Nick turned back to the stove. He stirred the potatoes, slathered butter over the steaks, and put them under the broiler. And then he went to explore the Michelle S.
He climbed, first, to the pilothouse. From behind the wheel he could see the river stretching ahead in the darkness, the square island of the barge tow sitting before the bows, black against the shimmering river. In the darkness Nick couldn’t see what kind of barges made up the tow.
He turned on the lights in the pilothouse and looked for a logbook or other indication of why Michelle S. had been abandoned. If there was a logbook, the crew had taken it with them when they left. He looked for a moment at the radio equipment and wondered about calling for help. But he didn’t know how to use the radio, and it looked complicated, so he decided that maybe he would try it later, after he had time to find a manual or instructions of some sort.
Besides, he thought, anyone in a position to give help would probably be giving help to people needing it worse than he and Jason did.
He froze as a tremor rose up through the deck. Adrenaline clattered through his nerves. The broad shimmering river broke up into leaping silver waves.
And then the tremor faded, and the river stilled, but Nick’s pulse continued to hammer in his ears. He dragged in a breath. The aftershock is over, he told himself.
He touched the necklace in his shirt pocket. Arlette, he thought, I am coming to you. But still his knees felt watery when he went down the companionway to the galley. He stirred the potatoes, put frozen peas in the boiling water, turned over the steaks. Then he went down, to the engine space, where the towboat’s powerful turbines bulked under the low ceiling, and the air smelled pleasantly of machine oil. Nick looked for the engine and electric system controls, and he found them. He started a generator to keep the batteries charged, the lights glowing, and to keep the refrigerator and the freezers working. He made sure that the water heater was on, and that there was water pressure for bathing and running the dishwasher.
He was much better at this sort of thing than at radios.
Then he returned to the galley and found Jason gobbling a sandwich. The boy looked at him through eyes swollen by sorrow and tried to grin.
“Smells good,” he said.
“How do you like your steak?” said Nick.
Larry cupped his hand for the two orange ibuprofen tablets that the army corpsman was shaking into his palm. He slapped the tablets into his mouth, picked up a cup of water, and swallowed them. Nervous eyes watched him from around the table set in Major General Jessica Frazetta’s command tent. The table was covered with maps, many of them with pencil marks annotating breached dams, broken levees, shattered locks, flooded land, and the tracks of the rescue flights that were trying to pluck survivors from the chaos.
Larry put down his cup of water. “First, the good news,” he said. “The reactor and containment structure is in good shape. Relatively speaking.”
“The reactor can be restarted?” Emil Braun said hopefully. He was a bespectacled, potbellied man who did not look at all comfortable in the bright yellow jumpsuit he’d put on for his helicopter ride. He was looking for a happy ending, Larry could see, a way the company could restart Poinsett Landing and not lose the billions of dollars they’d invested in the plant, but Larry didn’t have a happy ending to give him. Larry licked his lips. “That reactor’s not going to be restarted whether it’s intact or not,” he said. “As I will tell you in a minute.”
“But—” Emil said.
“One thing at a time, please,” Larry said, more sharply than he intended. Emil almost visibly bottled up his objection behind his plump cheeks.
Larry looked down at the sling that held his left arm. “My busted shoulder kept me from getting into the access penetration—” He looked at General Jessica. “That’s a sort of an airlock built into the containment structure. It’s the only one we could use, because the other access points were all under water.”
Jessica nodded. “I understand. Go on, please.”
Larry looked at Wilbur, who sat on his right. “Wilbur here went into the containment structure. We got all the readings we could by flashlight, with portable instruments. Everything looks nominal. There may be damage to the reactor core, but if so there was no release into the environment.” Larry could see tension fading from the people around the table. No massive clouds of radiation drifting over the South, no Chernobyl on the Mississippi.
Larry felt a series of jolts, as if someone was repeatedly kicking his chair from behind. Before he could turn around to look for who was doing the kicking, he realized that an aftershock was going on. His heart leaped. He looked up, saw nothing but tent canvas over his head. Nothing dangerous was about to fall on him, so he decided to stay right where he was.
Kick-kick-kick-kick-kick. Emil bolted from the table, ran into the field outside. No one else moved. The aftershock faded. The general looked at Larry.
“You were saying, Mr. Hallock? No radiation released?”
“Not from the reactor, no,” Larry said, and a wary look crossed Jessica’s face.
“Go on, please,” she said.
Larry looked up, saw Emil returning, an embarrassed smile on his face. Larry turned back to Jessica.
“I don’t know what people here know about reactors,” Larry said, “so I’ll start with the basics, okay?” The general nodded. “Poinsett Landing is a boiling water reactor, which means that steam from the reactor is piped directly to the turbine, instead of going through a closed-loop thermal exchange system as in a high-pressure reactor. You follow?”
“Yes. Please continue.”
“What that means is that steam from the reactor going straight into the turbine is then cooled by the turbine condensors, then recirculated to the reactor. So when the generator house was destroyed, there was a release of steam into the environment, and there was a certain amount of radiation in that steam. Not in the water, you understand, but in any impurities that may have been in the water. But since we use demineralized water in the reactor, there weren’t very many impurities to begin with, and the radiation release wouldn’t have been large. It may be of concern to anyone at the plant at the time of the release, but there is no real danger to anyone now.”
“Very good,” Jessica said, and Larry detected a well-concealed curiosity in her eyes. She knew that Larry had been at the plant when the steam was released, knew that the radiation was “of concern” to him. She knew that his health was compromised, and that he’d just brushed over the matter, and she wanted to know what it meant to him, how he was handling it.
Larry wanted to know these things himself. He hadn’t had time to think about any of this as it related to himself, hadn’t had time to feel much of anything. He’d been too busy. One thing at a time. He’d deal with it when he had the opportunity.
Emil, who had returned to his seat, looked relieved at Larry’s statement. Fewer liability problems for the company, Larry deduced.
“The real problems,” Larry said, “are two, and the two interact in such a way as to make any solution a real mess. First, the stored fuel.” He looked at Frazetta. “There’s over thirty years’ worth of spent nuclear fuel at Poinsett Landing. In fact we ran out of space for the spent fuel entirely at one point, but one of my colleagues came up with a new way of racking the fuel elements that increased capacity.
“Now, the spent fuel assemblies are stored vertically in racks under the water in the auxiliary building. The assemblies are in neutron-absorbing borated racks to assure that there is no chance of achieving critical mass and starting a nuclear reaction. And they’re subjected to active cooling—water is circulated through the building to remove any waste heat.”