Galen Winsor: The Nuclear Scare Scam

America's promise brings you the nuclear scare scam with galen windsor here to introduce mr windsor is pastor ben i'm pleased to have as our guest mr galen windsor from richland washington i first heard of galen from a tape that somebody gave to me some months ago and i found his story to Be absolutely fascinating his story is unique to say the least galen has been in 77 different cities in the last two years lecturing on the subject of nuclear energy the majority of his life the last 35 years he spent processing plutonium from nuclear reactor

sites he has worked in the manhattan project Facilities in hanford washington oak ridge national laboratories and nuclear plant in oak ridge tennessee general electric's midwest fuel recovery plant in morris illinois general electric's fuel fabrication facility in san jose california and wilmington north carolina and he's worked in every major reactor decommissioning project around this nation up to this Present time his major work in these projects has been the analytical process inventory control which means that he was responsible for measuring and controlling the nuclear fuel inventory for these projects galen windsor has few peers in the world

in this area of expertise and those few peers admittedly know and agree with the things that You'll be hearing on this tape however except for two or three of these experts they've all chosen to remain silent for reasons which they only know leaving this man then the burden of leading this lonely battle of exposing what we call the nuclear scare scam he's without question one of the world's foremost authorities in nuclear radiation measurement And he's recognized by members of the atomic energy commissions of all the major nations of the free world mr galen windsor god

bless you thank you ben we've been considering today how best to approach this subject so that you would feel comfortable with where i am and we thought it might be appropriate to start with how i got involved in this Game now in 1945 i was a navy radio man out in the pacific on a destroyer aim for japan we had a one-way ticket that's all you get just one way so as we uh we're becoming proficient at our business of fighting war The manhattan project caught up with us and did a job now the weapon

that was dropped on hiroshima japan in august 6 1945 was a u-235 fully enriched u-235 weapon where the material was separated and purified in oak ridge tennessee the one that was dropped august 9th on nagasaki was a plutonium weapon made at hanford But to those of us out in the pacific it was quite interesting it had a ticket on it it says you get to go home i was impressed now i was stuck out on guam after the hostilities quit and was running a radio broadcast that communicated with 4 500 ships west of pearl harbor

quite a few to listen to every dot and Dash that i made so i was used to having people listen to me they couldn't see me because they could sure hear me i had all the good messages that were to come to them fleet movements to red cross messages they came along one day and says we'd like to have radioman to go down to anawitak for the atomic bomb test not me No way i want to go home so they went through and they took every third radio men to go to anawi talk i didn't

go they let me come home but i wanted to go home i had a driving need within me that says hey that big firecracker i want to know how it works i want to know everything about How it works so back to the ranch in nevada where i grew up and stacked hay all summer getting back to 40 pounds that i'd lost out there in the islands into brigham young university the fall of 46 in chemistry classes dr joseph nichols could make an old farm kid like me love chemistry And had any chemistry in high

school but the way joe nichols started i wanted to know so chemistry it was and some neat guys like carl lyring taught me physics and long in 47 i ran across acute blonde from richland washington now this girl had been telephone operator For general leslie groves and dr enrico fermi on the manhattan project she got to put through the calls to franklin delano roosevelt for these guys so she talked personally to fdr and she told me some of the stories like you've never heard she says oh in those canyons great things are done this cowboy

from nevada couldn't even imagine what she was talking about well In 1947 after we were married i see i ran until she caught me that i wasn't going to get married anyway i wanted to get my education i had to get on with this thing and so we went to richland washington for the first time in september of 1947. i saw that those buildings she was talking about were there 1000 feet long 11 stories high five of them below ground tremendous things And people all over camp hanford in those days was a whole army camp

just there to secure that place to provide security thousands of soldiers you move around out in the desert and hop out of a foxhole and pop a soldier with a gun in his hand there wasn't any horse around it was all business back to school in 1950 I applied for a job up there before i had graduated and they were in such bad need a chemist i had a job before i had my degree and so the last year my chemistry mostly english i did on a bus riding 25 miles to work in the morning

and 25 miles back at night and i did advanced grammar and business riding and all those things on that bus but in september 1950 i got into this Thing called plutonium processing when we did it bare-handed without instruments without coveralls we had some of the most peculiar acid burns and some of the shirts and i found one of those the other day it's got acid burns all up the front of it plutonium on it too amazing that was normal operation in those days We ran those facilities and we ran them so well that by 1965

we had separated enough plutonium when it only existed in the parent uranium matrix to a half of a single weight percent .005 weight fraction of plutonium maximum in that fuel and we processed enough tons of uranium To recover enough plutonium by 1965 to meet the weapons needs of this country ten times over for the foreseeable future now we're talking about a massive amount of work hands on do it type thing and there was a couple thousand of us and we were just as happy as could be just working like mad making those Plants run 24

hours a day seven days a week in a community that ran on shift work a b c d shift the whole community that way a war time community people dedicated to doing a job and we were doing it and we did it well no pretense oh yes there were out in the reactor began to sneak in people who wanted a radiation monitor Behind every reactor operator why we know how to make these things run when we got a metal fuel element stuck and it fell down on the trampoline back of the reactor we'd go in

with our feet and kick it off into the pool smoking burning if you didn't have an instrument you didn't know it was too hot so you just went in and kicked it Finally along came a rule maker that says thou shalt not do that you'll get burned oh i didn't get burned when i did it last week but you exceeded the limit well where did this limit come from turns out that in 1934 the international commission on radiation protection Fabricated a limit for x-rays it was no longer permissible to be burned by them erythema reddening

of the skin you now had to keep a limit called two-tenths of an hour per day how much is that well you've got to have one of these beckman instruments to read it And you have to keep time of exposure you know there are four requirements on this thing the size of the source the therefore the strength of the source the distance from the source the time of exposure and the intervening shielding to keep from getting burned oh fine we've been doing this thing for years Now and we've never been burned why we got these

