“You’re going to get sick out there. How is that going to help us?”
“I’m not going to get sick,” he said. “I have a plan.”
“Which is…?”
“I’m taking the slicker we keep in the garage. That’ll keep the rain off me.”
“And the air? How are you going to keep the air away?”
“The paint mask,” he said, cutting through the kitchen and reaching for the garage door. “The one I used when I sprayed the garage walls last year. Remember?”
The bare cinder blocks in the garage couldn’t be painted correctly with a brush because of the deep pitting, so he had to resort to a spray gun connected to an air compressor. Even with the bay doors and all the windows open, there was so much drift that he had to invest in a self-contained oxygen mask. He had commented at the time that it made him look like a World War I soldier fending off an attack of mustard gas.
He found the slicker in the cabinet by the slop sink and slipped it noisily over himself. The mask was on a high shelf in a box marked “painting stuff.”
“It’s not like I’m going to be swimming in the flood on Ventnor Avenue. I’ll be in the car until I get to Sharon’s apartment, then I’ll stand on the porch and keeping ringing the bell until he comes out.”
Cary had come up behind Kate and was studying his father with growing horror. The unspoken sentiment that flashed across his face appeared to perfectly mimic that of his mother—Oh, my God, you’re not actually going out there, are you?
“Pete, I really don’t think—”
“Here,” he said, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out his Bluetooth headset. He worked it into his ear and turned it on. “I’ll call you as soon as I get out there, and we’ll stay in touch the whole time.”
He detached the charging cable from their silver Toyota Prius, hopped in, and started the engine.
“I’m going to open the garage, so please go back inside.”
Kate hesitated before saying, “Okay.” Then she closed the door with Cary shadowing her. The feeling that she would never see her husband again was overpowering. She heard the garage door rattle up, then down again.
Pete called a moment later, as promised.
19
Marla had to return to the high window in the staircase to take fresh pictures of the damaged reactor and give an updated blog:
Most of the staff has been evacuated for decontamination; very few people outside now. The helicopters keep coming with the sand, and the burning chunks of material from the blown-out reactor vessel have been extinguished. The fire truck that presumably was used to do this is still sitting out there, but the firemen are nowhere to be seen. I’m going to guess they were ordered to evacuate along with the others. There’s a massive amount of smoke pluming from the damaged vessel, no doubt loaded with radioactive particles. I have tried to get Gary Mason on the phone to ask if the boron is now involved, but he has not been answering.
She sent this and the new photos to her editor — the cell signal was considerably stronger up here — then hurried back down to where Ellerton was waiting.
The door that Ellerton stood by was a massive, disc-shaped structure, with eight cylindrical locking bolts around the perimeter and a center-mounted handle that resembled a ship’s wheel. It looked like something in a bank vault.
There was an audible puff of air as the seal fractured, and Marla said, “Won’t we need masks? And for that matter, are we in any danger from what’s happening outside right now?”
Ellerton glanced at the climatic monitor above the electronic keypad where he’d entered the unlocking code. “No, we’re fine. Buildings at nuke plants are constructed to shield radiation. There are things like multiple layers of concrete and steel, thick panes of glass, and emergency shutdown switches for ventilation systems. If it wasn’t safe in this area, I wouldn’t have brought you here. Anyway, let’s get back to the reason why I did…”
He stepped in and switched on the lights, revealing a room filled with steel drums, neatly arranged on pallets in groups of sixteen. There was enough space between each cluster to allow passage of a hand truck or a small forklift. Every barrel was bright yellow and had the standard three-bladed radioactivity symbol on the side.
“Is this what I think it is?”
“What do you think it is?”
“Enriched uranium?”
“That’s correct.”
“And you’re sure it’s safe to be in here?”
“I wouldn’t stay overnight,” Ellerton said, “but we’re not going to be long.”
He led her to the far corner of the room. The lighting was poor, and Marla noticed that the bulb in the overhead fixture wasn’t just out — it had been removed.
Ellerton removed the Maglite from his belt with the fluidity of a gunslinger and shined it on the floor. The bright circle of light revealed badly eroded concrete and the building’s exposed foundation. There was significant discoloration of the gravel and cement, not just within the scar but well beyond.
“What happened?” Marla asked.
“A spill, four years ago.”
“Of this stuff?”
“Yeah. Forklift operator, young guy. Wasn’t paying attention and put one of the blades right through a barrel. It was all over the place.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“It took over a month to clean and decontaminate.” He pointed to the damaged floor. “They’ve repaired it about ten times since the accident, but the concrete keeps flaking away.”
“A spill is a huge safety violation.” Marla paused. “I don’t remember hearing anything about it…”
Ellerton shook his head. “There are no official records. It never happened.”
Marla’s jaw tightened as the smoldering anger she had been keeping on a leash for the last hour and a half threatened to break free. This was the fifth stop on Ellerton’s guided tour. After the hidden cask repository, he had taken her to another sub-basement chamber, where two large pipes ran through a concrete wall. He explained that the wall was new construction, built about eight feet in front of the original. It concealed a cracked-and-repaired length of pipe that had been leaking tritium and strontium, which had seeped into the water table. Leo Corwin had done nothing about the problem until, after several years, there were a few reports of local children developing problems with bone and dental growth.
In one of the reactor rooms, Marla was shown a freshly painted section of the vessel head. Ellerton scraped away some of the paint, revealing the speckled remains of boric-acid corrosion. Instead of replacing the damaged head and reporting the incident, per procedure — which would have cost millions and likely shut down the plant for a time — Corwin instead had the rotted seals filled in and the damaged surface areas sanded and sprayed over.
And in a locked room near the plant’s main transformer, Ellerton worked hard to move three filing cabinets away from an insignificant-looking control box, the exterior scarred and blackened by extreme heat. This, he told her, was the only remaining evidence of a fire that had broken out three years earlier and damaged both the plant’s backup generator and its emergency turbine. Repairs had cost nearly eight million and NRC inspectors had reviewed the work. But no official records were ever filed, and the plant continued standard operation throughout the repair period, though if an accident had occurred while the secondary generator and turbine were offline, the results would almost certainly have been catastrophic.