She turned to the pool directly below. “We’re deep underground and isolated. What if the water supply is disrupted? What if the power goes off, and the water can’t be circulated or cooled? The water would get superheated, boil away, and if the rods are exposed to the air—”
“Or what if an asteroid slams into New Mexico?” van Dyckman said with a snort.
“Or what if a small plane crashes into Hydra Mountain?” Shawn muttered. “Sometimes unlikely events happen.”
“Those scenarios have been assessed, and the risks were deemed acceptable.” He scowled around the group that seemed to have turned against him. “Are there any other questions, or should I give you a complete safety briefing?”
Victoria Doyle looked increasingly agitated, struggling with something she refused to say.
Garibaldi stepped closer to the edge, into the red crosshatched area, and pointed to the above-ground pool directly below. “Your in-ground concrete pools may adhere to NRC guidelines, but your temporary pool only has plastic walls — to hold radioactive spent fuel rods! It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
“It’s fiber-reinforced plastic, Dr. Garibaldi — over an inch thick, greater than industrial standard. And this FRP uses carbon fiber, giving the sides a tensile strength greater than steel. It exceeds the specs for commercial water tanks.”
“Except that everyday water tanks don’t store nuclear waste.” Garibaldi pointed at numerous water outlets, filters, and temperature gauges embedded in the wall near the bottom of the pool, barely visible through the water. “And those fittings make the pool more susceptible to a leak.”
Undersecretary Doyle finally blurted out, aghast, “This is ridiculous! If that pool leaks and floods the lower level, a radiation release down here would have… unprecedented consequences.”
Van Dyckman’s tone was withering and defensive. “In a complete worst-case scenario, it would be a mess, yes, but easily contained. We are deep inside a mountain, after all. Who is going to get hurt, even in a disaster?”
Victoria was sweating. Her face had a look of disgust, even fear. “You still don’t understand. Even moderated by all this water, those rods have already raised the background radiation level in this cavern well above ambient. With so much nuclear material present, if that damned tank of yours leaks, it would take only a few stray neutrons to cause a potential disaster.”
Adonia frowned. What kind of disaster? Was Doyle misinformed? Her expertise was in nuclear weapons, not power reactors, but surely the Undersecretary could see that the fuel rods in the pool below weren’t packed densely enough to go supercritical.
Garibaldi leaned over the edge as he spoke, as if he felt compelled to stare at the temporary holding pool far below. His voice had a different tenor — unlike his previous biting sarcasms, he now sounded deeply frightened. “Stanley, are you storing standard-sized fuel rods in that temporary pool?”
“Of course.”
Garibaldi nodded. “So, those rods are four meters long, but that pool below us is clearly not as deep as NRC standards would dictate.”
Van Dyckman grew more agitated. “It’s twenty feet deep — the maximum depth we could use and still guarantee the FRP integrity, so that the water wouldn’t burst out the sides. There’s at least six feet of water above the top of the fuel rods, and that’s acceptable to moderate the emitted neutrons.” He looked around the committee members, flushed, and then insisted again. “That is fully within the NRC’s safety guidelines!”
“Six feet of water is plenty,” Senator Pulaski repeated, clearly repeating what van Dyckman had told him.
Garibaldi said in a scornful tone, “Yes, I’m sure you completed the rigorous calculations, Senator.”
“It’s barely within the guidelines,” Adonia said. “That temporary pool has almost zero safety margin, fiber-reinforced plastic or not. And any drop in the water level could result in an enormous increase in radioactivity.” She glanced at Doyle, who seemed unaccountably worried. “But probably not the disastrous scenario the Undersecretary is so worried about.”
Doyle shook her head. “You don’t have a clue. None of you.”
Stanley grew increasingly agitated. “This is only for three months, max! The next six concrete pools should be completed soon. The contractors are penalized for every day they go over the schedule, and we’re still constructing eight more.”
Shawn stood next to Adonia. “Again, what if there’s a leak? Or a power failure that would stop the cooling water from circulating. The fuel rods would heat up and evaporate the water, leaving the rods exposed, which would make the situation worse.”
Van Dyckman paced along the wide ledge, increasingly upset. “We covered all these scenarios in simulations. What if a magnitude 7 earthquake strikes at the same time a plague of locusts sweeps across New Mexico? And on a national holiday during a full moon?” His sarcasm was clear. “That’s the sort of idiocy that kept Yucca Mountain from opening its doors for the past two decades, and you all know it. The problem is far worse if we don’t accept this solution. That’s why the President assigned me as program manager, because he knew I could get the job done. Who else do you think has the right expertise and background?”
“Any DOE site manager, and not you,” Victoria said sharply. “Now that I see what you’re doing here, it’s clear you haven’t been fully briefed on the unintended consequences. Any of them.” She swallowed hard, letting her voice drop further. “Apparently, no one else has either. The Departments of State, Defense, and Energy should all have coordinated on this from the beginning.”
Pacing frenetically, van Dyckman looked as if he had swallowed something sour. “You don’t understand. Everyone is trying to micromanage my program, but I’m not going to countermand the President.” He looked directly at Shawn. “I have to deal with the practicalities and make sure Valiant Locksmith achieves its goals, for the good of the nation. Senator Pulaski understands this, and that’s why he increased our black funding line, and allowed me to circumvent the classified interagency review.” He looked intently at Adonia, as if expecting an ally. “Don’t you see? We are up… and… running!”
“Unless a forklift accidentally punctures those plastic walls,” Garibaldi said. “Or a seam leaks, or the pool is accidentally overfilled — which makes the water pressure exceed the FRP’s tensile strength, causing the pool to burst.”
Adonia said, “No matter how many thumbscrews you felt in Washington, Stanley, sometimes you just have to put down your foot and say no.”
Victoria turned to face them all. “I told him when he first read us into his program that there were things going on inside the Mountain he doesn’t know about, and he brushed me aside.”
“Valiant Locksmith is Hydra Mountain!” Van Dyckman sounded exasperated.
“Not by half,” she said. “Now that I’ve seen these pools, this review committee is over. I have grounds to shut down your entire program. You have no idea what danger you’ve put us all in. Not only us, but possibly the entire Southwest.” She glared at him. “I just wish I’d been read into your program at the beginning, and I would have pulled the plug a year and a half ago, before this crazy scheme was ever started. Would’ve saved everyone time. And money.”
26
His tense phone call with the DOE Secretary had yielded no solutions, only confusion and criticisms. Harris had looked to his superiors two thousand miles away in Washington for a bureaucratic safety net, but now it didn’t feel much more secure than spiderwebs. He was on his own.
Harris felt blind and hamstrung in his Eagle’s Nest office above the operations center. His techs still hadn’t been able to give him visuals in the lower level, so he couldn’t see Adonia and her companions, but sensors implied they had reached the high bay overlooking the wet-storage pools.