rules and he says yours is not to ask questions yours is to do and die don't you ask questions if you do you might disappear those who broke the rules didn't appear the next day military rule oh yes absolute what was your appeal and people you were working with one day When they weren't there the next day you didn't go inquire why you're just grateful you still had your work to do and you kept right on doing it now this is in the united states of america well in 1960 we found out that the materials

that we were working with the thing that we called high level waste that if you Waited three years these million gallon tanks that high level waste went into boiled off 15 000 gallons of water a day fairly hot oh yes this material that if it ever broke a line would seal itself off in the ground within a foot make its own glass it wasn't going to go any place we did that a time or two accidentally Of course and so we started packaging this cesium 137 in cass and railroad cars like that and shipping it

to oak ridge tennessee and they'd take it out and make it into a barium titanate and press it into a pellet and those things were so hot that they actually glowed in the dark from the infrared heat now Thermo ionic conversions came along at this time so you hook these little heat sources up to thermionic converters and you took electricity out this side no moving parts these things went into the snap program and these uh early snap power generators are what power the underwater transmitters for our nuclear Navy we've got a regular road map under

the sea all you got to do is have an instrument that knows how to find it and then you've got eyes on a submarine you didn't know that did you the power from it came from this material that they now call waste we processed that stuff and packaged it outside at hanford well we had rules that said 3r per year is your allowable exposure That amount of gamma energy that will expose a film pack but that was for the people that didn't know we weren't about to follow those rules we just went ahead and did

the job they sent around an investigation slip that says your dosimeter was overexposed two weeks ago what did you do and they had a cute little form on it that says accidentally exposed the light And that was the one i always used to check because it's the same amount of light you know if you get gamma through the film pack it's the same amount of light as you get when you click the limbs on a camera they wanted to limit us to that and one day we looked up and they had they had limited us

to that amount of exposure Then the fun part of the game begins you say who limited this to that are they powerful yeah they control the purse strings live by the golden rule them that's got the gold makes the rules if you like your work you keep the rules if you don't keep the rules you disappear Sure enough some of us disappeared some of my friends gone where'd they go i don't know well two years ago i started traveling for american opinion speakers bureau and one of the documents that they had was major jordan's diary

a story of shipping the technology and the material that was developed at hanford in 1944 directly to russia On u.s air force planes out through great falls montana fairbanks alaska under the auspices of one harry hopkins and with the at least tacit approval of franklin delano roosevelt now what are you going to do that thing that we had been doing and feeling so good about had been shared at no expense with russia you go back and you check the record and You find russia did not develop their own nuclear atomic weapon until 1949 even when

we supplied them the material and the knowledge four years after we touched them off hiroshima and nagasaki we weren't happy with that we were just happy doing our job well in 1965 general electric was ready to leave hanford i'd worked for general electric for that 15 years And they took me out to california san jose and we had in mind to design and build this nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at morris illinois they told me they're going to build it at san luis obispo that's how they got me away from hanford but that was just to

get me away from hanford i got to design the sampling analytical system for this plant the sample cell Was the hydraulic heart of this place i got to dictate where they put the columns how high the columns were in relation to my sample cell one man standing in front of a lead glass window could sample any liquid stream in that whole plant it took crews of men at hanford to do the same thing i wasn't happy with that so i built an efficient system i got to design that i Got to build it conceptual design

detail design build it operationally test it in 1973 this says forget it friends you don't get to run it we had 170 tons metric tons of spent fuel stored in the basin and the then president of the united states do you remember who it was jerry ford says huh friends no way you don't get to run it That's when i started to kick over the traces up to that point of time i thoroughly enjoyed my work i had no limitations practical limitations i had all the money to spend i was in charge of the design

effort i built it the way that i wanted to because it was technically correct all i had to do was check with engineers and make sure that it was right and all of a sudden i was told you must Reduce your limits of exposure by a factor of 10. i said huh i won't do it first thing you know you got the word that says oh yes you will i says no way well that's when the rebel galen windsor started to show up and when i found out that by management conference i couldn't get to

these guys i figured out another way now in this pool is in this plant is a Beautiful pool it's got uh place to store spent fuel bundles so it won't stop six hundred and sixty thousand gallons of water demineralized just as clear and pretty as it can be heated to 100 degrees fahrenheit when the outside temperatures were -20 wind chill factors down to a minus 60 and i found out that i could swim in that rascal You turn off the lights at night and it had a light blue karenkov effect and this kid from nevada

that never could pass up a warm swimming hole used to go swimming in that pool there wasn't anybody that had the nerve to swim with me but since i was manager of safety and analytical services this plant it was mine to use oh boy I found out that i could do that i showed some financial types one time that i could stir that pool with my bare hand and check out through the same radiation monitors they did without triggering it ge didn't like it i got a letter from him that says thou shalt not tell

financial types that you can swim in the pool that you can stir it with your hand because if they find that out they will Steal the inventory they will know that the inventory can be stolen oh is that an invaluable inventory the same material that's labeled high-level waste by our current government our current congress now plutonium is an interesting chemical element it is created in a nuclear reactor the manhattan project built eight of These reactors at hanford the first one took 12 months from sagebrush to nuclear steam to build and had never been done in

that size before how could they do that why did they do it to create this element called plutonium plutonium has been assessed as being the most hazardous Material on earth now from the standpoint that you can make an atomic weapon out of it yes it is quite hazardous because a piece of it that big two and a half kilograms that's only five pounds is the force that delivered 20 000 Tons of tnt equivalent over nagasaki indeed it is hazardous the one over hiroshima that had fully enriched u-235 in it was five times as big so

plutonium is more dangerous than u-235 is it not by a factor of five it takes five times as much u-235 as it does plutonium therefore it is the most hazardous thing Enter the great pretenders they said that five grams of plutonium properly distributed over the face of the earth would kill everybody on earth now if you can only get one 20 kiloton weapon to go on 2500 grams how's 5 grams going to kill everybody on earth early on i had a fear that said if there is this much fissile material that that can undergo A

chain reaction we called it in the beginning then if you set a match to it all the fissile material in the world is just going to keep right on going totally unfounded fear it turns out that when you're in this business recovering plutonium like we recovered so much of it at hanford we found out that if you have it in a solution where it's less than five Percent plutonium it won't go critical any way that you kick it and when you get it to a hundred percent plutonium you better be careful because if you put

it in more than a five inch diameter cylinder you're playing with fire you can undergo what is known as an uncontrolled criticality accidental criticality the air turns blue if the price if the Cylinder is sealed it will explode from steam pressure and that steam pressure builds up in a millisecond which is about that long no you don't horse with it and then you find out that those eight foot thick shielding walls on those canyons were put there because they didn't know how much was a critical mass he says if we make a mistake we don't

