Kill Zone

9

As van Dyckman and Garibaldi filed down the stairs from the Eagle’s Nest, Adonia was the last to exit with Shawn. She had so much more to talk with him about, but she doggedly stuck to business. “I still can’t believe Harris brought in Garibaldi as part of this team — you know he’ll never agree to any of this, on general principles. And despite what your classified report concluded, some of those Sanergy people are still extremists.” It was hard to stomach the idea that the suicidal pilot had no proven official connection.

“Garibaldi himself isn’t so bad, more willing to listen than you might think,” Shawn said. “Sanergy has been outspoken and skeptical, but their objections have a strong scientific basis, not just paranoia. Remember, Garibaldi does know what he’s talking about. He used to work at DOE Headquarters, and before that he was with Harris at Oakridge.”

“That was way before my time there.”

Shawn allowed a small smile. “He’ll drive van Dyckman nuts, that’s for sure. He may be a devil’s advocate, but he understands the industry and he’s smart.”

Adonia nodded. “But when he was at Oakridge, something happened that turned him against the entire nuclear complex.”

“He’s never said what it was,” Shawn said. “The DOE Secretary wanted him on the team for objectivity; she and Garibaldi seem to have some history. Despite all his grousing, though, Garibaldi must realize we’re at a tipping point with the nuclear waste piling up. If we can just get him to accept Valiant Locksmith…” He lowered his voice even further as they followed the group back down to the ops center floor. “At least he understands a lot more science than Senator Pulaski does. Even though the Senator controls the purse strings, he doesn’t know a thing about nuclear engineering.”

“Wonderful,” Adonia said. “The inmates in charge of the asylum.”

“Congress has a lot in common with an asylum.” When he lightly took her arm and led her toward the rest of the group, Adonia appreciated his touch, and she knew it wasn’t just an accidental courtesy. He left so much unsaid, and she wished they could just have an hour together to clear the air.

Another time they had been in such close quarters, she’d beaten him swimming in the Fort McNair lap pool, and then they had walked hand in hand around the Tidal Basin, enjoying the warm spring night in Washington, D.C., and ended up back at his apartment.

Even with all the opportunities she’d experienced, her relationship with Shawn had been the best part of being a DOE Fellow at the National War College. But thanks to the two of them excelling in their respective fields, their follow-on assignments had made a long-term relationship unrealistic. Adonia was posted to DOE Headquarters before leaving government work for Granite Bay in New York, while Shawn went off to command the 509th B-2 Wing in Missouri before his assignment as military aide to the President. Romance was shunted farther and farther down their list of priorities.

If she had stayed in Washington and continued working in the Forrestal Building at DOE Headquarters, their relationship might have grown instead of fading to the back burner. Who knew where they might be now? But Adonia had never lived her life by shaking a Magic 8 Ball and waiting for answers.

Outcome uncertain.

Catching up to the Senator, Rob Harris led the group out of the control room and back into the main passageway leading deeper into the Mountain. They stopped before a vault door that led into a side tunnel. In staggered intervals down either side of the smaller passageway, Adonia saw seven-foot-tall vault doors embedded in the granite wall, like prison cells.

“This side tunnel extends for a half mile and intersects another main passageway,” Harris said. “In an emergency, you can get out by following this tunnel to the end and taking a left. A right turn slopes down to the lower level.” He motioned to the vault doors that were built flush into the granite walls. “These storage chambers were originally designed to hold nuclear warheads.”

He led them to where an older woman waited for them in front of one of the sealed vaults. The technician wore a white jumpsuit and black work boots; a plastic mask dangled from her neck. Mounted on the wall was an old-fashioned intercom box with a speaker and a black Talk button.

In his bland voice, Harris introduced her. “Mrs. Garcia is a level-three nuclear technician and will be taking us through this dry-storage chamber. It’s a high-hazard area.”

Garibaldi stepped back with exaggerated alarm. “We’re… going inside one of the chambers?” His voice wavered.

