She signed the papers. “I guess it’s the government way.”
“Especially the DOE way.” Morales handed her a red badge clipped to a radiation dosimeter on a plastic lanyard. “Now that you’ve signed in, I’ll notify Mr. Harris that everyone’s here. He’ll be taking you all inside the Mountain.”
Adonia placed the lanyard around her neck as the name rang a bell. “Wait, you mean Rob Harris? He’s Regulation Rob? I used to work with him at Oakridge, but I haven’t seen him in years. A really good guy.”
“But he is a stickler for the rules,” Morales said as he picked up the phone. “Everything by the book, chapter and verse.”
Adonia smiled as she remembered. “Yes, that’s him.”
Rob Harris had had a long career in DOE, and she knew him to be competent, detail-oriented to a fault, and generally well liked. Harris hadn’t been the most charismatic manager, but he was thorough, and he was a straight shooter. Morales was certainly correct — Regulation Rob had never seen a procedure he didn’t like.
“I thought he’d retired, though.” She remembered talking to Harris at a DOE mixer in Oakridge five years ago, when he told her he intended to take advantage of a government golden parachute that year. He yearned to leave work behind in favor of a nice beach and a stack of novels.
“The retirement didn’t last long.” Morales pressed the phone closer to his ear and spoke into it. “Yes, sir. Everyone is present. I’ll send in Ms. Rojas.”
Even before he hung up, the conference room door opened, and Stanley van Dyckman emerged to meet her, all smiles. “Adonia! Glad you could make it.” As always, his brown hair was slicked back. He was nattily dressed even out in the New Mexico desert: blue pinstriped suit, white shirt, a maroon tie, brown wingtips.
She adjusted her new badge and dosimeter, keeping her expression neutral. “Always glad to help.” He chuckled at her sarcasm, and she pressed harder: “Why exactly do you need me here, Stanley? And why in such a hurry to get me here on a Sunday morning? A little bit of warning would have been nice.”
Van Dyckman often insincerely tried to play down his position as a DOE Assistant Secretary, but ever since he’d received his political advancement after the Granite Bay incident, Adonia had noticed something standoffish about him. “This inspection team had to be put together quickly, a pro forma review committee, and we’ve got a ticking clock here. The Senator has a big meeting in Washington on Wednesday, and he needs our blessing for the Hydra Mountain project.” Before she could ask any more questions, he cut her off, anxious to take her into the briefing room. “You’ll find out once we’re inside the facility. We can’t talk out here in the hall.” After glancing at the completed paperwork, van Dyckman ushered her into the room, eager to make introductions. “I think you’ll be impressed with what we’re doing here, Adonia. I really do. It solves a lot of crucial problems for the nation. You’ve been complaining about it yourself.”
She had no intention of letting him sweep her along before she had a chance to speak candidly. She grabbed his arm, forcing him to stop just inside the door. “Just a minute, Stanley. First, you and I have to discuss my backlog of spent fuel rods. For some reason the NRC keeps deferring to you.”
He brushed her off as his smile became more brittle. “We can talk at a break. The others have been waiting for you to arrive.”
Translation: he intended to avoid her at every opportunity.
Adonia insisted, “Stanley, you know we’ve exceeded capacity for wet storage, but the fuel rods keep piling up. My cooling pools are crammed, and I don’t have any additional space. No room at the inn! I simply can’t store any more spent rods unless we build larger permanent pools on site, not temporary ones. Immediately. And that takes money, as well as government approval. The NRC keeps booting the problem over to you, but your staff is sitting on my request. I don’t know why they’re stalling. This is not the sort of thing you can avoid — unless you want to shut down Granite Bay entirely.”
“Permanent pools are a different line item in the budget, with additional regulations,” van Dyckman said. “I don’t have as much leeway as I do with temporary construction.” He obviously didn’t want to talk about it, leading her into the conference room. “Trust me, Adonia, I’m taking care of the problem. Just be patient and make the stopgap measure work for a little longer, as I suggested a few months ago—”
She shook her head. “I won’t do that. The NRC is still looking for any reason to shut me down after the crash, and I won’t ask them for another waiver. I need funding for permanent pools, and I need it yesterday!” It seemed absurd to construct “permanent” temporary pools, as opposed to even worse “temporary” temporary pools, but she wouldn’t compromise safety. Granite Bay had enough of a black eye as it was, thanks to the attack by the antinuke fanatic.
Stanley was clearly impatient with her interruption. “Just erect the temporary pools and let me worry about the NRC. That’ll give you breathing room and ease the crisis.”
“It shouldn’t always be a crisis,” Adonia said.
His expression looked strange. “I said I’d take care of it. I fixed the last problem after the attack, didn’t I? We stopped a radiation release that could have dwarfed Three Mile Island.”
“Dodged is a better way of describing it.” Adonia’s eyes flashed. And “we” prevented it? He’d been busy preening before the press while she directed the emergency response, and the morning rainstorm had done as much to mitigate the radiation release as anything else. Talk about revisionist history!
It wasn’t the first time he’d tried to take credit for other people’s actions. Three years ago when Adonia was still in the government and assigned to DOE Headquarters, right before his appointment as Deputy Assistant Secretary and while he was still Chief of Staff for a powerful senator, van Dyckman had refused to release funding unless the DOE packed additional fuel rods in their reactor’s cooling pools, crammed closer together than what the NRC had approved. He’d offered his own plans for yet another “temporary emergency solution,” but he had made a minor — and crucial — error in his calculations that would have resulted in a major criticality. It was only Adonia’s quick action countermanding his commands that had saved the day. Although van Dyckman happily took credit for preventing the “mishap,” they both knew who had stopped a possible catastrophe, and they both knew who was responsible for it in the first place.
What mattered most to Adonia was that a disaster had been averted, but it made Stanley insufferable. She had felt great relief when she left government service to become the manager of Granite Bay.
Later, his response to the plane crash, as well as the powerful senator’s backing, had somehow led to van Dyckman being appointed as Assistant Secretary of Energy, which placed him in charge of the nation’s nuclear waste. Yet he hadn’t done anything to solve the growing storage problem.
At least he was so busy that he couldn’t micromanage her, and Adonia was able to do her work without being harassed. He knew that she could hold the truth over him if she wanted, revealing to the public how his botched calculations would have resulted in a disaster, but she had never threatened to do so. It was an uneasy truce between the two of them.