Want to die so we will provide the shielding and so the shielding thing started for no other reason than they didn't know what was a critical mass well through the years we got pretty good at telling what a critical mass was and i have worked in a plant where i had half a critical mass in this hand bare-handed dressed in street clothes half in this hand wearing a lab coat and i'd put this half In a pocket on this side and this half in a pocket on this side and walk down the hall if those

two ever got together there would be a blue flash they never got together because i was in between them and we do that every day and each half had to meet definite dimension characteristics and so we'd take them down and pass them one half at a time and they'd measure and say yeah that Will pass and then we'd pass them the other half and that will pass too but they were carefully put in separate bird cages so they couldn't get together accidentally well those of us who worked with it enjoyed it we knew what we

were doing we worked at it when the president united states decided not to operate that fuel reprocessing plant i started scrambling to find out what Was going on many things have been done in the name of health and safety don't get burned you got to have safety record you have to be safer than anybody else we were already safer than anybody in the whole world well you can't get forward to get burned with this you've got to enforce the limits you've got to keep it and i says hey that's not what the ball Game is

at all i'll bet you the ball game is something else and in 1982 when the congress passed the nuclear waste policy act of 1982 a guy by the name of udall i don't know whether you people in arizona have ever heard of him or not authored that bill it's called the high-level waste disposal act of 1982. the material he called waste Is the reusable uranium fuel that i had been working on for 32 years needless to say mo udall and i do not agree on whether that material is waste or not the name of the

game then is who owns the plutonium and how much is it worth the government says bury it three thousand feet deep in basalt and we'll Hold a contest among the states to see who gets to bury it oh why do you want to bury it did you ask the owners who is the owner of the plutonium may i submit that it's most likely the nuclear power rate payer he has paid for the mining the fabrication of the parent uranium power generation And is being charged in advance for its burial if you're paying for it to

whom does it belong how much is it worth in inflated dollars a ton of reusable uranium fuel contains useful metal isotopes worth upwards of 10 million dollars a ton mo udall says it's high-level waste the value of reusable uranium fuel Scheduled for permanent disposal probably exceeds the national debt naturally occurring plutonium quantities and you know plutonium does occur naturally plutonium-244 is found at the residual activities of the several eight at least oklo phenomenon reactors across the world first one found at gabon africa Naturally occurring plutonium quantities have been enhanced by transmutation of uranium that's the

reason we built reactors in the first place our ability to detect and measure emissions from these elements is useful in inventory control when fissile elements fissile isotopes are present at less than five weight percent plutonium-239 Equivalent and the heavy metal oxide matrix is stored dry in air it has no critical mass remember we talked about shielding was because they didn't know what a critical mass was if it is light water reactor fuel less than five percent equivalent Fissile content you can handle it you can do anything you want with it you can stack it up

you can have a room full you can have a handful as long as you keep it dry it will not sustain a chain reaction what then is all this fault or all about a little bit five grams will kill everybody in the world they don't know what they're talking About and when they say that they're thumbing their nose at measurement experts like galen windsor i am insulted when they say those things and get away with it because it has no bearing on the truth it cannot be mishandled it will not expose any person to an

unshielded nuclear reaction in other words no controls are necessary except to prevent the pilferage of the inventory Have you got that one let it register do you need governmental rules and regulations and instructions no way then why do we have all of those rules inventory control practices capitalized on the fear of under educated masses who work in the industry i didn't say anything about ordinary people now i'm talking about the people who have worked In the industry and those who cast stones from without the ralph naders the jane fondas now it doesn't take you much

thinking to find out that maybe the industry is the source of the problem the industry is the one that made up the committees that made the rules that the congress enforced you ever thought of it that way the strangest kind of feather bedding That's ever been dreamed up it makes the railroad engineers look like pikers the only amounts of fissile process materials that are of health concern to the handlers are those that can accidentally cause an unshielded nuclear chain reaction or that will cause erythema from the shortest wavelength highest frequency and therefore the most easily

shielded ultraviolet light emissions of the Electromagnetic spectrum big words let's see what they mean the emissions from uranium plutonium cesium all of those things are only important if you assemble an amount that if you get this amount and this amount together it can go critical you can get a blue flash and therefore get burned and that's happened 34 times In the business and eight men have died as a result of that accidental criticality documented in los alamos document 3611. if you want to check the source or if you've got enough of it together that it's

giving off ultraviolet light of this particular wavelength and frequency without any intervening shielding enough to burn you sunburn you erythema Reddening of the skin if it's less than that if the effect is less than that then what is the problem excessive government regulation that's what's the problem tritium heavy heavy water deuterium is hydrogen two tritium is hydrogen three if you let an inventory get away from you what's going to happen to it out in The biosphere nothing other than it will become diluted and join the naturally occurring inventory of tritium because tritium is created in

the upper atmosphere by sunlight we have a natural inventory of tritium then the only thing that happens when you release tritium which is the trigger mechanism for bombs it's the source of the push that makes it go Is that you lost a valuable inventory then what of these people that are pretending that a little bit of tritium is going to do you in it is not so what are those two points only if it is an economically recoverable concentration or if it has a natural reconcentration mechanism you know there isn't any one of the Radioisotopes

