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Life & Times Transcript

9/19/07

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Will climate change help California warm up to the idea of nuclear power?

Richard Rosenblum>> We've seen nuclear as an important option that needs to be on the table to deal with greenhouse gases in the future.

Daniel Hirsch>> They're not all Homer Simpsons, but it just takes one Homer Simpson at a reactor to produce a meltdown.

Val Zavala>> And then, a chance to walk in the clouds, visit a rainforest and witness meat-eating plants without ever leaving southern California.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

With additional support for Life and Times from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.

Roger Cooper>> A nuclear power plant. It's been thirty years since one of these has been built in California. That's because our state has a moratorium on construction of new nuclear plants. But some are now saying that, because of global warming, that ban should be lifted. Should it? It's a question you may be asked to vote on. The promise of nuclear energy has raised our hopes at times.

Narrator>> "The U-235 atom to fission has opened a limitless future to mankind. Like fire and electricity, this new tool must be properly controlled."

Roger Cooper>> And sometimes created some of our worst nightmares.

Emergency Announcement>> "There has been a state of emergency declared on Three Mile Island. Please stay indoors with your windows closed."

Roger Cooper>> Following the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979 and the fire at Chernobyl in 1986, nuclear power plant construction has been on hold in the United States. For most of us, nuclear power has been out of sight, out of mind in recent years. It's only when you drive to San Diego and see this large reminder beside the freeway just south of San Clemente, the San Onofre Nuclear Power Station.

Part of our electricity is coming from nuclear reactions going on inside those large domes right now. People who live in San Clemente have an added reminder that there's nuclear power nearby, the sirens that would go off if something went wrong with the reactors. Just a test like this at another plant can be a sobering moment.

Besides San Onofre, there's just one other nuclear power plant in California, Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo. Brought online in the mid-1980s, it's the last nuclear plant to be built in our state. But this man wants to change all that. Republican Assemblyman Chuck Devore of Irvine believes that it's time to rethink nuclear and start building plants again.

Assemblyman Chuck Devore>> Californians are warming up to nuclear power largely because of concern over global warming.

Roger Cooper>> Devore argues that, because nuclear plants don't emit greenhouses gases, they'll be necessary to fight global warming and comply with California's new law requiring reduced emissions by 2020.

Assemblyman Chuck Devore>> You add to that this drive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by twenty-five percent in thirteen years while our state is going to grow by seven million people, I don't see how we can get from here to there without lifting the thirty-one year ban on nuclear power.

Roger Cooper>> Devore has been leading an effort to get an initiative on next June's ballot. Voters would be asked to repeal California's 1976 law that bans building of new nuclear plants until a solution to disposing of radioactive waste can be found.

Daniel Hirsch>> Yet what Mr. Devore is proposing is that we should start building new ones even though we have no solution for the waste that those reactors produce.

Roger Cooper>> Devore's answer to spent fuel would be to reprocess it into fuel to use in the reactor, as is done in France. But anti-nuclear activist, Dan Hirsch of Committee to Bridge the Gap, says that creates bomb material for terrorists.

Daniel Hirsch>> Beyond that, nuclear is the most dangerous technology on earth. It proliferates nuclear weapons. Nuclear plants are extraordinary targets for terrorists and the potential for an accident is such that you could kill hundreds of thousands of people if they ever lose their coolant.

Assemblyman Chuck Devore>> You have to look at what are the relative risks of using this technology. What is the proven safety record of using this technology? And what are the alternatives?

Roger Cooper>> The existing nuclear power station at San Onofre is operated by Southern California Edison. Edison executive, Dick Rosenblum, believes nuclear needs to stay in Edison's mix of power along with solar and wind.

Richard Rosenblum>> We've seen nuclear as an important option that needs to be on the table to deal with greenhouse gases in the future. It needs to be available because greenhouse gases are a real and urgent and very difficult problem to solve.

Roger Cooper>> Edison has called for nuclear sites to be pre-approved so construction could be expedited if the decision is ever made to build more plants.

Daniel Hirsch>> It gives new meaning to the phrase of "pick your poison", carbon dioxide or plutonium. The public knows that those aren't the choices, that there are sensible, renewable and safe technologies which are the really sensible way of going.

