Texas Blogger’s ‘Man Crush’ on Putin Leads to Lengthy Heart to Heart

Nonetheless, last week Mr. Young scored a journalistic coup, publishing a lengthy written interview with Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Young approached the Russian government last year after blogging repeatedly about his “man crush” on Mr. Putin, and the questions he sent the Russian prime minister were, shall we say, softballs. They included, “Are there Yetis or Russian ‘wood goblins’ in the taiga?” and “Are you the coolest man in politics?”

The decision to grant the interview appears to be part of an attempt by Mr. Putin to soften his image in the West. During the three years since Mr. Putin entered a power-sharing arrangement with President Dmitri A. Medvedev, the president has been cast as the smiling face of a “reset” in the relations with the United States. In the eyes of Western observers, that has left Mr. Putin as the bad cop, which could pose a problem if he decides to return to the presidency next spring.

“There is some truth in this argument, and I think Putin has realized he needs to care about his image in the West,” said Alexander Rahr, a Russia specialist at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “The only argument which really speaks for Medvedev is this Western thing. That is his trump card. Putin has to counter it.”

The Outdoor Life interview — at times an exercise in mutual back-slapping — is not likely to have much impact, especially since it was released the same day as a much-anticipated news conference by Mr. Medvedev.

But it does show Mr. Putin trying to present himself in a softer, more friendly light. In between discussions of tiger poaching, Ernest Hemingway and the fragility of human existence, Mr. Putin tells Mr. Young that the United States and Russia have been powerfully drawn to each other since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The recent improvement in relations “seems to point to the fact that the vast majority of barriers between our peoples were unnaturally and artificially forced upon them,” Mr. Putin said. “Ordinary people always want to live in peace rather than in war and to be able to freely socialize, interact and make friends, if you wish. For too long, we had been cruelly held apart from each other, so it was only natural that the fall of the Iron Curtain generated a huge wave of interest toward Russia.”

Mr. Putin also plays up his image as an avatar of manliness, which has been established by photos of him riding shirtless on horseback, shooting a tiger with a tranquilizer gun or offering judo instructions. Asked about an episode last summer, when he shot a dart at the exposed back of a gray whale from a rubber dinghy, Mr. Putin drifted into Hemingway territory.

“All that surrounded me — the low sky, the stormy sea and, of course, the whales — was magnificent,” he said. “Besides, these elegant giants showed us a real performance, leaping out of the water in front of our boat.”

On that occasion, a reporter asked Mr. Putin whether it was dangerous, and the prime minister responded, “Living in general is dangerous.” In the Outdoor Life interview, he elaborated, saying that a human being is “still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth,” barraged by disease, disaster and criminality.

“However, this is not a reason to hide away from life,” he said. “One can truly enjoy his or her life only while experiencing it, and it is inevitably related to a certain level of risk.”

It was the gray whale episode that especially captivated Mr. Young, 42. After he began writing about his “man crush,” his blog hits grew so high that his editors asked him for more, and he published an open letter to the prime minister proposing that the two men go hunting together.

Before long, Mr. Young was communicating with the press attaché in the Russian Embassy in Washington and with Ketchum, a public relations firm that represents Russia.

“My editors were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’?” Mr. Young said. But early in the spring, he was told that Mr. Putin was in the process of answering Mr. Young’s questions — at considerable length. The draft originally sent to Outdoor Life was almost 8,000 words long and had to be edited down by almost 3,000 words, Mr. Young said.

“I got to tell you, I’m more in love with the guy than ever,” he said. In an interview from his home in Texas, Mr. Young said Outdoor Life was hoping to send him to Russia to go fishing with Mr. Putin, who is not a keen hunter. It seemed Mr. Young’s ardor does not extend to Mr. Medvedev, since a mention of the Russian president’s name was met with silence on the other end of the line.

“You’re going to have to remind me who that is,” Mr. Young said.

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U.S. Engineers Cite Lengthy Cleanup in Japan

Lake Barrett, the senior Nuclear Regulatory Commission engineer at Three Mile Island during the early phases of the cleanup said by comparison, “it was a walk in the park compared to what they’ve got.”