out there that has a meaningful level of reconcentration in any of the species not even the oysters in the bays in maryland below calvert cliffs why then are we still playing this game that any amount of this material is of hazard reusable uranium fuel which has been isotopically enhanced in power producing reactors Is a valuable national resource not a high level waste the utility operators recognize the future worth of this commodity mo udall in that nuclear waste policy act of 1982 imposed a tribute of a mill per kilowatt hour a dollar per megawatt hour on

all electricity produced in a nuclear plant so that they can research and develop methods to throw it away Why do the utilities willingly pay this amount to the secretary of energy to limit their liability exposure who pays that amount anyway the consumer of nuclear generated power you have no choice and therefore i call it a tribute at the same time they have provided their own storage basins at these reactors at ratepayers expense to retain ownership control of the plutonium Resource so you consumer you ratepayer you taxpayer are paying for the storage of this fuel and

wnp2 at hanford has storage that will take them through the turn of the century and yet every day they are paying a tribute to the secretary of energy with the concurrence of the united states congress and signed by the president of the United states in 1982 83 who was that ronald reagan they have provided those storage basin at ratepayer expense to retain ownership control of the plutonium resource i started playing a game one day seven years ago i says okay portland general electric you've got the trojan reactor you've got a storage basin problem i'm Going

to make you an offer i made them an offer that says i will take all of your spent fuel fob your basin if you will give it to me in other words i will take it off your hands at no expense to you i will ship it i will store it i will do everything that needs to be done to that fuel you know what they told me Can i quote them go to hell galen windsor we value it more valuable than platinum or gold we're going to play the plutonium futures ourselves now where did

i learn that the name of the game is who owns the plutonium and how much is it worth the first plutonium i saw was in a glass tube on the newsreel When i got back from the pacific in 1946 and that that they had in a glass test tube they said was worth a half a million dollars certainly they had less than five grams of plutonium in that tube that's pretty expensive stuff and so for the show they put a pot underneath it in case they dropped it they said we we'd want to have to

pick it up out of the rug when we Decided when it was decided for us not to operate this plant plutonium was guaranteed on buyback by the federal government at 43 dollars a gram that's quite a price drop don't you think when that price guarantee went away in october of 1971 the price of plutonium became ten dollars a gram It steadily went down to where its present worth on the market is a minus two dollars a gram per year that's what it costs you to hold on to a plutonium inventory on a material that has

been declared worthless by the utility owners and rubber stamped by the congress of the united states and they're spending billions of dollars digging hole in ordinary rock so that they can throw it away dispose Of it okay what are you going to do with it reusable uranium fuel may be properly stored in air-cooled dry storage in a cost-effective manner nukem in germany offers this immediate and long-term option as a necessary and safe step prior to reprocessing they're doing it in europe at least four recently located facilities are available in the united States where this concept

can be used right now barnwell nuclear fuel plant in south carolina midwest fuel recovery plant in morris illinois this one nuclear fuel services in upstate new york and redox processing plant at hanford washington these fully shielded already Radioactively contaminated storage areas have secure limited access all have been operated under processing conditions of 10 cfr 50 and the mfrp has a 10 cfr 70 storage license the only licensed storage facility away from a reactor in the united states it singly all by itself is capable of storing all of the Reusable uranium fuel that needs to be

moved away from power reactors for the remainder of this century we had that storage designed in 1975 had the approval of the design why then are you spending money over here in new mexico on the waste isolation project why are you spending money at hanford at the basalt waste isolation project why are you spending money at baiting nevada For storage when i can already store it in this building that's already built i just named you three others that can do the job all by themselves too and i know where there's 14 more buildings that can

do it what are we going to do redox and other excess facilities at hanford are capable of dry storing all commercial raf until plutonium recycle at least through 5 enrichment is Re-established or until the 22nd century whichever comes first ruf can be cost effectively stored in existing facilities whereas mo udall came off then saying that you cannot use this plant for its intended purpose unless it is owned by the united states government he has said that the waste isolation projects are politically mandated wasting Of national energy and construction resources plutonium proliferation by diversion of stored

reusable uranium fuel is of minor importance compared to global availability of fully enriched uranium by laser isotopic separation let me explain that last thing that i said jimmy carter said you can't ship plutonium to india but in the same paragraph said you may Ship them fully enriched uranium oh jimmy carter that peanut brain what did he just say he says that when the israelis took out the reactor in iraq they had fully enriched uranium from france and he says those rascals those iraqis are going to take that fully enriched uranium put it in that reactor

or radiate it to plutonium and therefore have to recover the plutonium in a plant like this and we stop them When the fully enriched uranium makes a better weapon than the plutonium in the first place now when the president united states says things like that and when the press gives it credibility i get insulted and right after i get insulted i get angry and i've been angry for quite a while now and finally one day i said my own personal security is not Important i think i'll go tell this tale all i want is to

tell my story the commodity that i communicate is called truth and so then i ask you a question a very brief pointed question who owns the plutonium and how much is it worth and then i'm going to attach on to that a question i want you to think about Till we talk again if you haven't been burned by this particular source of radiation what is your problem you obviously have one otherwise you would join with me and telling the truth about this particular commodity and so yes i'm recruiting helpers what happened to the guys Who

taught me the business thousands of them the hands-on business where are they they're still there why don't they talk who are the they that say this is the way the business is going to be run whether it makes sense or not we're back with galen windsor And we're talking about the nuclear scare it seems to me that from what i've heard you say that the scaring of the people is better than a lock and key to keep this stuff out of the hands of those who might be interested in investigating and keeping this valuable material

hidden for just an elite few This is probably the way that it works best and so then the secret was to keep from letting other people know that it could be handled because first of all we weren't accepted by the community and the materials that we were working with they feared but there were certain few people that realized its real worth its potential to be used in ways other than to support our national defense let me Ask you a question galen are you are you worried about your do you have reason to be worried about

