Two hours later, Hank jogged the quarter mile into the plant in his suit, carrying his radiation meter. Twenty minutes later, he hadn’t come back out.
“Shouldn’t we send someone in to see what happened?” I asked.
“Hank knows what he’s doing,” the crew leader said. “Give him some more time.”
At the thirty minute mark, Hank emerged from the plant building slowly walking back. Half way back to us he removed the helmet from the radiation suit.
“It’s working,” he said as he arrived. “Radiation levels are falling. The cooling pool is full and the reserve water pool is filling. I inspected the control room and everything looks like it should work. We need to get team two and three out here; we can send a team in only once, and we’ve got two more reactors to rescue. Good job, everyone.”
As I talked with Hank, I noticed Dave Saltzman wander off to the side. He was reporting in.
The next day Hank’s Team Two ran additional wires from reactor Building One to Building Two. By noon, the cooling pools were full and Team Three took over, running wires from Building Two to Building Three. By late afternoon, the radiation levels were down significantly.
“In two or three days we can start decontamination,” Hank said. “A week or two after that we can try bringing the first reactor back on line. If that works properly, you can have your generator back. We’ll be self-sustaining and ready to supply electricity to the area from that point on.”
“Then we better start stringing power lines,” I said, “and see what we have in the way of transformers.”
“Yep,” Hank said, “transformers are going to be your limiting component. Here’s the name of a guy who just might know where some of those transformers can be found.”
I took the name and thanked him for his help.
Hank was good to his word. Sixteen days later, reactor number one went subcritical as the control rods were slowly raised out of the reactor core. In an hour, steam was flowing and the massive generators began to rotate. Palo Verde Number One was back online, the country’s first nuclear reactor to be recovered. Electricity was the life-blood of industrial operations. Metals could be refined, cast, molded, forged and machined; wood could be cut, planed and processed; looms could be built and operated; cloth and thread could be made.
I brought John up to date over the radio.
“How are you doing for water in the Phoenix area?” John asked.
“That’s the one thing that is taking the greatest amount of our time and resources,” I said. “We’re following the same procedure we used in Denver. We have the same basic situation: no blueprints, so we don’t know where all the shutoff valves are located. We have some guys who worked for the DPW Water Department and they have turned off everything they can remember. The rest we’ll just have to try and see what we can find.”
“Okay,” John said. “How soon will you be starting?”
“Wires are already run,” I replied. “Tia’s out at the water plant now supervising initial startup.”
“The other concern is food production,” John said. “I’ve received reports that farmers are having trouble plowing their fields. There is little if any fuel for tractors and only a couple hundred horses survived the meteor storm. Farmers are plowing their fields with twenty to thirty people pulling the plows by hand. This is insane. We need better answers.”
“I know we do,” I replied, “but the lack of reliable transportation is crippling everything. Even if we manage to grow the food, how do we get it to where the people are?”
“The railroads are our first answer,” John said. “But right now we have only three trains and thirty five thousand miles of damaged track. People are going to starve this winter unless we can come up with a better answer.”
“I’ll talk with Ralph,” I said. “I know he’s been working on something. I’ll see if it will help.”
The sheer number of problems was staggering. I began to realize that the 650,000,000 people that died in the meteor storm 63,000 years ago were not only the direct result of the storm, but of the disease and starvation that followed. We had survived the storm. The only question now was how do we manage to grow enough food and get it to where the people are so we don’t end up at a thousand survivors again?
Ralph showed his private project to me. A large stake truck had survived the meteor storm. Without diesel fuel it was essentially useless, but Ralph had pulled the engine and was replacing it with a magnetic generator. All that was missing was an electric motor.
“We found several industrial motors that survived the fires and the meteorites,” Ralph said. “But they’re the wrong voltage to be used directly. I have a guy rewinding the first motor now. Tomorrow we try it all out and see if it works.”
“Good,” I said. “John told me Albuquerque is in desperate need of water and they have no electricity. Can you help them?”
“We’re casting the parts for our first megawatt generator now,” Ralph replied, “it should be ready to go within the week. Albuquerque works for me. There’re 20 thousand pounds of neodymium over there. We can deliver the generator and pick up the neodymium for the return trip.”
“Excellent,” I said. “I’ll let John know. He’ll have your neodymium all packaged up and ready to go. By the way, can you come up with a generator and motor combination that we can retrofit to a tractor?”
“You mean like a farm tractor?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Right now people are pulling plows by hand, trying to grow enough food to get us through the winter. Tractors would make a huge difference.”
“Huh,” Ralph said. “Let me see what I can find.”
On the first test of the stake truck, the connection between the motor and the transmission broke after an hour of use. Ralph beefed up the connection and two days later we had our first delivery truck ready to go. It was a little comical watching the driver start the generator. The crank extended through the front of the grill work and reminded me of the old movies with people starting the Model T’s Henry Ford used to make.
The next day we loaded the country’s first megawatt magnetic generator onto the back of the truck and covered it with a tarp. By noon, it was on its way to Albuquerque.
“I took a look at some tractors,” Ralph said. “There’re quite a few that survived. They run on a hydrostatic drive, which makes the transition to a magnetic generator system relatively simple. My engineer thinks we can come up with a retrofit package that can be installed into a tractor in less than a day.”
“How many do you think you can build?” I asked.
“If I can build some more kilns, we can make a dozen a week,” he said.
“In addition to what you are making now?”
“The parts spend 36 hours in the kiln,” Ralph replied. “That’s the current bottleneck. The rest of the operations are relatively short, by comparison.”
“And what’s holding up new kilns?” I asked.
“Fire bricks,” Ralph replied. “Right now we are scavenging damaged houses with fireplaces for the fire bricks.”
“Can we make more?” I asked.
“The problem is getting the right clay for the bricks,” Ralph said. “In the past all of the Alumina Clay for fire bricks came from South America. We don’t have any reserves except for old fireplaces.”
“So our only long-term solution is international trade,” I replied. “That is going to take a lot of time to accomplish, since it depends on shipping things on the oceans.”
It dawned on me that the Navy just might have freighters that could be put to use, if they even acknowledge the ships exist. I located Lieutenant Saltzman and pulled him aside for a private conversation.