There were about a dozen other cars in the lot — a veritable horde by current standards — and Sarah recognized them all. She parked in the spot reserved for her at the front, shoved her papers and devices into her bag, and got out. She paused to look at the building across the street. It was smaller than the complex on this side but clearly designed as a companion. It also had a fresher look about it, e.g., the white concrete on the top half bore no water stains or bird-crap splotches like the one over here. Getting the tightasses who commandeered the town’s budget to agree to build a new community center had been a Herculean struggle, but she loved the final product. The fact that her father’s name was prominently emblazoned over the front door in bold steel letters only deepened that pride.
Today was supposed to be the grand opening, and she’d been looking forward to delivering her speech to an expected crowd of at least fifteen hundred. There was a planned tour, outdoor games for the kids, and a raffle to win a new SUV that Toyota had generously donated. Instead, the location would be used as a refugee center.
She sighed and turned toward the atrium. A few steps shy of the revolving door, she felt something strike the top of her head. Then she saw a dime-sized dark spot appear on the pavement. A moment later there was another… and another…
“Here it comes,” she said pensively.
5
“That’s where it all happens,” Corwin said, pointing downward through the tilted glass of the observation deck. “That’s nuclear fission going on right before your very eyes.”
The room below them was easily the size of a school gymnasium. Hundreds of pipes of varying sizes snaked along the concrete walls, some running into the floor or through the girdered ceiling. The main feature was a massive pool of water in the center, crystal clear and tinged a neon blue. Modules at the bottom, lined up in tight rows, looked like stacks of plastic soda-bottle crates; narrow rods protruded up through some of the nodes. Lighting in this particular area had the propulsive glow of a rocket booster.
“There’s a certain beauty to it,” Corwin said, “you have to admit.”
He’s trying to warm me up again, Marla thought, all buddy-buddy. She had no intention of going along. She thought about the untraceable email that had dropped into her inbox just a few weeks ago. The writer had warned her that Corwin would try this approach.
“That’s how he is,” the mystery informant wrote. “That’s how he gets you on his side, just like his father used to do.” And they had been right. In fact, Marla’s unknown contact had been on target about everything so far. The details she had received in that email and many more afterward — about Andrew Corwin, Leo Corwin, this plant, and about nuclear energy in general — had proven both accurate and astonishing.
She was all but certain the source was someone who worked here, maybe someone reasonably high up. During her tour, Corwin introduced her to several people, most of them in hard hats in lab coats. And with every one, Marla had wondered: Was it you? Are you my Deep Throat? Not that knowing would have changed her plans in the least. She had a very clear notion of how to handle the cards she’d been dealt—Play dumb. Just like her own father had taught her during their head-to-head poker battles at the kitchen table when she was young. When you’ve got the best hand, he used to say, you’ll be tempted to let your opponents know it. But if you let them think otherwise, the payoff will be much bigger in the end. That advice had proven invaluable over the years.
“Shouldn’t it be covered up in some way?” she asked as they began walking again.
Corwin shook his head. “Water does such a good job of containing fissile material that no further shielding is required. This is called an open-pool reactor, and it’s one of two reactor types that we have here. This is the newer of the two, and it’s very impressive. People can work around it without fear of irradiation. The water also acts as a coolant as well as a neutron moderator. And because the pool can remain open, all the materials and equipment down there are easily accessible.”
“Is that what’s known as ‘heavy’ water?”
“Yes, heavy water. Do you know what that means?”
“Educate me,” Marla said.
“It has a larger-than-normal amount of deuterium, aka ‘heavy hydrogen.’ The increased hydrogen content means the water will absorb fewer neutrons than ordinary water. And the advantage there is that we don’t need to utilize enriched uranium, which is more expensive and also more radioactive, i.e., more dangerous.”
“What level of explosive force are we talking about here?”
Corwin stopped and turned to her, smiling. “Explosive force? What do you mean?”
“If the whole thing blows. You said yourself that there was nuclear fission going on down there. The power involved is tremendous.”
“Yes, the power involved is tremendous. But it’s not explosive. It doesn’t work like that.”
“See, now I know you’re lying,” Marla said flatly.
“Excuse me?”
“What about the Chernobyl disaster in ’86? You’re going to tell me that wasn’t an explosion? The core of reactor number four blew the building around it to pieces.”
“That’s not what happened.”
Marla took her iPhone out of its holster. “You want to see some pictures?”
Corwin put a hand up. “I’ve seen plenty of pictures of Chernobyl.”
“Then how can you say—”
“It wasn’t nuclear.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t a nuclear explosion,” Corwin said.
“How can you say that?”
“The explosion at Chernobyl was thermal, not nuclear. It never ceases to amaze me how many people assume it was a nuclear detonation when the facts are there for all to see.” He cleared his throat. “Okay, here’s what happened at Chernobyl — the people who managed the plant wanted to run a test to see how the safety systems would react to an electrical failure, so they began shutting down those defenses one by one.
“At the same time, the channel through which the heat and steam passed into the turbines got closed off. As a result, the pressure built up to such a point that it ruptured the lines and damaged the reactor core container. A second explosion blew off the biological shield that covered the reactor, flipping a concrete disc — one that weighed more than a thousand tons — into the air like a coin.
“When the lid came down, it landed over the hole crookedly, allowing outside air to rush in while radioactive material rushed out. If it had landed in a better position and resealed the reactor, there might have been a chance to avoid most of the catastrophe, but that didn’t happen.
“So anyway, no, it wasn’t a nuclear explosion that caused Chernobyl. It was a thermal blast that ultimately caused a core breach. But the real cause of Chernobyl was unimaginable stupidity. It was a man-made situation that was completely avoidable.”
“But this reactor here,” Marla went on, “your reactor. If there was an explosion of nuclear material, it could easily—”
“It can’t explode.”
“There’s uranium here and uranium in a nuclear bomb, so how—”
“But it’s not enriched uranium. I’m sure you’ve heard about our government getting nervous every time some country starts an enrichment program. That’s how you get weapons-grade material… and that’s not what’s used to generate electricity in a nuclear plant. If a group of terrorists flew an airplane into this reactor building right now, the material down there would not explode.”