“Nothing to worry about.” Mrs. Garcia held up her badge. “Does everyone have a dosimeter? We’ll be opening two of the chambers so you can see the safety and security features, new ones and legacy ones.”

Van Dyckman said in a bright voice, “State of the art. When DOE transitioned Hydra Mountain from military jurisdiction, we enhanced the existing safety and security of the entire facility, ranging from upgrading air ventilation to adding classified security measures.”

“I’ve worked my whole life in the nuclear industry,” the technician said with a grandmotherly smile. “And this is the most sophisticated technology I’ve ever seen. Things certainly have changed.”

Adonia looked to Shawn. “DOE health and safety regulators must have had a field day upgrading Hydra Mountain from Cold War standards to get a present-day certification.”

“The old countermeasures were good enough to guard nuclear warheads, and with our new systems we can certainly protect radioactive waste,” van Dyckman said.

Garibaldi broke in, “Have you tested all possible combinations of the old Department of Defense systems and your new technology? What about unforeseen interactions? Cascading nonlinear effects?”

Van Dyckman answered stiffly, “Hydra Mountain meets all DOE standards, which are far more stringent than the older military requirements. The two layers provide a high level of redundancy.”

Victoria Doyle finally joined in the conversation. “The DoD and the DOE have different ways of handling nuclear material. The DoD is the end user of nuclear weapons. They don’t build them; that’s the DOE’s job—”

Van Dyckman cut her off. “The Department of Energy designs and manufactures nuclear weapons, conducts research using nuclear reactors, and so they have to deal with the waste generated by those operations. Both departments have outstanding systems for nuclear safety and security, but they are different, and we had to account for that difference when Hydra Mountain was transferred from the military to the DOE.”

“Well said.” Mrs. Garcia was cheery but uninterested in the discussion, hurrying them along so she could do her part. “Let’s go inside and have a look.” She entered a code in the keypad next to the old-fashioned intercom outside the vault door. “This is a typical chamber where we now store dry high-level waste.” As the door moved, a magenta light flashed at the ceiling and an alert buzzer sounded in the tunnel. “Step back, everyone.”

As the thick metal vault slowly rotated open, Mrs. Garcia pointed at the line of similar oval doors staggered at intervals down the long tunnel. “Back in the day, when the military stored warheads here, each vault was staggered to make sure that stray radiation from one device couldn’t interact with others. Fail-safe systems ensured that when one chamber door was open, all the other doors had to be sealed. That kept any radiation from getting inside—”

“But Hydra Mountain’s mission has changed,” van Dyckman interrupted. “So we modified these systems to hold high-level waste, which can’t go critical like a nuclear weapon.”

Harris added in his bland voice, “Because of the schedule imposed, we needed to open more than one chamber at a time just to accommodate the volume of material we’re bringing inside. Otherwise, we could never keep up, and shipments would pile up in the main corridor staging area, causing an even greater hazard.”

“We wouldn’t want to slow things down, now would we?” Garibaldi said in a biting tone.

Adonia frowned at the site manager, surprised that “Regulation Rob” would bend the rules. “You modified the systems so you could open multiple chambers at the same time, in order to move in more shipments as they arrived.”

“You know the sheer amount of backlog in our nuclear facilities,” van Dyckman said. “The faster we ease the pressure on power plants like Granite Bay, the safer the nation will be. And we have all these empty vaults just waiting to be filled.”

“We keep receiving shipments,” Harris said. “It seemed the best way, and calculations showed a significant safety margin in these specific vaults.”

Harris had a fine reputation at DOE, and he had even mentored her when she’d been a young intern at Oakridge National Laboratory, working on her first reactor. But now his hair was thinning and much grayer than she remembered; his face was lined with stress. He seemed to be going through the motions, following the rules without any passion for the work. She hadn’t realized at first, but now she saw that he looked old. And worried.

Mrs. Garcia waited patiently as the vault door ground all the way open. “Wait here while I do my safety check. Don’t go inside yet.”