Roger Cooper>> Since 9/11, critics like Hirsch say that there's one more reason to oppose nuclear power. They say that building more plants would provide targets that terrorists could fly a 747 airliner into. Committee to Bridge the Gap has proposed requiring a system of steel beams and cables it calls beamhenge to deflect incoming planes from piercing reactors.

[Film Clip]

Roger Cooper>> But the nuclear industry says that rocket sled tests like this plus computer modeling show the feet-thick containment vessels would withstand a hi-jacked plane. Opponents say that the sled test wasn't meant to simulate a reactor crash.

Assemblyman Chuck Devore>> And it wouldn't do a darn thing. They've run simulations and, because of the way the containment dome is curved, most of the aircraft which is quite large simply bounces off.

Richard Rosenblum>> These are incredibly robust structures. We have great confidence in them and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C. who's looked at this has concluded that that's really not a credible threat.

Roger Cooper>> Assemblyman Devore says that there needs to be a calm and reasoned discussion of nuclear, but he acknowledges that educating the public could take some time. What does it do to your efforts the realization that the most famous nuclear plant worker in the world is named Homer Simpson?

Assemblyman Chuck Devore>> "Dope".

[Film Clip]

Roger Cooper>> This cartoon depiction of Springfield's nuclear power plant has become a part of our popular culture. Could it be a factor in public perceptions?

[Film Clip]

Daniel Hirsch>> It just shows you that this is such a dangerous technology. It's an industry that often doesn't know what it's doing. They're not all Homer Simpsons, but it just takes one Homer Simpson at a reactor to produce a meltdown.

Assemblyman Chuck Devore>> The redundancy in the system so that it would be impossible for one person, you know, a person acting alone, to do something that would damage the plant and cause an unsafe situation. The way the plants are run, I think, would make them proof even to someone pulling a Homer.

Richard Rosenblum>> I looked a little while ago and I saw that, across the world, we have two thousand reactor operating years without a public injury from nuclear power. That's something very few industries could say.

Roger Cooper>> If Devore's initiative makes the ballot, California voters will have much more than the Homer factor to weigh. How safe will modern reactors be? Can we afford power from an industry known for cost overruns? And what about California's earthquakes?

Assemblyman Chuck Devore>> We set aside forty percent of the state of California and ban it from the construction of new nuclear power plants as being too seismically active.

Daniel Hirsch>> He's carefully written his map so that you could build new reactors at Diablo which has the Hosgri fault which is capable of a 7.5 magnitude earthquake, to build new reactors at San Onofre which has a massive fault nearby as well.

Roger Cooper>> After thirty-one years, an old debate is on again as Californians are asked to take another look at nuclear power. At the San Onofre Nuclear Power Station, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Hena Cuevas>> What would you say if somebody told you that you now had an additional four hundred thousand dollars worth of debt? It's estimated that's the amount each American household would have to pay in order to cover the current United States deficit.

It's a level of spending that can't be sustained according to United States Comptroller, David Walker of the Government Accountability Office. He's now traveling around the country and sounding the alarm with his fiscal wakeup tour. What is the purpose of the tour that you're making?

Comptroller David Walker>> Well, the purpose of the fiscal wakeup tour is to state the facts and speak the truth to the American people about where we are financially and where we're headed fiscally and the need for our elected officials to start making some tough choices in order to make sure that the future for our country, our children and our grandchildren is better than our past.

Hena Cuevas>> In this particular tour, do you take a stance as to what is the correct solution to a lot of these problems?

Comptroller David Walker>> Basically, there's broad-based agreement that comes out during the tour that our financial condition is worse than advertised, that we've got to start making tough choices. Those tough choices mean the need for budget controls, Social Security reform, health care reform, tax reform, and re-looking at what government does and how government should do business in the twenty-first century.

There's disagreement among the panelists about, "Well, how do you reform social security and how do you reform Medicare? How much should the tax level be and how should we reform the tax code?" But there's unanimity on the elements that need to be pursued and we do discuss possible options and possible ways forward. That's what the citizens want.

