“Why was it?”
“Well, to hear the stories at the Department of Energy, a calculated effort was made to disregard every potential candidate for a new highlevel waste site except the one in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. There, despite an active fault system, recently vented volcano, and rapidly percolating groundwater, they’ve spent over fourteen billion dollars planning a waste storage facility tunneled a thousand meters into the rock.”
“Sounds like a conspiracy to me,” Zubov said. “Congress is using its black project money to build an underground facility for UFOS or faking more moon landings and billing it to the taxpayers as a nuclear waste dump.”
“Those may be more laudable purposes than anything they’re proposing now,” Junko admitted. “Uranium 235 has a half-life of seven hundred million years! What manmade structure can compare to that? Look at the Hanford site: 40 percent of the waste tanks leaked, dripping a million gallons of waste into the watershed. Today’s containment technology — if you can call it that — isn’t much more advanced. Burying waste might work someday, but you’d have to drill down about a mile. The heat of the waste — we’re talking about temperatures exceeding eight hundred degrees Celsius — would, in theory, melt the surrounding rock and seal the waste away, far below any groundwater. Obviously that isn’t an option here, so we’re back to burial in the seafloor.”
“If the seafloor is such a good disposal site, then why is this one leaking?” Carol asked.
“That’s what’s got me worried,” Junko said. “Not only that it’s leaking, but why it’s leaking. No one seems to know what form the waste was in when it was deposited. Let’s assume the standard, fifty-five-gallon galvanized barrels, since today’s steel-lined concrete tanks weren’t available and would be too difficult to deposit. Let’s further assume that the waste wasn’t treated — it contains long-lived, highly radioactive fission products and small amounts of plutonium isotopes. Plutonium is the stuff bombs are made of. If there’s plutonium down there and it’s leaking in some soluble form, as it clearly is, then we can assume the waste wasn’t stabilized by drying and mixing with concrete, as is done today.”
“Unlikely they’d bother hauling that much cement way up here,” Zubov agreed.
“So at most they would have added an alkaline base to the liquid waste, plating out the dissolved residue, but keeping the remainder of the fissionable materials intact.” She turned back to the PATRIC plotter, typed in some hypothetical data.
“Even Scott doesn’t seem to really know how much waste was originally there, but we can reasonably guess how much has leaked by looking at the effluent from the Devil’s Finger. An academic exercise, really, because whether it’s one barrel or a hundred, there’s the same opportunity for rearranging fissionable materials into a critical mass when we add this much energy to whatever’s down there. It’s all generating heat; that’s why highlevel wastes need to be stored aboveground, so they can cool.”
“You’re talking about an uncontrolled nuclear explosion,” Garner said.
“Yes, possibly,” Junko agreed. “At the very least, corrosion of the drums may have led to a buildup of hydrogen, ammonia, and methane in the repository — a potentially explosive mixture.”
Zubov looked at them.
“And here I thought all we had to risk was starting a new ice age. Man, Palau is looking better every day.”
As with many modern submarines, the sonar room of the Hawkbill was positioned forward of the sail, just below the weapons-loading hatch.
It was a position very close to the ship’s center of balance and far from the noise generated by the engine room and the single seven bladed propeller. The space was cramped in most standard Sturgeon-class vessels; the Hawkbill was even worse, as several additional racks of electronics had been installed to accommodate the enhanced sonar array and other instrumentation.
With funding from the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation, the forty-two-hundred-ton vessel had been modified to carry researchers into the Arctic Ocean, which remained among the world’s most complex and least understood ocean basins. The most extensive of the Hawkbill’s modifications was the addition to the outer hull of two SCAMPS — Seafloor Characterization and Mapping Pods. Distinct from the bulbous sonar dome on the bow of the ship and its spherical sonar array, the SCAMP profilers added two additional systems to the Hawkbill’s sensing array: one that generated a fifty-kilometer swath of bathymetric information about the seafloor, and a second that performed sub seafloor profiling of the sediment. The SCAMP arrays had been the most instrumental in detailing the bathymetry of the Devil’s Finger and now provided the best locations for the placement of the C-4 charges.
A second system, the acoustic Doppler current profiler or ADCP, was used to determine the effect of wind and ocean currents on moving floe ice; these data, in conjunction with the satellite information, would be instrumental to guiding the ships forming the Ulva sponge.
Krail conferred with the submarine’s sonar operators as the latest bottom profiles were developed by the ship’s computers. Conferred was a generous term in fact, Krail nearly snatched the data from the operators as soon as they were acquired and forwarded the information to Charon.
On the seafloor, Charon’s men continued placing the C-4 canisters along the lip of the canyon, moving slowly but steadily toward the oil rig in two squads. The first squad consisted of the SEALS, including the crew of the ASDS, who were in charge of taking the canisters from the surface to various strategic positions deep within the Devil’s Finger.
The second squad was Charon’s men from B-82, who wired the charges together into a demolition array. The original plan had called for Charon and Stimson to quarterback both units from the communications van on B-82, five nautical miles away, but Charon apparently grew frustrated with that arrangement and donned a JIM suit himself. That had been two hours ago. Krail had been so absorbed with the charts, so intent on controlling his own team members, that he had lost track of Charon’s exact whereabouts.
Krail got on the radio to both the ASDS and Sea Sprite, asking both submersibles whether they had seen Charon. They hadn’t. According to Stimson, back in the communications van, Charon was still down in one of the JIM suits.
“Who is he using for surface support?”
“Commander, the last time I tried to watch Mart’s back, I nearly ended up facedown on the deck with a three-day headache.”
“I assume the last time he wasn’t in charge of wiring a trainload of C-4,” Krail snapped back. This motivated Stimson to cycle through the comm links, asking the SEALS who were still submerged where Charon might be. The various answers that came back offered no conclusions.
“Two billion dollars’ worth of listening equipment and you can’t locate a loudmouth like Charon?” Krail spat. He suspected Charon was listening in on the exchange, had heard every word, but was too absorbed in his work or too resentful of playing by the rules to respond.
“Find him. And if you can’t find him, get him on the comm link with an update on his status and position.”
“Will do. Commander,” Stimson said. From his tone, it wouldn’t surprise Krail if Stimson chose to forget that pledge before the microphone clicked off.