Without waiting for a response, Rogers looked at the man in uniform and asked, “General Ford. Can you please start us off, considering that you knew Marshall Hail’s father.”
The General turned away from Rogers and softened a little. He looked at the President and softened a little more. Rogers guessed that must have been the teddy bear face the President saw in Ford.
“I’m sure that we all know that Marshall Hail’s father was Tucker M. Hail, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was a five-star Fleet Admiral. For those of you who are not military, that is the highest rank the Navy has to offer. It is equivalent to the General of the Army.”
Ford paused for a moment and considered what else he could say about Tucker Hail that had any relevance to the matter before them.
“I was a few years behind Tucker ― actually a decade,” Ford corrected himself. “By the time I was moving up in the higher ranks, Tucker was on the verge of retiring from both the service and politics. From what I heard, Tucker was proud of his son, but not proud like a life-long tough military man would be of a son who opts to go to MIT instead of WestPoint. Don’t get me wrong, I suspect that Tucker was proud of his son. I mean, hell, his boy was a Nobel Prize winner, but Tucker would have much preferred Marshall to be a soldier. Does that make any sense?”
The President spoke with a measure of aversion in her tone.
“Not really,” General. “Marshall’s father sounds like a piece of work to me, although I’m sure his service to our nation was impeccable.”
No one argued the point with the President.
“What I know about Marshall Hail,” the President continued, “is that he was some kind of whiz kid. He went to MIT and was a marvel in physics. He then took the TerraPower traveling wave reactor design, the nuclear company Bill Gates chaired around 2015, and redesigned the reactor so it would efficiently burn our old nuclear waste. I know from reading probably the same stuff you gentlemen have read over the years, that Marshall Hail made a fortune by installing his new reactor in dozens of countries. To my knowledge, five of his new reactors have recently been installed and activated in our own United States.”
“Well, that’s not exactly where Hail made his money,” General Ford said. “We can’t forget the contribution the United States made to the Hail Corporation.”
“And what is that?” the President asked.
The General considered how best to phrase his facts. After a moment, he decided there was no way to sugarcoat it, so he said, “Hail bargained a deal with our United States government to collect and remove all of the nuclear waste we had stockpiled since our first reactors went online in 1958. Hail agreed to transport our entire nuclear waste stockpile out of the United States. Where? We didn’t care. And that stockpile included the 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride we had in our storage yards.”
“And what is the significance of that?” the President asked.
“Well, Hail’s new traveling wave reactor burns nuclear waste as fuel. Our nuclear waste as fuel. So those new Hail Nuclear power plants you were referring to, we are actually buying back our own nuclear waste from Hail’s company. Sure, Hail Industries packaged it up so it will burn correctly in their reactors, but it cost Hail virtually nothing, and he is selling our own nuclear waste back to us for millions.”
General Ford looked at everyone looking at him. He finished up his little speech with, “So that’s where his fortune came from. All the countries around the world acquire Hail’s reactors cheaply, but the fuel bundles cost them a pretty penny and Hail owns it all.”
The room was silent for a moment as they all absorbed the General’s information.
“How was he able to set up that deal?” the President asked.
“It was a combination of things,” the General told the group. “First, it was perfect timing. The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository near Las Vegas was a total bomb, no pun intended,” the General laughed. No one else did.
“We spent billions of tax payers’ money on literally a hole in the ground and never put a single neutron of nuclear waste into the facility. So along comes Hail who says he will ship every stick and barrel of nuclear waste off of our continent, as long as he gets it for free.”
“You said it was a combination of things. So what were the other factors?” the President asked.
“His father was the appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. Do you have any idea how much political power Marshall could bring to bear on the issue? It was a no-brainer for the Administration at the time to green light the deal. We had a problem with storing our nuclear waste and Hail was the solution. What no one understood at the time was that Hail already had a solution but he didn’t have any fuel to burn in his reactors, and that was his problem.”
Finally, Rogers spoke up.
“We can’t fault Hail for inventing a brilliant reactor, or understanding the lay of the land better than all us non-MIT graduates. His reactor takes high-level nuclear waste and burns it for a decade until it’s low-level waste that can be literally thrown away. Just the stockpile of nuclear waste fuel that Hail has right now, can safely power the world for the next hundred-thousand years. And I want to emphasize that his traveling wave reactors are a completely new design and they are safe. They don’t come with any of those scary problems that people are always afraid of when they think of nuclear.”
“Are you referring to the meltdowns, the China syndrome?” the President asked Rogers.
“Yes Ma’am,” Rogers confirmed. “The first safety design change is that the Hail traveling reactor operates at atmospheric pressure, so there is no chance of blowing the roof off the containment vessel, which happened in the Chernobyl disaster. Another safety feature is the reactor uses liquid sodium as the coolant instead of water. That means the plants don’t have to be built next to large water supplies such as rivers and oceans. This eliminates flooding and tsunami issues, which happened in the Fukushima disaster. This eliminates the issue of water contamination as well. So by way of design, Hail’s new reactors cannot meltdown. We need to face the fact that Hail built the perfect energy machine. Drop in a fuel bundle of our own nuclear waste and you can power an entire large city for ten years. It’s pennies for power instead of dollars. We are as close to the end of the world’s dependence on fossil fuels as we have ever been.”
The people in the room looked at Rogers for a moment and studied him.
The President asked, “And how do you know all of this?”
Rogers looked uncomfortable for a moment and then confessed.
“Marshall Hail is a personal friend of mine. But everything I told you is general straight forward information. You can read about it in MIT magazine. I’m just a little more versed on it because Marshall told me about it over and over and over, throughout the years as he was developing the technology.”
Rogers looked at everyone, looking at him, judging him.
Rogers added, “But to tell you the truth, I never fully believed Marshall. You hear all the time about a medical breakthrough that’s only a decade away or that we can travel through black holes to other dimensions, if we can only figure out how to fly at the speed of light and not disintegrate. Marshall’s new reactor was a lot like that. I thought he was close, but I really didn’t think he had it all figured out.”
“Well, we all believe it now,” General Ford said. The big man was still on his feet and slowly pacing around the perimeter of the room. “Can we get back to the question of how did Hail infiltrate North Korea, kill their top General, film it and still get out alive?”
The President looked around the room. “Anyone have any ideas?”