“But—”
“Marla, it would not explode. It simply doesn’t work like that.”
She pursed her lips in growing irritation and looked at the pool again. “What about Fukushima?”
“What about it?”
“The independent investigating commission concluded that all of the causes of the accident were predictable, that the plant did not meet the standards required to withstand the force of either the earthquake that triggered the tsunami or the tsunami itself.”
Corwin nodded. “That’s all true. The plant’s designers did not foresee the possibility of such an unusual chain of events. I’m not sure anyone could have. First, the tsunami triggered by the earthquake actually reached over the protective seawall at the Fukushima facility. The wall was thirty-three feet high, but the tsunami produced waves as high as forty-six, which is beyond incredible. Water flooded the lower levels of the facility — including the rooms where the diesel generators were located.
“Even though the nuclear reactors had been shut down per the appropriate procedure, they continued to produce what’s called decay heat, and therefore they still needed to be kept cool. Those generators did provide power to the cooling systems — that is, until the floodwater caused them to stop working. The backup generators kicked in, but they ran out of battery power the next day.
“With no cooling going on, the reactor naturally began to overheat, triggering a series of hydrogen-air explosions that occurred in multiple locations at the plant over three days — including the nuclear containment areas. That’s when the radioactive material began to escape. But again, like with Chernobyl, it wasn’t a nuclear blast that caused the crisis, but rather explosions of an altogether different type that damaged the container holding the nuclear material.”
“So it sounds again like human error was the culprit.”
“The original designers simply did not plan for those circumstances.”
“And it doesn’t bother you that all those deaths—”
“Whoa, wait a second. Deaths?”
“The deaths that resulted from all those incidents — Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island…”
“No deaths resulted from the Three Mile Island incident. None.”
Marla wasn’t sure she heard this correctly. “Say that again?”
“There were no deaths from the Three Mile Island incident in Pennsylvania. It was a partial nuclear meltdown that could’ve become much worse, but it didn’t. Two people died tragically during Fukushima — but they were killed by the tsunami while examining earthquake damage to the facility, not because of radiation exposure.”
“And Chernobyl?”
“In 2008, there were sixty-four deaths confirmed. And that information comes from the UN, not some pro-nuke NGO. I don’t mean to say sixty-four like it’s only sixty-four, I’m simply pointing that number out because I’ve seen estimates from some of the radical orgs in the tens of thousands.” Corwin shook his head in frustration. “I’m sorry, but that’s just ridiculous. It simply does not reflect the facts.”
Marla opened her mouth to rebut, holding up her pen like an admonitory professor, but Corwin wasn’t finished yet.
“I should also add that many of the Chernobyl deaths were emergency-response workers ordered to the site by government authorities who didn’t bother telling them what they were dealing with. Many of those workers were therefore under the impression they were simply putting out an ordinary fire. Some went up the ladders into clouds of toxic smoke and were never seen alive again. After their bodies were recovered, they had to be sealed into lead coffins, and a new cemetery had to be established in a remote area of the country because the corpses were so radioactive.”
Marla felt her stomach roll, and she turned away to fake-cough behind her hand while she purged the image from her mind. At the same moment, she heard the first booming notes of thunder.
“You can’t argue the increase in health problems around the accident sites,” she said.
“Such as?”
“Oh, come on. Higher cancer rates around Three Mile Island?”
“Multiple epidemiological studies were done within a ten-mile radius of that facility in the years following the accident, and all of them concluded that any increase was so small as to be considered insignificant from a statistical standpoint, and further, that none of those increases could be tied causally to the exposure. You may remember that President Jimmy Carter visited the facility just a few days afterwards — a few days—without a gas mask or a radiation suit. If I remember correctly, he did not sprout a sixth finger or a new eye in the center of his forehead.”
“And Fukushima?”
“No ill-health effects have been reported, even to this day, as a direct result of the radiation that got loose. None.”
“There were over fifteen thousand—”
“Those deaths were due to the earthquake and the tsunami. That’s been well documented.”
“I know there was an increased risk of various cancers — thyroid cancer and breast cancer, to name two — in people who lived in the area.”
“Yes, that’s right. And the World Health Organization issued a report stating that everyone who had been evacuated from the area had absorbed so little radiation that the effects would be virtually undetectable. Further, the WHO supported an aggressive screening program to catch early cases of thyroid cancer resulting from the incident. And the recovery rate of thyroid cancer, when caught early, is one hundred percent. Not ninety-nine—a hundred.”
Marla thought it over, then said, “Okay, I didn’t know that.”
Corwin raised his hands in a what-can-I-say gesture.
“These are the facts, Ms. Hollis.”
Yes they are, Marla thought, but not all of them, Mr. Corwin.
6
“The culvert that runs under Lenox Avenue over here may be too small for the expected swell,” Joey Sharpe told Sarah from the other end of the line. His voice sounded older than his twenty-four years, probably the result of too many Friday nights sitting with his buddies around a campfire up on Francine Mountain, with a bottle of Jack in one hand and an oversized joint in the other.
“That’s the one from 1959, right?” Sarah asked. Sharpe had been in Sarah’s class at Silver Lake High until he’d dropped out in the middle of junior year. Recently he’d cleaned up his act and managed to land his current position on the town’s maintenance crew. But no one who knew him — including Sarah — expected that he’d be riding the wagon of sobriety for very long. She hoped he would at least stay sober through this crisis.
“Yeah,” Sharpe said. “It’s badly in need of an upgrade. State recommendation is one and a quarter the width of the stream under normal flow. This thing is actually smaller than the stream’s width.”
“It probably wasn’t in ’59,” Sarah said. Her cellphone buzzed to indicate the arrival of another text message. Outside, the rain drove against the windows as if the town was being run through a car wash.
“No, probably not,” Sharpe agreed. “Has this road flooded before? Because if it has, I should probably get some barricades ready.”
“Hold on a sec and I’ll check. It’ll take a minute; the records are in the mayor’s office.”
“’Kay.”
Setting the handset on her desk, Sarah left her cramped, messy office and walked quickly through a paneled anteroom, where two secretaries sat behind matching desks just a few feet apart. The woman on the far side, in her midthirties, was heavy beyond the point of good health and wore her brown hair in a bun that came to a point on top. The other, who was well past retirement age, had her glasses perched on the end of her nose and was staring into her computer screen.