Hena Cuevas>> These are not very popular issues because, whenever you talk about tinkering with Medicare or tinkering with Social Security, people immediately say, "No, you can't touch my entitlement." So how do you address an issue like that?

Comptroller David Walker>> Well, the first thing you have to is you have to convince people that there's no free lunch and that it's not a matter of if we're going to have to make tough choices, but it's a matter of when we're going to make those choices.

People need to understand what the consequences of an action are. The fact is, the sooner we make the choices, the less change we need to have, the more time that people will have to adjust to that change. They also need to understand that this is not just about numbers. It's not just about economics.

It's about the future of our country, the future for their children and the future for their grandchildren. We are mortgaging our children's and grandchildren's future and that is not fair and it's time that we recognize that reality.

Hena Cuevas>> How are you presenting those numbers in an easy to understand way?

Comptroller David Walker>> Well, when you talk about billions of dollars or trillions of dollars, most Americans can't relate to that. So what we try to do is we try to convert the numbers into something they can relate to. For example, today the federal government's total liabilities in non-funded commitments for Social Security and Medicare are about fifty trillion dollars.

That translates to four hundred forty thousand dollars per household. The median household income in America is less than fifty thousand dollars a year, so it's like the typical American household having an additional mortgage of nine and a half times their annual income, but unlike a typical mortgage, no house to back the mortgage.

Hena Cuevas>> Why tackle this issue now?

Comptroller David Walker>> That's a key question. We've had this problem for a while. It's worse now than it was several years ago and it's going to get worse over time, but why now? The reason is because it's critically important that the next president of the United States, whether it be a male, a female, Republican, Democrat or Independent, make fiscal responsibility and inner-generational equity one of their top three priorities.

That means budget controls, tax reform, Social Security reform, health care reform, among other things. If they make it one of their top three priorities, then we can make progress. If they don't, then there's a real chance that we're going to have a crisis during the next administration.

Hena Cuevas>> But these are issues that aren't popular with politicians. They really don't want to touch that. They really don't want to have to say that we have to cut, raise, increase or make changes.

Comptroller David Walker>> Well, the answer is, yes, it's difficult, but that's what leadership is all about. Leadership is stating the facts, speaking the truth, generating positive results today, leaving things not just better off when you leave than when you came, but better positioned for the future.

If people don't have the courage -- and that's what it is -- if they don't have the courage to state the facts and speak the truth and to help people understand that, for the future of our country, our children and our grandchildren, we need to start making some tough choices, if they're unwilling to acknowledge it and they're unwilling to lead, we don't need them to be our leader.

Hena Cuevas>> So it's a kind of tough love approach.

Comptroller David Walker>> It's a tough love approach. You have it exactly right. We all love our country. We all love our children. We all love our grandchildren. But the fact is, the path that we're on threatens the future of all three. And this is not just about the economy. It's about our standard of living. It's about our national security over the long-term. The stakes are simply too high not to take this seriously.

Hena Cuevas>> You've also done a report on Iraq. How does this fit in with the United States' fiscal responsibility?

Comptroller David Walker>> We spend about a hundred billion dollars a year on Iraq. Our deficits are much greater than a hundred billion dollars a year and they're going to go up dramatically when baby boomers start retiring.

Iraq is a temporary situation. It's a serious problem. We need to re-assess what the way forward is in Iraq, but it's something that ultimately we will come out of Iraq at some point. Our fiscal challenge is a large and growing problem which increases with the passage of time. That's why it's important that we start dealing with that soon rather than later.

Hena Cuevas>> Because it's easier to talk about cutting back on defense spending, on spending for the military, considering the entitlement spending actually takes a bigger portion of the pie.

Comptroller David Walker>> Well, see, what most Americans don't realize is that sixty-two percent of the federal budget is on autopilot, that the thirty-eight percent of the budget that is not on autopilot that Congress deals with and makes decisions on every year includes things like national defense, homeland security, judicial system, education, transportation, the Congress, the executive office of the president, the GAO, some very, very important things.

So what's happened is, over the many years since we've become a republic, we have lost our way, quite frankly, with regard to a lot of issues. It's time to get back to basics. It's time to re-assess where we're at and where we should go from here.