your personal safety because the kind of people that you're describing here are powerful people i wonder you're still around i wonder how much longer we can expect you to be in this game well On the 13th of december last year the nrc nuclear regulatory commission region 5 turned out a federal swat team to get me on a federal warrant issued by bob thomas out of walnut creek california it was kind of funny in a way they turned out this federal swat team at hanford and they add my picture and alongside it says this is an

irrational individual he poses a threat to our security take Him at any cost now the reason that i'm still here only has one logical conclusion i have lots of help well you've told us about how that you and others of your friends and colleagues have handled many times this so-called deadly nuclear energy Material that the whole world is so scared of why weren't you afraid of it because we did silly things like recover some of the undissolved fuel elements out of the redox dissolver that burned a hole in it and we went in and sampled

these things by remote process we got it out into our hands and found out that we could walk around the lab with them bare-handed and they wouldn't Hurt us and we were standing there in the lab tossing them back and forth uranium metal that wouldn't dissolve in the boiling nitric acid well if you find out that you can play with it and it was only 90 days since that thing came out of the reactor and it doesn't burn you why should you be afraid of it so in other words you're telling me that you learned

to not be afraid of it Because of practical use and application and hands-on experience hands-on we might even been playing games okay you say that you swam in this water that was straight from spent fuel used to cool that fuel and you're swaming it yup you told me earlier that you went a little a little bit beyond that would you share A little bit of that story well swimming in it didn't have the desired effect so i decided i had to be more direct with these people that were giving me trouble they were kind of

hard to teach so i went to drinking a glass of it a day i had the bottle of it last time i went swimming why i filled this two liter bottle with water and washed it off on the outside in the shower when i washed me off on the Outside so that we didn't tattletail you know radioactive material is just a trace or a tattletale so you got to get it off so they won't know that you've been swimming in the pool and drinking the water so i took this bottle in and set it on

my desk and who would suspect that the manager of safety and analytical service had a bottle of spent fuel pool water sitting on his destiny drank a glass of it every day This was unheard of nobody ever did that crazy stuff before how's that affected you uh galen well as near as i can tell it made me about six foot four in my cowboy boots 210 pounds and really quite a nice fellow all right what then happened as a result of your doing this strange experiment on your desk with this water what was the Result

can corporations have a heart attack i think general electric had one because after they ran me through a whole body gamma scan in december of 1974 by the time i got out because i had a plutonium lung burden and it took 45 minutes to an hour to count that everybody on site knew that the manager of safety had been swimming and drinking in the swimming Pool the spent fuel storage pool had cesium 137 at a ferociously high level it even exceeded the nrc's limit and i'd been drinking it they knew the fat was in the

fire now where do we go from here well first of all i got a poison pen letter from the people in san jose and he says thou shalt not do those things They'll find out that the inventory can be stolen well that didn't set very well with this cowboy because nobody tells me what to do particularly when what i do is right and hasn't harmed me who are they to tell me what i want to do it just didn't set very well i was going to do something about that what was your motive in this

Correct information as an expert in the measuring system why it was very obvious that i knew the parameters of inventory control the disintegration rate of each of these isotopes how to measure them that's how we regulated our inventory and to have these rascals come along and start playing games with the information that i was very expert in that i had designed the analytical system for this plant around disturbed me a little bit Now it made me fighting mad and i got angry and i have to admit in retrospect that for the next five six years

i was more than angry i was hard to live with just ask my wife well in your estimation then how dangerous is a nuclear reactor plant a nuclear reactor plant is just a way to boil water that's the cleanest neatest Most economical way to boil water that you've ever seen and so in my estimation nuclear reactors ought to be insured under the same insurance policy as any other steam boiler plant power generating plant and to have special consideration under the price anderson act means that the insurance industry has already paid off the congress so that

they can have a rip-off Charging ever and higher and higher insurance premiums total coverage much much greater for a non-existent risk what a racket can a nuclear plants explode only like any other steam plant like laughlin nevada had a steam explosion it's coal-fired plant but six men were killed There last year that could happen at a nuclear plant but as far as an atomic explosion good heavens no no way what kind of accidents can actually happen at a nuclear reactor generator plant you could lose your moderator and the reactor shut down the control rods would

stick in and you wouldn't be able to start it up you might Do several things that would invalidate some of the safety controls for instance an emergency car cooling system the only reason they put eccs on a reactor is to destroy it when you start these big babies up because they're so big you only warm them up 50 degrees an hour and they say we got an emergency throw the emergency car cooling system on like they did at three mile island too And you're going to thermally shock that big machine and ruin it so it

can never be used again let's talk about three mile three mile island what what really happened there that we've heard all kinds of stories about meltdown and uh they made movies on it uh that this meltdown could melt right through the earth clear through china and and we've seen a lot of scare stories What really happened to three miles do you know what really happened there yes i do i followed that one very closely in fact i know the guys personally who wrote the script for china syndrome and also wrote the script for the three

mile island fiasco dale brydenbaugh dick hubbard and greg miner who used to work with me at general electric or the mbh associates that wrote that china syndrome script and not only that remember that was the Time china syndrome came out jane fonda starring 14 months ahead of the tmi2 accident it was predicted in writing in new york state that that accident would happen one year from the date that that three mile island two reactor started up it started up in march 1978 and it went down march 28 1979 right on the day one year anniversary

in other words with 14 months advance notice the industry still went along with the sham nothing happened there except that the owner the operator and the regulators conspired to turn it off what melted the top of the fuel rods the third time that the core got uncovered due to internal pressure blew the top off some of those rods they've got in-canal springs in them to keep the pellets fuel pellets from vibrating when It's running those things are under compression and when they reduce the outside pressure and the fuel rods were still hot it blew the