The Fukushima Daiichi reactors are similar to those in Pennsylvania — “the cores are probably really similar, partially melted,” Mr. Barrett said — but engineers pointed out several key differences in the aftermath of the accidents. In Japan, four separate reactors are damaged, and fixing each one is complicated by the presence of its leaking neighbors. It will also require a major infusion of equipment to replace parts far from the reactor’s core, like pumps and switchgear that were destroyed by the tsunami.

In the short term, weather is a factor: according to engineers who managed the American cleanup, which ran from 1979 to 1993, Tokyo Electric Power has only a few weeks to patch up the three smashed secondary containments before the coming rainy season, when downpours could wash more contamination into the environment. And the company will have to carefully watch that the number of workers with the necessary skills do not burn out under the size of the task, or absorb so much radiation that they have to quit.

Still, Mr. Barrett and others say that the mess at Fukushima Daiichi can be contained, cleaned up and even securely wrapped up for long-term disposal. The plant may benefit from past experience, because it is the second major accident worldwide in a big water-cooled reactor, they say.

The first task, they agree, is to fill the reactors and the spent fuel pool with water that can be pumped out again, cooled and then returned to the reactors. That would sharply reduce the possibility of generating new hydrogen and new explosions, and would go a long way toward declaring that the plants were stable, a point that the N.R.C. observed recently that Fukushima Daiichi had not reached.

Right now the reactors are in “feed and bleed” mode, adding clean water and cooling the fuel by letting that water boil off or dribble out, but such bleeding allows radiation leakage. “Whatever you bleed is letting cesium out,” said Mr. Barrett, referring to the radioactive isotope. Cooling with recirculating water could end releases of radioactive materials, but will require new pumps and possibly new piping, experts said.

Before that new equipment can be installed, engineers will have to clean up the water in the basements of the reactor buildings, the turbine buildings and other structures. At Three Mile Island, water in the reactor building and the primary auxiliary building gave radiation doses as high as 1,000 rem an hour, said Ronald L. Freemerman, a Bechtel engineer who was the project manager of the cleanup. That meant a worker would hit the N.R.C.’s annual limit in about a minute. The water can be pumped through filters that will strain out the radioactive elements.

Engineers from Three Mile Island laid out the three next steps:

First, decontaminate the walls and floors, to hold down the potential radiation dose. “They have to economize on how they expose these people,” Mr. Freemerman said, or the company will run out of trained workers.

Second, rebuild the secondary containments of units 1, 2 and 4, and fix or replace the heavy cranes just beneath their ceilings. That would allow workers to defuel the reactor. That step alone took five years at Three Mile Island, where no buildings had to be rebuilt.

Third, peek inside the reactor vessel and figure out what tools will be needed to remove the wrecked fuel in the core. Three Mile Island was a surprise, Mr. Freemerman said, because so much of the core had melted and flowed beneath a support made of five plates of thick steel. Another veteran of the cleanup, Michael McGough, said only then did they realize they would need new remote-controlled tools to cut through the metal, to get to the material below.

Mr. McGough’s technicians worked from a trailer outside the containment vessel, manipulating a cutting tool that was operating under about 40 feet of water. They also used long-handled picks and scoops to break apart the fused mass of ceramic fuel pellets and metal. “Basically we dug our way down through that debris until we got everything removed,” Mr. McGough said.

At Three Mile Island, technicians then painstakingly loaded debris into shielded casks, under water to shield themselves from radiation, and then brought the casks to the surface. Eventually about 150 tons of radioactive rubble was shipped to an Energy Department laboratory in Idaho Springs, Idaho, where it still sits, waiting, as all used American fuel does, for a final resting place.

Japan may have another option if the wrecked core isn’t too thoroughly mixed with other materials. It already has a reprocessing plant, where old fuel is chopped up, dissolved in acid, and then sorted, with its plutonium being removed, and the uranium sorted out for possible re-use. But that process is likely years away.