The other two team members were now at Katashi’s side, snapping him back to reality. They stood there a while in silence, staring down at their colleague’s limp remains.
‘At least he didn’t suffer,’ Katashi murmured in consolation, more to comfort himself than the others.
His body then stiffened. ‘We’ve got a job to do, otherwise Tamotsu won’t be the last casualty. We need to restore power to the cooling pumps before we have a total meltdown on our hands.’ He looked around at his colleagues. ‘You two, take Tamotsu’s body into the containment chamber,’ he ordered. ‘We’ll pay our respects later, when we have more time!’ Then he turned and waded across the room to the generators.
The enormous Lister diesel engines, which were the powerhouse of the generated backup electricity supply, sat in twelve inches of water; however, Katashi could tell, by the distinct tidemark on the wall, that they must have been fully submersed at some point. He knew it would be futile, but he tried to restart the engines anyway, using the automatic ignition.
He pressed the red button and the turbines churned over, spluttered, and then died. He tried again, several times, but to no avail; saltwater had obviously got into the system. He knew he would have to strip the engines down, dry the individual parts, and reassemble them. But that would take time, and time was something the Fukushima power plant was fast running out of.
The only hope they had was to use the ‘third-line’ backup power, whilst Katashi worked to fix the diesel generators. The third-line backup supply was a bank of fifty batteries, in principle much the same as a standard car battery, except much larger and far more powerful. These were located in the containment chamber to protect them from the weather.
‘Switch over to the battery backup!’ Katashi shouted up to his two colleagues.
Within seconds, the huge pumps began to whir into action. It was now a race against time to get the diesel engines working, before the batteries exhausted themselves.
It had taken twelve hours to get the generators in Reactor 1 back on the grid, while those in Reactor 3 had only taken him just over eight; he’d worked quickly with knowledge gained from the previous one. Both reactors’ cores were now cooling down as they were designed to do.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case in Reactor 5; the core temperature was rising to a critical level. Unless power to the pumps was restored, the temperature of the fuel rods would continue to rise until they melted, pooling at the bottom of the reactor vessel. It would then just be a matter of time before the pressure built up to such an extent that the containment chamber would explode, creating an atomic shockwave, four hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The backup batteries powering the pumps had run out two hours previously, at which point Katashi had ordered the rest of his team and the skeleton staff left behind to operate the plant, to evacuate. Nobody had argued.
The welfare of his family played heavily on Katashi’s mind, despite his efforts to block everything out in order to concentrate on completing the task as quickly as possible. Just before he left the plant, Masumi had informed him that he still hadn’t heard from his family. Images of his dead protégé, Tamotsu, mingled with pictures of his family, flooded into his subconscious. He knew Hikari had the commonsense to get to higher ground; it was just whether she had the time to pack his father in the car and collect his daughter from school, before the tsunami struck. There was nothing he could do about it while he was still in the power plant, so the sooner he could get the generators started the sooner he would be reunited with his family.
He had already managed to disassemble the generators, had dried each component and was in the process of reassembling them, when he heard the alarm. Meltdown was imminent. There was just no way of knowing exactly how long he had left. Theoretical scenarios could predict the system’s anticipated breaking point but, in reality, there were too many factors that could affect the outcome.
His clothes under his protective overalls were wet through, his hair was matted to his scalp and beads of sweat formed on his top lip, but he reasoned that every second counted. As long as his protective suit didn’t impede him, then he could put up with the discomfort rather than taking the time to strip off.
A loud bang, followed by a hiss of steam, made him jump and he dropped his wrench into the water, beneath the generators. Fumbling around on the floor, his hands sieved through the layers of silt, trying desperately to locate the tool. He adjusted his position so he could reach further under the generators. His fingertips nudged something hard. He stretched his hand out as far as he could and felt the cold steel of the spanner.
That was the last thing he ever felt. Katashi wouldn’t have felt the shockwave of the nuclear blast as it ripped open the reactor. He wouldn’t have felt his protective clothing evaporate in an instant, as the expanding fireball, three times hotter than the Sun’s surface, burst through the containment chamber. He wouldn’t have seen the flash of light, so intense that it melted his eyeballs. And he wouldn’t have felt his blood boil and his body vaporise, leaving only his shadow etched on the wall, before it too disintegrated into shrapnel, as the shockwave continued its lethally destructive path.
CHAPTER 4
‘Okay, who can tell me how we calculate the interaction between charged particles, in quantum electrodynamics?’ Tom Halligan stared at each one of the twenty-two blank faces that stared back at him in turn. He may as well have just asked the question in Cantonese. The reaction would have been the same, he thought.
‘Anybody?’ he encouraged.
A pimply adolescent, who was wearing a cardigan that looked as though it had been knitted by his grandmother, raised his hand hesitantly. ‘Is it Einstein’s theory of relativity?’
Halligan exhaled slowly, looking down at his feet. He raised his head and addressed the class in general.
‘Has anybody heard of Halligan’s theory?’ The same blank expressions. ‘Halligan’s theory states that, if you use that specific answer every time somebody asks you a question, one day it will be the right answer. Unfortunately, today isn’t that day.’
Smirks appeared on all the blank faces, apart from the pimply adolescent’s, who blushed with embarrassment.
‘The answer this time, my friends, is Feynman Diagrams.’ The bell rang signalling the end of class. Halligan had to shout over the top of it to make himself heard. ‘Which is what I want you to write an essay on, as part of tonight’s homework assignment. Two thousand words, on my desk, the day after tomorrow.’
With that, the class filtered out of the door, leaving Tom Halligan to pack his notes and stationery into his battered, brown, leather briefcase.
He looked up, expecting to see an empty classroom, but instead was rather surprised to see an elderly gentleman sitting on the back row.
‘Hello, can I help you? I take it you’re not one of my undergraduates?’
‘No, Professor Halligan, and I’m sorry if I startled you,’ replied the older man. ‘My name is Frederick Volker. I am President of the CERN Council.’