top off some of those fuel rods the fuel rods in tmi2 are internally pressurized to about 1200 psi with helium gas so that they don't reverse dent when they're hot and running for five years and when they drop the outside pressure why that internal pressure with those Hot rods blew aside out of some of those rods at the top but melting the fuel is already an oxide ceramic it is a pellet it's been pressed into a ceramic when you pick it up and feel it it feels like metal it's pressed so very very tight hard

and so no the fuel didn't melt the chyna syndrome is a script writer's Fantasy uh right here how to tell a story i guess see i spent three weeks on the island in march of 1981 the two-year anniversary of this particular quote accident and tom hall who stood alongside enrico fermi when they pulled the control rods on 100b in october 1944 at hanford and i were delegated to go to the island and find out what happened and so we did We went over all of the records and everything else and there's we could tell from

performance records 51 thermocouples for instance only one of which went over a thousand degrees fahrenheit the center line temperature of those rods when they're running is 4032 degrees fahrenheit and so they say things like over 50 percent of the core was greater than 4000 degrees yes it was if it wasn't it Wasn't running at 100 power so they take that kind of information and bugger it all up so that you don't understand what's going on they give you a little bit of it well the worst joke that people could dream up and they says do

you know what the nrc's worst nightmare is no i don't know what that is galen windsor and tom hall in the tmi2 control room for an hour by Themselves you know why people that know laugh these crazy guys from hanford would have started that baby up and showed that it would run we just started it up and they were afraid of us so there was no accident at three mile island no they did it on purpose share it out very interesting Can nuclear radiation cause mutation in people and animals if a cell gets too much

radiation it dies and so if it is a sperm or an oversight why they die they don't reproduce and there are no mutations i think the good lord built that safety factor in so you're saying that mutation in future generations is an unfounded fear yes and the studies of the people That hiroshima and nagasaki have borne that out those people do not have that now they showed the immediate effects of too much radiation the women who were pregnant showed the embryo showed the effects of very similar to rubella measles some deformity certainly from that in

radiation insult but uh that's not the kind of mutation that's going to go On to the next generation galen what and where are these burial sites and what's in them for this so-called nuclear waste i've been hearing stories about stainless steel containers buried in concrete under the ocean boiling for over 2000 years that sound that sounds like a real story Let me start out by saying there are no nuclear waste only materials created in a reactor to be recovered and used beneficially now high-level waste is radioactive and self-heating and so fuel uh reusable uranium fuel

fits that definition but if you disregard its intrinsic worth why then yeah it would fit the definition of high-level waste but let's Say there isn't any high-level waste only material to be recovered and used beneficially then what's the low-level waste fiasco that's an excuse for a federally mandated non-inspectable disposal system so that organized crime can get rid of any evidence that they want and it can never be dug up again they're afraid to look in there not afraid they don't want you to they've got rules on the transport so That if you have an accident

with a low-level radioactive waste shipment while you call out all the state police and you make sure that nobody looks at it that nobody gets exposed that there's no spreading of the contaminated material and it's also that you don't find out whose body's in that drum the situation got so bad that the the smell of human flesh was so great that they made it so that you could ship analytic animal biological waste in Refrigerated van so that it wouldn't stink up before you got it buried what what is then in these low level or high

level or whatever containers under the ocean nothing but if you see they were one time dropping uh barrels of radioactive waste off barges in the ocean Do you know what was in them not high level self-heating radioactive waste probably had a few bodies and a few guns and a few knives and a few evidences in them too if you drop them in the ocean they are truly disposed of so there's an international trade in that right now you can't do it in the united states so they transship it across the ocean to south africa and

they can bury it offshore So what is in those drums well that's what you're telling me that i that i needn't worry about boiling drums under the ocean for 2 000 years no no way thank you i'm glad to know that well one one more question jalen what do you feel like a good portion of these men in congress know this already i know they do i went there four years ago and sat down with the senate legal Staff and told them my hour and a half long sent sad story and sam bollinger one of

the lawyers stood up and he says galen if i understand you right why you want us to have president reagan snap his finger and make this thing come up straight and i said hey sam terrific go ahead and do it he uh didn't take that challenge He says no i'll tell you what galen industry likes it the way that it is i said sam you really know how to hurt a guy and he says well if we change it what are we going to do for an encore yeah they're fully aware that this thing goes

on as far up as the president of the united states it's the way that industry wants it the industry is its own problem then so the question is then What is the industry what is the real story here is this an industry of nuclear energy the industry has been ripping it off for years and years in 1975 we knew that large nuclear reactors were dead that large is not the way to go the way to go is small mass-produced nuclear reactors sitting right in the middle of town one ever ten blocks producing power we haven't

built a reactor right yet Time that we do it why haven't we because of a federal energy cartel these guys control the amount of electricity the availability and the price and they say you do not have a choice i have a choice i'm going to take one of those decommissioned nuclear subs up in puget sound refuel it and generate more own electricity save the government five million dollars because that's what they want to throw Them away i will use it for my own power proof quinn million up in omak washington and i are moving on

that and if one of these days i hook one of them up to pier 91 in seattle don't be surprised well good luck i'm galen windsor and i thought i'd share a few hands-on practical things that have to do with this nuclear scare scam Now you've heard that gamma energy the kind of energy that comes off a rock like this is the most penetrating most damaging of all radiation and not only that here is uranium the parent of radon and they say if you can measure detect radon in a home then it's bad if you

exceed the epa's limit it's reason to run you out of your home spend thirteen thousand dollars like they did with stanley watrus's house in Pennsylvania the other day to get rid of the radon to ventilate it out through ridiculous let's take them one at a time this is a rock that i picked up in natarita colorado 16 weight percent uranium high grade uranium hot i read a thing the other day that says they had high grade uranium and lo and behold it's too hot to Transport so they had to bury it on site oh wonderful

let's talk a little bit about radiation if we can uh yeah are we picking up if you put the probe right there meter goes off scale and you can hear it all right hot radiation gamma radiation is the most penetrating of all radiation oh is it Falls got between the rock and the probe is my hand doesn't count so pretty much does it or if i put the rock behind me you don't suppose i've been lying to you do you i suspect they have let's do a little bit more i got a black bottle this

