This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel with the author Robert Zubram. His new book is

The Case for Nukes, how we can beat global warming and create a free, open, and magnificent future.

What can go wrong and why? In chronological order, a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, three mile island.

Number one is shut down. Number two, as an anomaly. What happened, Robert? Can you say it quickly?

Sure. Three Mile Island had a meltdown. Okay. Now, the possibility of such an accident was known before Three Mile Island.

That is, you can turn off the chain reaction in a nuclear reaction reactor instantly by dropping

into control rods or simply letting the coolant boil out because without the coolant, the water,

the neutrons cannot be slowed down enough to give them a good chance

of causing another fission. So if the reactor gets too hot, the water goes away, fission is shut

down. However, there are residual radioactive waste products in the nuclear fuel that are still

decaying. So you shut down the reactor and instantly the power level goes from 100% to 7%.

But then it only slowly decays from 7% down to 1% over the next several hours.

And if you don't cool it during that period, that heat is enough to melt the fuel elements in the reactor.

Now the environmentalist said, oh, it's going to melt through the reactor, through the reactor pressure vessel, which is eight inches of steel, and then through the containment building, which is eight feet of reinforced concrete, and then through the earth's crust, all the way to the center of the world, and then somehow going goes up the other side of the world and emerges in

China. The China syndrome, 1979. That's what you're referring. That's right, the China syndrome.

Now, in Three Mile Island, there was an extraordinary reactor operator error that caused the coolant

to be drained out of one of the two three-mile island reactors. And so the reactor

instantly shut down the fission chain, but it still has a decay heat. And so the fuel did melt,

but it did not melt through the pressure vessel. It melted about one inch through the eight-inch

steel pressure vessel and stopped, let alone through the eight-foot containment building,

let alone to China. Okay. And so Three Mile Island is the only mega-disaster in human history in which absolutely no one

was hurt.

...