Hena Cuevas>> What has been the reaction to your tour?

Comptroller David Walker>> Well, at first when we started two years ago, people were shocked and appalled. They had no idea that the situation was as we articulated it. As time has gone on, there's been much more media attention and a greater awareness as to the nature of our problem.

So now the public says, "What do we need to do? What's the way forward? What are some ideas that you have as to how we can start addressing these challenges?" Now we're starting to get into some of those options as part of our Town Hall meetings and other sessions that we have around the country.

Hena Cuevas>> You also speak at college campuses. How do you approach students who have been told that, by the time they get to retirement age, Social Security is not going to be around?

Comptroller David Walker>> Well, you know, they're wrong. There are a lot of young people that think it isn't going to be here for them, and it is. Even when the so-called trust funds run out of money, there's still about seventy-three cents of revenue for every dollar-promised benefits. So the key is that there will be something there, but the sooner we end up restructuring that program, the more certainty we'll have about what's going to be there.

So I tell young people, "Look, you need to get informed and involved because you're the one that's going to pay the price. You're the one that's going to bear the burden if others fail to act." Hopefully, they will.

Hena Cuevas>> Comptroller David Walker, thank you very much for sharing the details on the fiscal wakeup tour.

Comptroller David Walker>> It's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for your interest and efforts.

Hena Cuevas>> David Walker was a guest of TownHall Los Angeles. For information on future speakers, go to their website at townhall-la.org.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
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You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> I'm here at the Huntington Gardens in San Marino where something big has happened. A sixteen thousand square foot greenhouse of sorts has opened, filled with hundreds of species of plants and, if you think plants are just something pretty to look at, think again.

Here you can touch, poke and prod and some of the plants will actually grab back. Its official name is the Rose Hills Foundation Conservatory for Botanical Science. To my eye, it was simply a wonderful greenhouse. I got a tour from Jim Folsom, the Director of the gardens at the Huntington.

Inside this steel and glass pavilion are three distinct climates created by a group of architects, engineers, botanists and geographers. One is a Cloud Forest, cool and very humid. Another is a Bog, little soil but very, very humid. But the first place you see as you enter the Conservatory is a Rainforest, an emerald landscape under a glass dome four stories high.

Jim Folsom>> What we've brought in are plants from around the world from those situations that like warm, humid nights and warm days and a good average growing condition.

Val Zavala>> You've got some gorgeous plants. Tell us about it.

Jim Folsom>> They're exploding with growth. This is a fun plant. It's a palm from the areas around Singapore and that part of southeastern Asia, tropical Asia.

Val Zavala>> That is stunning.

Jim Folsom>> It's beautiful. It's called a Joey Palm. This small tree with these hugely -- each of those feather-like things is one leaf. There were probably only about three leaves on that plant that were on it when we planted it in July. That small tree has doubled its size since July and we're in November now.

Val Zavala>> Now what is this here? It looks like a lily pond.

Jim Folsom>> Well, this is a pond and it's all landscaped in and it's got all of its systems going, but the plants that are here are just visitors because the pond was designed for a very particular water lily. These are tropical water lilies and they're fun and people are enjoying seeing them and they have a nice fragrance, but next year we'll be growing a very particular kind, the ones that make these massive leaves so big that they will even support a little child.

Val Zavala>> Now what's happening right here? We just got rained on.

Jim Folsom>> Well, we're at the end of the day. We get a little bit of fog coming in. So this is to keep the humidity up. A little dew in your hair.

Val Zavala>> You don't have to worry about that (laughter).

Jim Folsom>> I don't worry about it.

Val Zavala>> Now this is the --

Jim Folsom>> -- this is the Cloud Forest. Now that is low and tropical, wet tropical. This is in the mountains in the tropics where it's cool and misty.

Val Zavala>> It's cold in here.

Jim Folsom>> It's cold in here. In some of these cloud forests, it gets down below forty even in the daytime, but it hardly ever freezes. If it froze, you'd get an entirely different circumstance.

Val Zavala>> And you've got some exotic things in here.

