Fairewinds Energy Education: Forty Good Years and One Bad Day

Akio MatsumuraIn this video, Arnie Gundersen talks with international diplomat Akio Matsumura (photo left), the former special advisor to the United Nations Development program, the founder and Secretary General of the Global Forum of spiritual and parliamentary leaders for human survival, and the Secretary General of the 1992 Parliamentary Earth Summit Conference in Rio de Janeiro.  Arnie and Akio discuss the continuing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi site, and come to the conclusion that Tokyo Electric must be removed from the clean-up process. Arnie also discusses his 40 years in the nuclear industry, and how the worst day of that career led him to conclude that a nuclear power plant can have “Forty Good Years and One Bad Day.”

Arnie, Fairewinds Associates, Inc.'s Chief Engineer, has responded to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) nonchalant attitude towards Entergy's announced impending reductions in staffing levels at its reactor fleet across the country, "What the NRC is saying is that AFTER a nuke breaks (negative trend) it will know that the layoff (human resource change) had gone too far!  This is what I discussed in the latest video-Forty Good Years and One Bad Day…http://fairewinds.org/media/fairewinds-videos/forty-good-years-and-one-bad-day…basically, the NRC will wait for that One Bad Day before they take any action."

Arnie was responding to an NRC spokesman's quote in a Rutland Herald/Barre Montpelier Times Argus article, “If we observe any negative trends via inspection findings and/or performance indicators, we could determine if there was any linkage to human resource changes...”.