25
Adonia grasped Shawn’s arm as they both looked over the ledge. Over the dizzying drop, she saw in the distance exactly what van Dyckman was building at the bottom of the lower cavern: eight massive, in-ground concrete pools in various stages of completion, each forty feet deep and nearly half the size of a football field. At the bottom of each partially constructed pool was a rigid metal frame, a support structure that could hold an array of hundreds upon hundreds of rods upright.
Senator Pulaski frowned as he peered down, following Victoria Doyle’s accusing finger, but he didn’t seem to understand. “Swimming pools?”
Adonia felt defeated and appalled. “Wet-storage cooling tanks for spent fuel rods.” How could Stanley have done this? “He’s going to cover the cavern floor with cooling pools.”
As spent fuel rods built up at her own nuclear power plant, Adonia had been forced to build similar concrete reservoirs behind the Granite Bay security fences for stopgap storage. She had no place else to put the fuel rods, no sanctioned holding facility where she was allowed to send them. But her pools were much smaller than this. The scale of Stanley’s project made her own temporary holding tanks at Granite Bay look like wading pools.
“Sixteen of them, when we’re all finished.” Van Dyckman sounded proud. “We already have two completed and filled, with six more nearly finished, and excavations for an additional eight. Plus,” he pointed directly below them, “that large temporary pool just below. We’re relieving the backlog of spent fuel rods as quickly as possible, making all those nuclear power plants safer by the day.”
Directly below them, Adonia saw another reservoir, an above-ground circular pool full of water. It was constructed with inch-thick plastic panels and crowded with submerged fuel rods arranged in an array, held upright at the bottom by a flimsy support structure. This wasn’t a secure, concrete-walled, in-ground storage pool like the others being built; rather, it looked like a giant backyard swimming pool, more than a hundred feet in diameter. She couldn’t judge the depth of the water from directly above, but the side of the pool was over twenty feet high; basically, a water tank.
Flush with the top of the round pool, a metal mesh platform ten feet wide encircled the outer perimeter, three feet above the water’s surface, which would presumably allow inspectors to walk around the top. The platform was supported by a matrix of crisscrossed struts that provided further support to the pool. The surface of the water lay thirty feet below them as they stood on the ledge.
Van Dyckman’s eyes were bright. “Those two concrete pools at the far end of the cavern are already packed with rods at the highest allowable density approved by the NRC. I removed them from the most problematic waste sites around the country, and that eased the greatest pressure. We had to do what we could, as fast as we could. I’m sure you’ll all agree.” He nodded to himself, though no one else chimed in. “But that wasn’t enough. As you see from the above-ground pool below us, we’re maintaining our momentum and receiving even more spent fuel rods so we can keep nuclear power plants safe around the country.” He gave them an embarrassed smile. “The other permanent cooling pools aren’t completed yet.”
“Permanent?” Garibaldi asked, as if he had caught van Dyckman in a lie. “Well, I thought Hydra Mountain was just a temporary measure until we all agreed on a full-scale acceptable solution.”
“Or until unicorns fly out my ass,” Pulaski muttered. “People like you would prevent any solution from ever being constructed.”
“Sorry, that was only a figure of speech,” van Dyckman said. “Senator Pulaski understood what we meant when he approved the additional funds for construction down here. A good manager improvises. If this day had gone as planned, we would have shown you all aspects of Valiant Locksmith, one step at a time, leading up to this grand finale, so you could put it all into perspective.”
Victoria Doyle looked sickened. “Perspective! All these spent fuel rods in here—in here! — and some of them in a flimsy plastic pool! You don’t have a clue why this is so dangerous.”
Undersecretary Doyle always made van Dyckman particularly defensive, and he rounded on her. “I know what I’m doing, Victoria. Is it any less safe than what Ms. Rojas is storing at Granite Bay right now? Some nutcase crashed a plane into one of her holding facilities!”
He huffed. “Before we did anything here in the Mountain, I arranged temporary access to specially cleared inspectors so they could certify every aspect of the construction and operation of these pools.” He pointed to the half-built structures scattered across the grotto floor. “When the other in-ground pools are completed, we’ll fund a full-time NRC inspector resident in Albuquerque to ensure continued safety of operations. Nothing to worry about, everything by the book. Even Rob Harris is comfortable with the arrangement.”
Victoria narrowed her eyes, as if she knew something the rest of them didn’t. “I doubt he is.”
Adonia was put off by Stanley’s arrogance. Yes, she supposed it was better that the spent fuel rods were deep inside Hydra Mountain than scattered around nuclear power plants, where they were far more vulnerable, but she also remembered how van Dyckman’s erroneous calculations had nearly caused a complete disaster in packing the Granite Bay cooling array. Could she really trust him to do everything properly with a nation’s worth of high-level nuclear waste? “Stanley, I have grave reservations about this.”
“Well, you shouldn’t,” he said, dismissing her concerns. “We have more than adequate administrative inspection and oversight.”
Another Stanley-ism. She felt exasperated with him. “Administrative oversight doesn’t ensure safety. You’re the Assistant Secretary, and you’re the program manager here, but have you ever actually worked at a functioning nuclear site? Spent time in practical day-to-day operations? Ever?”
“Of course. At Brown I interacted with NRC officials. I also ran experiments just down the road on MIT’s test reactor. I was responsible for modeling—”
“Universities are not equivalent to commercial nuclear or DOE operations. They’re great for learning basics and theory, but they cannot simulate large-scale operations, and they certainly don’t cover all conceivable situations in real-world operations. You can’t play fast and loose with nuclear waste.”
Shawn asked a different question. “What will you do when that above-ground pool is full, and the spent fuel rods keep coming?”
“Then we need a new contractor, one who builds pools faster!” he joked. Nobody laughed. “If the in-ground pools aren’t yet completed, we’ll just have to put up another temporary one. We have enough materials, and we’ll catch up sooner or later. Look, you’re missing the point. Every shipment of fuel rods we bring into the Mountain makes the nation safer.”
“Safer?” Garibaldi groaned. “That is exactly what I warned everyone about. A hasty, easy solution! You are much too confident in design specifications, Stanley.”
Feeling increasingly uneasy, Adonia pointed at the massive concrete casks stacked against the ledge’s far wall, each one marked with radiation symbols. “How dangerous do you think it is to move the fuel rods from transportation casks into the pools using that crane or the freight elevators? What happens if one of the casks accidentally drops and cracks open?”
“Impossible. Tests at Sandia dropped the casks from twice that height, and they survived.”