Jim Folsom>> Oh, it is the jewel box of the tropics. When you get into the great Cloud Forest, the trees are covered with these epiphytic plants, plants that grow on other plants.

Val Zavala>> That's "epiphyte", a plant that derives its nutrition from the air and rain and usually lives on another plant. Hey, I learned something. Now do all these orchids exist in the same place in nature or have you drawn them from different parts?

Jim Folsom>> We've drawn them from the Cloud Forests around the world, mostly from Latin America, Panama, to Columbia, Costa Rica. There are just fabulous floras of epiphytes there, but it's a little bit showmanship. We want people to walk out and be so excited because they're going to go learn more, think more, dream more.

Val Zavala>> The whole idea behind this seven and a half million dollar project is to plant seeds not only in the soil, but more importantly, in the minds of young people especially California middle school students whose science literacy is among the worst in the country.

Jim Folsom>> This is dedicated to that middle school group kids making major decisions about where they're going in life, kids who have learned enough in school to be able to really take in voracious amounts of knowledge. So it's that group, but it's for all ages. It's the Disney thing. There's something here for everybody.

Val Zavala>> Right. Now this is called --

Jim Folsom>> -- the Bog.

Val Zavala>> A Bog. Some kids may not even know what Bog means.

Jim Folsom>> Well, they know what bodies in bogs are, right? They know these grim things. But a bog means a place where the soil is saturated with water and it kind of circulates around, but it rises and falls and it's so saturated and there's so much movement of water through it that there are no nutrients. They're are all washed out.

Val Zavala>> All washed out.

Jim Folsom>> So the plants that grow in bogs have particular concerns. Their problems are how do you get your roots on nitrogen and all those useful nutrients? Well, they have evolved the systems of carnivorous, Venus Fly Traps, Pitcher plants. This is a Pitcher plant.

Val Zavala>> Pitcher, as in like a pitcher of water?

Jim Folsom>> A pitcher of water, and this opens up. These are last year's leaves. This is an individual leaf and it has a little bit of water in there and it's kind of like that Roach Motel thing. Insects check in, but they don't check out. They go down and they don't come out.

Val Zavala>> They can't get back up.

Jim Folsom>> Right, right. When we harvest one of these, it will be full of insect carcasses. Nothing but the shells and all --

Val Zavala>> -- so the plant eats the meat of the bugs and leaves the carcasses?

Jim Folsom>> It dissolves away the useful parts, extracts the nitrogen and some other minerals and then, when this leaf passes away, you'll just find it chock full of little dead ants and other bugs.

Val Zavala>> This is the kids' favorite?

Jim Folsom>> Oh, this is uniformly -- the opportunity to close a Venus Fly Trap is, once again, a hands-on thing. We have a screen here so you can see it. We can talk you through it. This one actually has a dead fly in there already.

Val Zavala>> Okay.

Jim Folsom>> On the surface of the leaf are these trigger hairs that stick up and, if an insect hits two of them or one of them twice within about a second and a half, the leaf closes. Oh, that one was kind of slow.

Val Zavala>> Oh, but that's great though. The Conservatory has fifty hands-on exploratory stations. In this area called the Lab, there are magnifying glasses, microscopes and video scopes.

Jim Folsom>> So with this simple microscope, you have both compound and simple microscopes in here, they can focus on different plants and they can get a slightly more magnified group. Not only do they get to do this, if there's a larger group like a family, they can all participate because of what's going on there and they can, of course, once in a while, put it on their chin (laughter).

Val Zavala>> Of course, being kids. And adults too.

Jim Folsom>> And adults too.

Val Zavala>> Every part of a plant from its roots to its flowers can be seen up close and beautiful. And by the way, not every plant grows upwards.

Jim Folsom>> This is not about coming and seeing. This is about coming and doing. Hands-on science, hands-on natural history, hands-on gardening. There's a lot of low-tech simple things here.

Val Zavala>> And for those of us who just want to stroll in search of exotic foliage that could never survive in southern California back yards, the Huntington's Conservatory is a treasure trove.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> For more information on the Conservatory, you can go to their website at huntington.org. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

With additional support for Life and Times from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.

Sponsored in part by:


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