Sam nodded. “We will be. Thanks.”
He then gripped the boarding ladder and climbed on board the wreckage of the Hoshi Maru.
Chapter Twenty
The Tahila motored along the Columbia River heading northeast.
Inside, Tom Bower took a seat at the Round Table at the heart of the Mission Room. With Matthew, the ship’s skipper, Veyron, the ship’s submersible engineer, Elise, a computer whiz, and Genevieve, a retired Russian assassin whose unique skill set had been appropriated for the team, only Sam Reilly was missing from the table. It wasn’t the first, or the last time he’d miss an operation, but everyone knew the stakes.
The Round Table was Sam’s idea. He liked the concept that each person brought their unique wealth of knowledge and experience to any mission. Given that they all had, in previous events, risked their lives for each other for the greater good, he felt that the concept of a Round Table, with the voice of each person seated there being given equal weight and consideration, was good strategy. Tom liked the symbolism of the Arthurian ideal, and he always tried to keep it in the back of his mind when he took over the director position at any time.
Symbolism was where the Round Table’s similarities to its Arthurian predecessor ceased. The table itself was a three-dimensional touch-screen projector, which allowed them to bring up 3D images, expand those images, and search through in-depth 3D renditions of buildings, ships, locations, mine tunnels, and anything else the human mind could imagine and engineers have once built.
Tom opened the briefing by putting up a 2D digital image of the Hanford Site in 1942.
“I just want to go through a bit of background information about the site and the project, before we talk about how we’re going to pinpoint the specific location of the nuclear waste leakage.” Tom increased the size of the image until it covered the entire table. “This is the original Hanford Site dated June 1942.”
Tom pinched the table, zooming in to the section around the river. “The land is predominantly desert environment, receiving less than ten inches of precipitation annually, and is covered with shrub-steppe vegetation. Visually, little of that would change, but in terms of livability, the events of World War II were about to dramatically alter the landscape.”
He swiped the table to the left, revealing a new building. “This is the S-1 Section of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development, known as OSRD, which sponsored an intensive research project on plutonium. The research contract was awarded to scientists at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, known as Met-Lab. At the time, plutonium was a rare element that had only recently been isolated in a University of California laboratory. The Met Lab researchers worked on producing chain-reacting "piles" of uranium to convert it to plutonium and finding ways to separate plutonium from uranium. The program was accelerated in 1942, as the United States government became concerned that scientists in Nazi Germany were developing a nuclear weapons program, led by Werner Heisenberg.”
Tom took a breath and rapped his knuckles on the table. “So, in December 1942, General Lesley Groves dispatched his assistant Colonel Franklin T. Matthias and DuPont engineers to scout potential sites to be dedicated to plutonium research. Matthias reported that Hanford was "ideal in virtually all respects", except for the farming towns of White Bluffs and Hanford. General Groves visited the site in January 1943 and established the Hanford Engineer Works, codenamed "Site W.” The federal government quickly acquired the land under its war powers authority and relocated some 1,500 residents of Hanford, White Bluffs, and nearby settlements, as well as the Wanapum people, Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and the Nez Perce Tribe.”
Elise said, “That wouldn’t be the first time the local people got screwed in the name of military progress.”
Veyron shrugged. “Hey, they built the bomb, didn’t they?”
Tom didn’t want to get into the moral or ethical debate about the development of a nuclear bomb. That wasn’t his job. His job was to find out where the leak was, so that the engineers could fill it with millions of tons of concrete.
Tom swiped to the side, bringing in a more modern photo. This one showed the reactors up and running. He said, “The B Reactor at Hanford was the first large-scale plutonium production reactor in the world. It was designed and built by DuPont based on an experimental design by Enrico Fermi, and originally operated at 250 megawatts.”
“Megawatts?” Matthew asked.
“That’s thermal, not electrical,” Tom clarified.
Matthew nodded. “Ah, thanks.”
Tom continued. “The reactor was graphite moderated and water cooled. It consisted of a 28-by-36-foot, 1,200-short-ton graphite cylinder lying on its side, penetrated through its entire length horizontally by 2,004 aluminum tubes. Two hundred short tons of uranium slugs, 1.625 inches in diameter by 8 inches long, sealed in aluminum cans, went into the tubes.”
Tom lifted two imaginary reactor diagrams from the table, forming a holographic 3-dimensional image of the structures. Reading from the information chart next to them, he said, “Plutonium was produced in the Hanford reactors when a uranium-238 atom in a fuel slug absorbed a neutron to form uranium-239. U-239 rapidly undergoes beta decay to form neptunium-239, which rapidly undergoes a second beta decay to form plutonium-239. The irradiated fuel slugs were transported by rail to three huge remotely operated chemical separation plants called "canyons" that were about 10 miles away. A series of chemical processing steps separated the small amount of plutonium that was produced from the remaining uranium and the fission waste products. This first batch of plutonium was refined in the 221-T plant from December 26, 1944, to February 2, 1945, and delivered to the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico on February 5, 1945. The material was used in Trinity, the first nuclear explosion, on July 16, 1945.”
Elise said, “And then in Fat Man, the bomb detonated over Nagasaki, Japan.”
“That’s right.” Tom paused. “So why do we care about the technical stuff?”
There was a general murmur that people around the table were getting lost in early nuclear physics.
“We care,” Tom said, “because all of this required extensive cooling. Water was pumped through the aluminum tubes around the uranium slugs at the rate of 30,000 US gallons per minute — and all that water had to go somewhere. From 1944 to 1971, pump systems drew cooling water from the river and, after treating this water for use by the reactors, returned it to the river. Before its release into the river, the used water was held in large tanks known as retention basins for up to six hours. Longer-lived isotopes were not affected by this retention, and several terabecquerels of radioactive material entered the river every day. The federal government kept knowledge of these radioactive releases secret. Radiation was later measured 200 miles downstream and as far west as the Washington and Oregon coasts.”
Tom glanced at the worried faces around the table. “The water supply wasn’t the only problem in the nuclear pioneering days. In fact, at Hanford, the plutonium separation process resulted in the release of radioactive isotopes into the air, which were carried by the wind throughout southeastern Washington and into parts of Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and British Columbia.”
Matthew said, “Hey, I’m from Idaho…”
It was the first Tom had heard about Matthew’s childhood origins. “Downwinders were exposed to radionuclides, particularly iodine-131, with the heaviest releases during the period from 1945 to 1951. These radionuclides entered the food chain via dairy cows grazing on contaminated fields. Hazardous fallout was ingested by communities who consumed radioactive food and milk. Most of these airborne releases were a part of Hanford's routine operations, while a few of the larger releases occurred in isolated incidents. In 1949, an intentional release known as the "Green Run" released 8,000 curies of radioactive iodine-131 over two days. Another source of contaminated food came from Columbia River fish, an impact felt disproportionately by Native American communities who depended on the river for their customary diets.”