Think, he urged himself. But he couldn’t think at all, couldn’t put one thought in front of another. The express train seemed to have run off with his mind.
The remaining lights faded to a dull amber. Dismayed cries filled the air. Electricity arced somewhere in the room.
Emergency lighting, Larry thought. Wait for the emergency lighting. The lights brightened for a moment, and Larry felt relief flood into him. Then all light faded. There were shouts in the darkness, crashes as things fell. The whole building seemed to take a massive lurch to one side. Larry felt himself pitch forward. His hands scrabbled for support. He could smell burnt plastic. And then there was a roaring as the electric arcs triggered the control room’s gas extinguishing system, as pressurized cylinders of Halon 1301 began to flood the room with gas in order to suppress electric fires.
“Out!” Larry shouted. “Everyone out!”
Halon gas wasn’t poisonous, not exactly. You could breathe it and it wouldn’t kill you. But it drove the oxygen out of the room, and that would put you six feet under.
There was so much noise that he couldn’t tell if anyone heard him.
Earthquake, he thought. No other explanation.
Vertigo eddied through his brain. The floor didn’t seem to be strictly horizontal anymore. Larry groped his way to the door, felt the metal frame under his hand, tried to haul himself upright. A bolt of pain shot through his injured right shoulder.
CHOOM CHOOM Choom choom choom choom…
The express train sound faded. Larry found himself standing in the door to the control room. Over the hiss of the Halon cylinders he could hear a babble of confused voices both within and without the control room. A shrill call for help echoed down the corridor. He moved instinctively toward the sound, groping his way down the corridor. Broken glass crunched under his boots. The only light he could see was an exit sign that glowed a ghostly red in the middle distance.
Someone slammed into him from behind, and pain shot through his shoulder. “Careful!” he snapped.
“Did the reactor trip?” Wilbur’s voice shouted in his ear. “Did we have reactor trip?”
“Must have,” Larry said. “Power loss this bad. Whole grid must be down.” He rubbed his shoulder, tried to make himself think. In event of electric power failure to the reactor, control rods would slide into the reactor to stop nuclear fission. It wasn’t something he had to order, it was something that happened automatically.
“Help!” a man screamed.
So the reactor, Larry forced himself to think over the noise, was shut down. The problem now was getting rid of the waste heat already in the core. Which should be happening automatically; there were systems that would do that.
There were also supposed to be backup electrical systems for the control room. And those had failed.
“Did the reactor trip?” Wilbur was shouting at the people shuffling out of the control room. “Did the reactor trip?”
“I don’t know,” came the answer from the dark. “I didn’t get a light or a warning. But things went to hell so fast.”
“Help!” someone shrieked. “Jesus Christ I’m trapped!” Larry kept trying to put his thoughts together. One thing after another, he reminded himself. Just keep turning that horse in circles. If the reactor’s primary cooling system suffered a LOCA—Loss-Of-Cooling Accident—gas-pressurized accumulator tanks within the containment building would dump a boric acid solution into the reactor core. This would serve very well for cooling, at least for a time, but in the event of a continued loss of pressure, auxiliary diesel generators belonging to the Emergency Core Cooling System, the ECCS, would automatically switch on and dump cooling water from accumulator tanks into the reactor, then keep the water circulating until the interior of the reactor cooled. If the diesels failed, the accumulator tanks would dump anyway, but the water would have no way to circulate.
“Help!” the man shrieked. Larry reached out into the darkness toward the huddle of men and grabbed Wilbur’s shoulder. He was alarmed to find the shoulder was covered with something warm and wet that felt like blood.
“Listen,” he said. “We’ve probably suffered a LOCA. We’ve got to make sure the ECCS is doing its job. We’ve got to get people down the stairs and out to the diesels.” Suddenly the building shuddered as if to a blow. Glass shattered somewhere nearby. Larry lurched and reached protectively for his shoulder, but did not fall. Panic whirled through his thoughts. I could die here, he thought.
“Heeeelp!” the man screamed.
The building ceased to move. Even the trapped man was silent in the next few hushed seconds as everyone waited for the whole building to tumble down.
The silence held. So did the building.
“Listen,” Larry said. “Who’ve we got here? Wilbur, can you check generator three down by the machine plant?”
“Right,” Wilbur said.
“Bill—you there?”
“Ayuh.”
“I’m trapped!” called the voice again.
“Bill,” Larry said, “I need you to check number two, by Reactor Services.”
“Right.” |
“I’ll check number one myself.” The man kept screaming down the corridor, but Larry’s mind had started working again, was putting one thought atop the next. “Marky? You there?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you go to the secondary shutdown room?”
The secondary shutdown room, at the very base of the containment structure, contained all the duplicate controls necessary to bring the reactor to a safe shutdown. Maybe the emergency power was working there.
“I don’t reckon I can get there,” Marky said. “I think I busted my leg. Somebody’s going to have to carry me out.”
“I’ll go instead,” said someone else.
“Good. You do that.”
“Somebody help meeee…”
“Okay,” Larry said. “The rest of you help Marky and that other poor soul. Check every office and make sure there aren’t people trapped up here. And take them down by the stairs—don’t use the elevators even if you can find one that seems to be working.”
Larry groped his way toward the illuminated exit sign. He found the steel push bar on the stair, put his weight on the door, and failed to budge it. The doorframe was bent, he realized. He put his unwounded shoulder against it, shoved. Nothing.
“Door’s jammed,” he said. “Can somebody help me here?”
Three of them, with effort, finally bashed the door open. The stairwell was dimly lit from the few battery-powered emergency lights that hadn’t been completely shattered. A strange bellowing sound echoed up the stair, like lions roaring in the African bush. Larry paused for a moment, sniffing for scent of fire and detecting none. Then he reached for the metal stair rail and began to descend. The stair was tilted at crazy angles, as if it were trying to pitch him off. His inner ear swam with vertigo as he groped his way down the stair, one slow step after another. He worried that the metal stair might have been structurally damaged, that his weight might prove too much and that it might fall away with him on it.
The roaring sound got louder as he descended. He began to feel a vibration through the metal rail. The roaring was terrifyingly close. Larry couldn’t imagine what might be causing it. Perhaps, he thought, a fire was raging somewhere nearby.