talking about, and when you watch the images of the japan disaster, when you see explosions at nuclear -- at power plants or if these storage pools, they are emitting large amounts of high-level nuclear waste materials. radioactive materials that get blown by the wind, and they are ingested. alpha emitter radiation is ingested as you breathe, and unfortunately it takes so long in most cases for cance...

Surrounding these spent fuel rods that are not even in containment buildings. what we are now experiencing is the potential of the nuclear nightmare that we have known all along, and frankly the utilities have known it all along, which is why they required congress in 1957 to pass the price/anderson act which sets limits on liability in case of a nuclear accidents like this. they also had maximum credibility accident studies that showed if you have a meltdown like we are seeing in japan from the core meltdown or from the release of these storage pools, the maximum credibility accident that jim...