“How hot are these fuel assemblies?” Jessica interrupted. “They’re spent fuel, right?”
“When fuel assemblies first come out of the reactor, they’re very hot, very hot indeed. It takes years for them to cool to the point where they can be safely handled. Now, the good news is that most of the fuel assemblies in the auxiliary building are very old, and if you need to, you can probably just have a couple strong men pick them up and carry them someplace else. But the bad news is that the plant underwent refueling over the last several weeks, and there are almost three hundred hot fuel assemblies sitting in the auxiliary building right now—with active cooling down, and the water level diminished due to leakage from the storage pond.”
The look that Emil gave him was one of pure horror. “Are you sure?”
“I knew about the leaks last night,” Larry said, “but I couldn’t get on the catwalks to find out how fast the water was falling. Well, it fell pretty fast—this afternoon I could detect a lot of radiation coming out of that building just by flying over it in the helicopter.”
Emil turned pale. Larry looked at the row of concerned faces that gazed at him from across the table.
“Here’s what I believe happened,” he said. “The auxiliary building lost active cooling, and lost enough water through its leaks to uncover the spent fuel. The hot fuel assemblies cooked—in fact they probably melted. There’s no chain reaction—not enough fuel for that—but those hot fuel assemblies are cooking up gasses like iodine and xenon and various kinds of noble gasses. In the meantime some dissolved fuel, with radioactive cesium iodide content, has probably leaked into the Mississippi.”
“So there’s a cloud…” one of the Army officers said slowly “… of radioactive material… floating out over the countryside.”
“A smallish cloud,” Larry qualified. “This isn’t Chernobyl. This isn’t a meltdown, this is some nasty hot metal that’s spilled and is putting out byproducts. This earthquake has probably killed a thousand times more people than will ever fall ill from this accident.”
Emil put his head in his hands. “It isn’t Chernobyl now,” he said. “But by the time the press gets done with it, it will be.”
“Better tell HQ to get their public relations people online,” Larry said.
“Twenty years of liability suits,” Emil said. “That’s what we’re talking about here.” General Jessica brought the conversation back to its proper theme. “What can be done, Mr. Hallock?” she asked.
“That brings me to the second problem, General,” Larry said. “Which is that the Mississippi has shifted its course eastward, and that the power station is now smack in the middle of the river.” There was a long moment of silence.
“Are you sure?” Jessica asked finally. “It isn’t just that the country is flooded?”
“I think that the level of the ground fell during the quake,” Larry said, “and the river flowed right into it. Current’s pretty brisk, too.” He nodded at Jessica. “The river’s your department, General Frazetta. You’d be in a better position to judge than me, but I reckon you’ll find I’m right.” He looked at the others. “And the foundation of the reactor complex is not entirely secure. When the ground dropped, it didn’t drop evenly; there’s a perceptible list to the containment building and control structure. So—if you want the worst case—the action of the river might furthermore undermine the concrete pad the reactor’s sitting on, and a reactor full of nuclear fuel goes skimming down the Mississippi like a hockey puck on ice.”
Emil winced at this image. “I don’t think,” he said, “that’s very likely to happen.”
“Probably not,” Larry agreed. Ache throbbed through his injured shoulder. He wanted this meeting over, and himself in bed. He took another sip of water.
“Here’s what needs to be done,” he said. “The reactor is fine as it is—we can just leave it undisturbed for ten years or so, give it time to cool off, then remove the fuel and turn the containment structure into a museum or a bird sanctuary or whatever you like. What needs to be done is to stabilize the foundation, and the way to do that is to build a big solid island around it. An island of stone or concrete or brick, twenty acres maybe, with a solid breakwater on the north end to keep the river from undermining it. I’ll defer to the general—” nodding at Jessica “—as to the best way to accomplish this.”
“That will take some thinking,” she said.
“That leaves the problem of the spent fuel,” Larry said. “What we need to do is fill that holding pond now, which will cool things off enough so that we can start other repairs. Demineralized water would be best.” Poinsett Landing, he knew, had once possessed a facility for creating as much distilled water as they could ever need, but that had been destroyed along with the plant’s other most useful facilities, like the beautiful, extensive machine shops that could have made any tool, appliance, or structure they would ever have needed during the course of the repair.
Larry looked at Jessica again. “If you can’t ship about, oh, thirty tons of distilled water to Poinsett Landing to pump into that holding pond, I’d pump in river water. The impurities in the water will get hot, and some of that will leak out into the river, but that’s better than what’s happening now.” Jessica frowned as she considered the problem. “Could we use a fireboat? Just hose water in there?” Larry nodded. “That’s what I figured. Bring one up from Baton Rouge or New Orleans.” He turned to the others. “That will buy us time. Time to survey the pond and discover the extent of the damage, to repair the leaks in the holding pond, clear the ruined roof and catwalks out of our way, and to work out a plan to remove the spent fuel. The actual removal will need to be done remotely, with machines or robots. There’s a machine already in the building that would do the job, if it’s undamaged and if we can get power to it.”
Larry closed his eyes. Weariness sighed through his mind like wind across a distant prairie. He shook his head, then stood.
“Well, that’s it,” he said. “I’d be obliged, General, if you could give me a ride home.” Jessica looked startled. “Very well,” she said after a moment’s pause. “If that’s what you want, Mr. Hallock. You seem to have got it all worked out.”
Larry scratched his whiskered face. “It’s just one thing after another. It’s not like I didn’t have plenty of time to think, sitting on that Indian mound all night.”
“Larry,” Emil said, “I’ve got to take you to Jackson. You’ve got to brief people at the company.” Larry looked at him. ” You do that. I’ve told you the situation and what we need. You provide it, and we’ll be fine.”
“But Larry—”
“I haven’t slept in two days,” Larry said. “I’m pushing fifty. I have a busted collarbone, and I’m in pain. I haven’t seen or talked to my wife or my kids since the accident. I’m going home, I’m going to kiss my wife, and I’m going to collapse into bed and sleep till morning.” He gave Emil a glare. “You got a problem with that, Emil?”
Emil made a last attempt. “What if we need to talk to you?”
“Is that a cellphone you’ve got there?”
Emil looked at the device peeking out of his jumpsuit pocket. “Um,” he said, “yeah.”