“Never a good sign,” the PO next to him said.
“Heard the cooks talking,” the missileman said, sliding his tray onto the table. “XO’s talking to himself.”
“Damn,” the ship’s medic said, shaking his head. “We’re only three weeks in. Never a good sign.”
“Better get your syringe ready,” the missile tech said, grinning.
“Carry it with me always.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
All machinists on a nuclear boat were “nukes.” That is, they had been through the Navy’s brutal Nuclear Power School after learning their other craft.
Thus PO Gants had been through a course that was the near order of a bachelors in nuclear engineering. Even if most of the time he felt like a glorified plumber.
However, that meant that most of his time was not taken up with glorified plumbing: It was taken up with watching the many readouts related to the power system of the Blade II. Eight hours out of every day everyone on the ship stood “watch” with an additional four hours of “duty.” (Glorified plumbing.) What “watch” meant depended upon the speciality. But in Gants’ case it meant watching a large number of readouts from, on this watch, Fusion Engine Two, which were not supposed to be fluctuating.
With a nuclear power system, such as had been on the original Nebraska, Gants would have known not only what any fluctuation meant directly but the thousands of additional issues it would cause.
However, the Blade II had fusion engines. He’d read the manual on fusion engines, understanding a surprising amount, but he could not really be called, in his opinion, fully certified. Then again, there were no humans that he considered “fully certified” on Hexosehr fusion engines.
So when one of the waterfall displays, vertical colored readouts that ran from green at the top through yellow then red, started flickering, he wasn’t positive if it was the first signs of cataclysm or just something “hinky.”
The whole fusion conversion system was a bit of a mystery, frankly.
In nuke boats radioactive fission released heat which boiled water which turned turbines which made electricity. Which was why one name for nuke boats was “tea kettles.”
The way that fission works is a “slow” neutron is captured by uranium 235 turning it into uranium 236. This destabilizes the uranium atom which then breaks apart, fissions, into, usually, barium and krypton gas and energy. Lots of energy. The fission releases 200 times the amount of energy in the neutron and, notably, gamma rays and more neutrons. The new neutrons continue to break up more uranium, thus the “chain reaction” part. The excess energy is mostly in the form of heat.
The heat is transferred to water (or in some cases sodium or helium) which in turn is run via pipes through other water. That water, turned to steam, drives massive turbines. The turbines directly drive the propellers and also produced electrical power.
In a fusion boat, helium three (He3) atoms were fused together. Like a fission reaction, that produced heat. It also produced plasma, atoms that had been stripped of their electrons. He3 was used because, unlike deuterium and hydrogen, it produced no secondary radiation.
Instead of boiling water, a secondary Hexosehr system grabbed the stripped electrons for electricity as well as used the generated heat to produce more through the “heat converter” unit. About 90% of the generated energy was captured and turned to electricity. Which was good since too much heat in a spaceship was a bad thing. Using the Hexosehr systems gave them four times as long between chills as the Blade I.
The whole thing was encased in a magnetic containment bottle. The containment bottle was, in fact, bottle shaped, having an opening on one side. That led to the plasma conduits and the heat transfer system, which had their own magnetic containment. The helium 3 that fueled the thing was inserted through rapidly opening and closing “holes” in the magnetic containment bottle.
Input: the He3. Output: the total power released in the fusion bottle. Throughput was how much electricity was scavenged. There was an “input” side of throughput from output that was measured as well.
What he was seeing, every five seconds more or less, was a slight drop in thoughput. Just a flicker. Fusion Two was set at 80% output, a good level for fast cruising. Every now and then throughput dropped about two percent.
What was bugging him was that if the throughput was flickering, the output should have been. And there should have been other systems showing a fault.
But only throughput was flickering. Actually, input power of the throughput systems. Which meant about two percent of the output was disappearing. Somewhere. To be specific, somewhere in the bottle. Given that the power contained in the bottle was nearly as much as destroyed Nagasaki, two percent of it disappearing was… problematic.
He reached up and touched a control, bringing up the numeric readout of output for the last few hours. Sure enough, he could see where the output started flickering. About ten minutes ago. It wasn’t visible with the waterfalls or the numeric readouts.
He sat back and contemplated that for a bit.
“Got a problem, Gants?”
The lieutenant of the watch was a nuke. He had a degree in nuclear power and had been through the same school, albeit for officers, as Gants. He had more theoretical knowledge than the machinist and Gants acknowledged that. But, like Gants, his training was in fission not fusion. They were not the same.
Gants, therefore, didn’t answer directly. He called up the same screens while he thought and pointed to the changes.
“How can you have a two percent drop in throughput but less than one in output?” the lieutenant mused.
Gants had started off thinking the same thing. But he was bugged by something.
He pulled up a detail of the containment bottle. The readouts were designed for fairly large-order changes and he was looking for very slight ones.
Dialing down he finally found what he was looking for, thought about it for a moment and reached out like a cobra to hit the SCRAM button, shutting down the fusion reactor.
“What?” the LT shouted. “What are you doing?”
“We were about to lose containment, sir,” Gants said, calmly, as alarms started to scream throughout the ship.
When Weaver reached the engineering compartment, the Eng, the lieutenant of watch and Chief Gestner were bent over the panel for Fusion Two while Gants was standing off to one side, his arms folded.
“What happened?” Bill asked.
“Gants SCRAMed the plant, sir,” Chief Gestner replied as the CO trotted into the crowded compartment.
“Why?” Prael asked.
“He says we were about to lose containment,” the Eng said, looking at the readouts. “I don’t see it. We were getting output fluctuations and one of the bottle cells was two percent out of alignment, but I don’t see that causing a containment failure.”
“What do you have to say, Petty Officer?” the CO asked just as Weaver said: “Which one?”
“XO,” the CO said. “I have this.”
“Yes, sir,” Bill replied.
“PO?” the CO asked, looking at Gants.
“There was a drop in throughput intake with a lower drop in output, sir,” Gants said, shrugging. “And the number three containment series was down two percent. Only the number three…”
“And that caused you to SCRAM the reactor?” the Eng asked angrily.
“Damned straight,” Weaver said, turning pale. “Oh, hell, yeah.”
“Okay, sir,” Commander Oldfield said, grabbing his head. “What am I missing?”