Somewhere under the pool are layers of bedrock. While solid to the touch, this stratum of the earth’s crust shifts at random, subject to a geological whim every now and then. One early spring day the bedrock layers yielded to a subtle heave and quaked slightly. Hairline cracks developed, sending fractured tendrils along arbitrary paths of least resistance, tiny tunnels that would carry water laced with toxic radioactive isotopes out to the world.
The undetectable tremor caused a brief, curious ripple on the blue, glassy surface of the nuclear plant spent-fuel pool. It might have been cause for concern had anyone seen it. But workers monitoring the pool were changing shifts, and the subtle vibration went unnoticed. Luckily, the vessels of used fuel were left intact. But deep below the sunken tubes, a weak spot in the pool wall cracked, and a new conduit connected to the veins in the bedrock. Contaminated water slowly seeped out into the ground and into the river. Eventually it would wash up on the sands of a popular recreational beach.
It was just after dinner break at the plant. Larry Hines packed up his lunch box and headed to the control room, the plant’s central nervous system, the hub. A year ago, Larry quit his job as control-room foreman after manning the helm for ten years. He loved every minute of it, until things started to break down. ALLPower executives were surprised when he asked for a transfer. What stress? Wasn’t he making top dollar? What more could he want?
Larry was reluctant to spell it out for them; surely they saw the writing on the wall. How the number of unfixed repairs fed the growing potential for dangerous accidents. It wasn’t only loyalty that kept Larry working at ALLPower; the plant was like his baby. He knew every nook and cranny, the vulnerable spots and places for likely slipups.
He became an inspection manager, a job that meant looking over everyone’s shoulder and spending extra time with workers at various stations. He would pour over checklists for accuracy, chew the fat, hang out. Many plant employees were Larry’s friends—some, more like his family. He’d rather be at the plant than go home to an empty house with his kids grown and gone and painful reminders of his wife who succumbed to breast cancer years ago.
Larry was in his midfifties, a short, stocky man with rimless glasses and red hair now fading to gray. A permanent crease bridged his brows, an unswerving stamp of worry and the focal point of his ruddy complexion. He sweated a lot, even in the winter.
Among the plant’s one thousand employees, Larry had the reputation of being reliable, trustworthy, and easygoing. Spending time with plant workers was his way of making sure everyone was handling the work load—especially the security guards, who tended to drift off at night. It was his version of personal oversight. He fretted about how much could go wrong, and he wanted to make sure the plant was running as smoothly as possible.
This particular evening he was working the late shift. With only three hours to go and time to kill, Larry headed to the control room. He walked through the turbine room and was dwarfed by the giant beige-painted turbines that loomed some forty-five feet high. The thunderous roar forced him to put on his ear plugs, which hung off his neck with the rest of his “nuclear jewelry”—identification badge and safety goggles. Pinned to his collar was the ominous dosimeter that measured radiation exposure. A white hard hat topped his head.
He rang the security buzzer outside the control room and looked through the door’s small window. His stomach squirmed. One of the men looked up and buzzed the door open. Larry poked his head in the door, cautious not to fully step inside. He could easily slip into the old role, the commander, the scolder. If he looked hard enough he would find something amiss, for sure.
Five men sat with their backs to the door in a semicircle, manning the giant cockpit of monitors spaced between an electronic landscape of color-coded buttons, knobs, and toggle switches. Periodically, buzzes and beeps honked out a staccato beat, a counterpoint to the flashing green numbers and flickering screens, the busy terrain of the control panel. A small shelf held two old-style rotary dial telephones, one black and one red, for the infrequent but dreaded calls to management or the NRC.
“Everything cool in here?” Larry called out. The men nodded robotically. One turned to face him.
“How’s it going Larry? Want your old gig back?”
“No way,” he grunted, eyeing a monitor that showed the inside of the containment dome, the core, where man’s triumph over harnessing nuclear fission was an everyday occurrence. It was here that enriched uranium atoms were split in a lightening chain reaction producing tremendous heat, heat that was used to boil water and create high-pressured steam. The steam drove the turbines that generated electricity.
Larry’s cursory glance from screens to numbers told him things were under control.
“Keep up the good work, you guys. See ya!”
He exited back through the turbine room, fidgeting with his ear plugs, and then headed to one of the lounges where Larry’s friend Jason was bound to be taking a break. When Jason wasn’t working his regular shift monitoring the spent-fuel pool, he was on the special crew that swapped out the used, spent fuel, replacing it with new fuel, an extremely dangerous job.
Extracting the used fuel was mostly done underwater. The radioactive uranium pellets worked their nuclear magic inside the long rods that were bundled together in “fuel assemblies.”
When the uranium became unstable and more radioactive, it had to be removed. The entire process was called a “fuel outage,” a routine job done every five months that lasted for weeks. The used fuel bundles were submerged in the forty-foot pool to cool down, a process that took years.
Larry found Jason in the lounge gulping down a soda and packing up his gear to go back to work.
“How’s it going, Jason?”
“Not so bad. How’s by you?”
“Same old, same old. You working the outage?”
“Yup.”
Jason looked haggard. Larry remembered the last time Jason worked the special crew, and it triggered a deep mental twinge. The men and women were always tired, trying to beat out the exhaustion brought on by arduous twelve-hour shifts. Larry nagged the foreman to hire more workers and shorten the work shifts, but he got a shrug and some excuse about cheap management.
Larry looked at Jason. “You look tired. How are you holding up?”
“Not bad. My shift is over in a few hours. Heading home to bed.”
“You working the ten-hour shift?”
“Twelve.”
“Yikes, Jason. They still have you go that long?”
“We’re under the gun, Larry. They need us to do this quickly so we can finish up the repair backlog. The feds and management are breathing down our necks.”
“I’ve been hearing that, but twelve hours?”
“Hey—it’s a living.”
The young man got up and walked toward the locker room to start the time-consuming process of suiting up in protective gear. The white, crinkly full-body suit, or “rad suit” is impenetrable to radiation, covering every inch of skin, topped with a white helmet replete with a walkie-talkie inside. Attached on both sleeves are two steely dosimeters. One beeps when radiation exposure is dangerous, the other tracks workers by serial number and how much radiation they’ve been exposed to in a year. At the end of the shift, the tags are checked, levels logged in, and the suits discarded.
Larry grimaced. He was irked about the long hours.