Q: Does your concern grow Saturday afternoon?
RM: The concern over the bubble basically didn't change from Saturday
afternoon for the next 12 hours. Saturday, during the night, coming into
Sunday morning, I've left the emergency center, maybe at two a.m. Sunday
morning. They told me to go get some rest. I haven't slept in a couple days
and Hindry and I are going to go to the site the following morning early by
car. I leave a group of people in the emergency center continuing to look at
the thermocouple data, continuing to try to understand everything we can from
the reactor, what is its condition and how is it changing, and, of course, that
includes the hydrogen bubble. They're continuing to get reports from across
the country. There are actually experiments being conducted in Idaho on the
hydrogen bubble. There are calculations being performed all over the country
of, if it were to burn or if it were to explode, what would the load be on the
reactor coolant system? Would the vessel break? Could we lose the whole
thing? And there are people continuing to do calculations of the evolution of
oxygen into the hydrogen bubble. These are people with knowledge in that area,
who are trusted in that area. They certainly weren't me, because I don't have
knowledge in that area. I couldn't do such a calculation to save my hide. I
just wouldn't know what to do. Those calculations continue through the night
Saturday and Sunday morning. When I come back then Sunday morning to meet with
Hindry and the other commissioners to prepare to go to the site, the consensus
is that we've reached about a five percent oxygen concentration in the hydrogen
bubble. Well, in about 12 hours we're gonna completely change our mind. We're
gonna decide that there's no oxygen in the hydrogen bubble. And so the proper
question is, how can you reverse your opinion so quickly? And, of course, the
Presidential commission wanted to know that. A lot of people wanted to know.
And it's a basic misunderstanding of the conditions that were there.
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