Arnie Gundersen: I think it's a relatively significant amount – maybe a tenth of the nuclear reactor core starts back up and shuts back down and starts back up and shuts back down. And that’s an extra heat load; you are not prepared to get rid of one tenth of a nuclear reactor’s heat by pumping water in the top
Now, Unit 3 has another problem and the NRC mentioned it yesterday for the first time and it gets back to that saltwater and the effect on iron. They are afraid that the reactor bottom will break, literally just break right out and dump everything. Because it's now hot and it's got salt on it and it's got the ideal conditions for corrosion. So the big fear on Unit 3 is that it will break at the bottom and whatever else remains in it, which could be the entire core, could fall out suddenly. And if that happens, you can get something called a “steam explosion,” and this may be a one in a hundred chance. I don’t want your listeners to think it's going to happen tomorrow, but if the core breaks you will get a steam explosion, but we’re not sure the core is going to break. And that is a violent hydrogen explosion like the one we’ve already witnessed.
Chris Martenson: Reactor 3 caught me when it blew, because what I saw there with my eyes was a fairly focused upwards very high-energy event, which completely looked different from what I saw when Unit 1 blew. Are you talking about – is that or I know you have postulated in the past that you think that might have been -- what’s the name for it a “prompt” criticality?
Arnie Gundersen: I called it a “prompt criticality,” that created a detonation and engineers differentiate – either way it's going to be a big explosion. But the violence of Unit 3’s explosion and I did some calculations to show that the speed at which the flame traveled in order to through particles as far as this one threw particles – the speed of that shockwave had to be in excess of a thousand miles per hour. That’s a detonation, where the shockwave itself can cause incredible damage and that can happen if we were to have one of these steam explosions at the bottom of the reactor in Unit 3 falls out – you could have another one of those all over again
More at: chrismartensone-gundersen-interview
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