stuff comes in white bottle a bottle of no-dos you can send children down to the Drugstore to buy no-dos all they need is money in this or six 60 white caffeine pellets and this one is uranium oxide u308 you can't buy it for love nor money the state of washington sent two of their gestapo agents over to my home to confiscate my uranium samples on the 17th of december last year got a challenge i'd like to have Somebody in the room volunteer to take all of this bottle or all of this bottle the only thing

i'll tell you is that one of them won't hurt you and the other one will kill you do you want the white stuff or the black stuff fight stuff you do there's enough in there to kill four men Your size the government says we got to ban this material it's radioactive let's check it in the bottom of the bottle not very radioactive let's take the cap off [groaning] oh goodness very radioactive this instrument will only count gamma energy it's just energy Lights coming from those lights only getting lots of infrared from the lights as well

as ultraviolet energy response and it's very carefully damped to only discriminated so it only gets the energy that comes from this i don't want it to respond to a light just to this cost me a thousand dollars to get an instrument that'll just respond to this and not to that this is radioactive by any definition Radioactive material giving off radiation that is read by an instrument like this the daughter of this radon cannot be read on this instrument because it gives off alpha particles an alpha particle is a dipositive uh particle that comes from the

nucleus it has two protons and two neutrons therefore an atomic weight of four and it's minus two electrons and if you Grab it with a high ionization potential counter it'll count but if it travels two inches in air or through a piece of paper it picks up two electrons two beta particles if you will and becomes helium gas and it won't count on an ionization chamber did you know that this thing right here is given off helium gas alpha comes from uranium okay radioactive Material you pour it out in the hand and that's radioactive contamination

is it radioactive yeah it is [groaning] very radioactive now decontamination is nothing but scooping it back up and putting it into the bottle i just now decontaminated my hand no i didn't do such a good job Not good at all is it still radioactive yeah that's called residual radioactivity now under the decontamination rules of the government when you decontaminate somebody like this that's that contaminated and this is certainly a reportable incident under current doe regulations when you're decontaminating it has to go down a controlled drain so that you don't disperse radioactivity Do i qualify as

a controlled drain that material that i just ate is uh not soluble in body fluids like it's been this it was fire originally at 940 degrees c where it becomes u308 known in the industry as hcl insoluble in other words it will not dissolve in concentrated hydrochloric acid hot your stomach has 10th normal hydrochloric acid in it so it won't even Dissolve the stuff is so fine that it has no texture to it doesn't even feel rough so it's tasteless odorless has no texture how's it supposed to hurt me because i've been eating this on

lecture tour for two years the state of washington felt it necessary to confiscate my uranium samples so that i would be safe Dr fulton from the hanford environmental health foundation called up and he says hey i heard one of your guys od'd on uranium today galen and we talked for a little while he says oh that was you and i says listen i can eat all that stuff i want he says it'll ruin your kidneys how are your kidneys they're fine well you should have been chelated within four hours and i mean you guys Are

going to follow me around the country and give me chelating agents every four hours after i eat it on lecture tour he says we'll give you any medical assistance that you need gail and we don't want anything to happen to you i said did that include turning out the federal swat team four days ago to get me where are these guys coming from well Here's a piece of metal density of 19 19.0 if you know your chemistry and physics you know that there are only two metals that have that density plutonium and uranium radioactive pyrophoric

density of 19. outside of a laboratory most of you can't tell me whether this is uranium plutonium or a mixture of the two now i said that it's heavy and it is Let's see if it's radioactive [groaning] yeah it is pyrophoric what does that mean spiral fire black on the end the spark that just came off there is pyro fire burned if it's plutonium i just contaminated this area of arizona In excess of the epa's limit for one square mile of surface somebody laughed it's serious the end of progress altogether says that i just contaminated

you in excess of the limit for one square mile it's now silver on the end tomorrow it'll be black because it self oxidizes this this black color like this all by itself plutonium does that and uranium does that Is it hazardous yeah it is because they take depleted uranium metal and make it into 50 caliber bullets fire them from shoulder held weapons in 1976 they obsoleted tank warfare with these things because it only takes one dog face with one weapon to knock out a 65-ton tank it'll go through three inches of armor plate and when

it comes out the other Side it's that white hot spark that we just made and the five men in that tank are dead because it'll burn all the oxygen out of the air and burn their flesh 1976 they obsoleted tank warfare and you never even knew that they make 10 000 of those bullets every day in the united states we got enough an arsenal to sink all of russia's tanks And our boys in the defense department don't even talk about it yeah it says or just your health reminds me uh lead is hazardous to your

health too isn't it uh particularly if it's in a 45 slug like this and it hits you right here going about twenty six hundred feet per second it's not the material It's the impact from the velocity let's be very specific in the words that we use this particular chunk of lead came out of a human body my son who's a deputy sheriff thought maybe i could use it on tour that's called dying of lead poisoning anything less is a figment of the imagination because it's not soluble in body fluid either this is a pellet of

cobalt 59. If you put it in a reactor into a neutron field you can convert cobalt 59 to cobalt 60 which gives off a gamma it becomes the source that doctors use to irradiate patients to 7 000 redken for one patient the total dose absorbed by radiation workers at three mile island in the last six years is something like fifteen hundred rent Can five times more given to a single individual in a doctor's facility now do you know why i say that the federal regulations are absurd and if you live by those federal regulations maybe

you're being absurd too now a pellet of cobalt 60 this size got shipped by mistake to mexico got diluted into 5 000 tons of iron some of the Reinforcing rod came up to los alamos new mexico and they said hey that stuff's radioactive understand that this single pellet diluted roughly a factor of 1 billion with what they were reading on a detector like this at los alamos and so they pulled back table legs that were in spokane washington made out of the same batch because it was hot and radioactive and it would burn you When

the pellet itself could be held in your hand like that for a few minutes without it burning you now christ walked the earth a billion minutes ago if i could scratch this stretch this pellet out into a wire and it went clear around the earth and right back here to phoenix a billionth of this amount is 1.7 inches of that wire so stretched out stagger your mind Yet ought to now let's try a little game the epa says that five picocuries per liter of air is the limit for 222 radon and they handle that like

it's a real number madame curie says that one gram one gram of radium Equals one curie equals 2.22 times 10 to the 12th disintegrations per minute and that's the basic definition of radioactivity how many disintegrations is this shall we find out and the epa in its wisdom says that 11 disintegrations per minute from One liter of air you have exceeded the limit you know what i did the other day i've been having a little tough with some legal authorities up in my house so i took one of these bottles of uranium like this and i

dissolved it in an erlenmeyer flask with nitric acid and i got a crack in the basement floor and i squirted that whole bottle into that crack on the basement floor in Acid solution so it'll drive that counter off third scale any place along a 10 foot section of that crack that i put when they bring the radon measurement in there can you know what the radon's going to do it's going to go off scale in their measurement it won't go that high if watrus's house with 17 times this limit in it was caused to spend

thirteen thousand dollars and give it National tv coverage press coverage think what galen windsor's house is like i went to the trouble to notify my congressman about it mike lawrence the manager of the department of energy in the pacific northwest my state representative ray isaacson a few other astute people including the Banker and the liars and the appeal court what are they going to do with that i set them up on that last thursday and i come down to phoenix so [laughter] i escaped the falder all what i'm saying you is that the federal regulations

are absurd the congressman that put them in the place ought to be fired they ought to be sent home The regulators what do you do with them quit paying them the taxpayer the electorate elects those people to go out and do a job why do you continue to pay them when they're teaching you baloney when they're putting in regulations that don't make any sense cut it out quit paying them fire them send them home Term i grew up with says cannon is it easy apparently not you haven't got the job done majority of the congress

is irresponsible amoral atheistic irresponsible let's see how many more adjectives can i drum up but that many let me tell you we as the people send a bunch of rascals out to the energy store With a signed blank check and we say hey fellows if you run out of money just go build us a good power plan if you run out of money come back we'll give you another sign blank check and guarantee the payment out of the ratepayers pocket tennessee valley authority has the most nuclear reactors of any outfit in the place not one

of them has produced any power since last august Browns ferry one two and three in mississippi hasn't produced any power since last march and they don't plan on producing any power at browns ferry until mid-year in 86 at a million dollars a day in lost power revenue per plant and held off in the name of health and safety now tell me we didn't send rascals out To the energy marketplace with a signed blank check they're still getting paid those reactors are all fully fueled fully staffed and just sitting there who's getting taken the ratepayer you're

still paying more and more for your electricity all of the time now bonneville power administration says that uh 57 percent availability is okay for a nuclear reactor maine yankee is often run at 103 percent availability which means it's running over nameplate rating enough days out of the year that its average availability is 100 percent bonneville power administration of the department of energy says that 57 availability is okay that means that you can let those things set down 43 of the year and that's judge's acceptable Performance on the part of the government there's an obvious answer

get the government out of the energy regulating business turn those plants over to people who will run them efficiently a hundred percent of the time when we put in zero release containment we started playing games about the time that we proved that a nuclear reactor has no measurable impact upon the Environment that's when they bottled them up put catalytic recombiners on them some of the reactors in texas were designed not to breathe for eight years at great expense why when you bottle up a reactor like tmi2 does then you get radiolytic hydrogen and indeed they

had a radiolytic hydrogen burn at tmi2 and they moaned and they grown about that and all they had to do was open up The windows and let the breezes blow through you don't need containment on them going up to colorado this weekend to meet with the uranium producers association and they're upset because the government is dumping uranium on the market and ruining the price of the commodity that they get their bread and butter from but what they're totally unaware of is That the grand junction operation office is going to issue a contract so that the

new operator has a 25 million dollar budget over the next five years eighty percent of which will be spent for a remedial action where you take this material dig it up if you find it it counts on a geiger counter you can have them come in and change out the whole front yard of your house give you a new front yard new Foundation on your house at government expense if you don't do it they'll take you down to the courthouse blacklist your property so that you have to remove the radioactivity at your own expense before

it can be sold now do you know what i did when i took that uranium solution and poured it at the crack in my house i set up the united states government and that episode is about to be played Did i do it on purpose yeah i did just like i used to dive into that swimming pool and drink that seasoning contaminated water i found out that it doesn't hurt me you need to find out that it doesn't hurt me or you in fact the only reason for the existence of these big trans continent distribution

lines would be if they could compete with a Small mass-produced reactor sitting in your backyard why don't they want you to because they are the federal energy cartel they like to set the price the total availability and whether you can hook on to it if you don't pay your bill cut you off that's called power domain and control and they like that They do not want you to be energy independent if you had one of these sitting in every 10 block area in phoenix you could tell the rest of the world to go get lost

oh there's another use for that heat you could heat your homes in the wintertime or you could cool them in the summertime with it heating ventilation air conditioning They call it hvac in countries where it freezes you could run that hot water out and chase the frost away in the spring and in the fall and they found out that plants grow faster in warm water anyway so you'd irrigate with it all summer so cooling towers are called wasting towers they throw over 50 percent of the heat away The other morning coming out of tri-cities wnp2

was putting its 700 megawatt electric up through the clouds 870 they were running at and the clouds were laying all over the ground and there was a little ice cream cone right out there and i said there's wnp2 it snows five inches every night out of Wnp2 and the rest of us don't get any where'd the water come from that's cooling the heat from the condenser cooler you should have a business right out there an oil cracking plant something taking that heat and using it like they build at midland michigan 10 years ago and they've

never used and so dow chemical is suing the utility because they never produce the steam for their chemical plant right alongside it We got troubles in this country i'm telling you what the problem is doing something about it responsibility is yours