Adonia and her companions crowded up to a bright yellow line painted on the floor just outside the entrance. Inside the large chamber, alcoves had been carved into the inner granite walls, each twenty feet high, ten feet across, ten feet deep. A yellow rope hung across each cubbyhole. Like a sarcophagus, a metal cylinder marked with the universal yellow radiation symbol stood upright inside each alcove.

“Those are dry-storage containers,” Adonia said. “Granite Bay is overflowing with them.”

“Those alcoves were originally designed to hold nuclear warheads, each separated by two feet of granite. That’s more than sufficient to absorb any line-of-sight radiation emitted by plutonium cores,” Harris said. “Or in this case, more than enough to shield high-level nuclear waste.”

Garibaldi seemed reluctant to move near the chamber. “What’s the ambient radiation in there now?”

“Negligible,” van Dyckman said reassuringly. “The containers themselves have sufficient shielding. It’s overkill, believe me.”

“It’s naïve to say that any radiation is negligible,” Garibaldi growled, looking at Harris as if they shared some kind of secret. “Right, Rob?”

The site manager balked, but refused to answer. Adonia got the impression this was an old argument — from all the way back at Oakridge?

Senator Pulaski peered inside. “Look at all that shielding rock. Opening two vault doors at the same time couldn’t possibly be a safety hazard. Or am I missing something?”

“It used to be,” Mrs. Garcia said, “when nuclear weapons were stored here. But now that they’re gone, there’s no kill zone surrounding the Mountain.”

“That’s overstating it,” van Dyckman sighed. “She means a possible contamination area.”

“No, she means a kill zone,” Garibaldi said. “It’s the area around a nuclear explosion where there’s total destruction of human life. Hiroshima’s kill zone had an average diameter of one point six miles, and that blast was ‘only’ fifteen kilotons. If the conditions are right, a megaton’s kill zone can reach sixty-three miles across — an area of over three thousand square miles. That’s why these doors were never opened at the same time.”

“Let me show you the principle, Senator,” Mrs. Garcia said, sounding like a schoolteacher. “Watch me.”

She stepped back into the corridor and walked fifty feet to the next sealed storage chamber. “Suppose this vault door were open. Now pretend I’m radiation emitted from a nuclear warhead stored inside.” She crossed the tunnel and stopped at the granite wall on the opposite side, slapping it with her hand. “Most of the radiation is absorbed, but some of it — me, in this case — will reflect off the wall and bounce down the corridor.” She walked back toward the group in a zigzag pattern, “bouncing” from one side to the other.

“Now imagine billions upon billions of particles either being absorbed or reflected, following a similar path.” When she reached the group of observers and the open vault door, her trajectory now headed straight toward the open chamber. “Eventually, some of the radiation could find its way in among the warheads, where it would bounce around and interact with the cores—”

“And possibly initiate a catastrophic chain reaction,” Garibaldi said. “A nuclear detonation that would ruin everyone’s day.” He looked around. “It’s a small probability, but with enormous consequences.”

“Worse than that.” Doyle spoke up, surprising them after her long silence. “In a warhead storage area, since the weapons are so close together, it wouldn’t be just one detonation. The radiation from each device might initiate another cascading explosion… and another… and another. It’s called sympathetic detonation — the absolute worst-case scenario.” She glanced at Harris.

“You’re right,” Garibaldi said. “Multiple megaton explosions even deep inside Hydra Mountain would result in a kill zone hundreds, if not thousands of miles in diameter, perhaps extending to the East Coast.”

Van Dyckman lifted his chin. “But of course that can’t possibly happen now, since we’re only storing waste here, not warheads.” Undersecretary Doyle seemed to be raining on his parade. Adonia recalled their alleged affair; the two probably considered each other competition now. “Nukes haven’t been stored in Hydra Mountain for decades. This is the safest SAP the government has ever run, and I will keep it that way.”

Doyle seemed to roll her eyes. “This is a huge place, Stanley—”

The technician held up a hand, then glanced at her watch. “I came in on a Sunday for this. Before we enter, I need to disengage the internal sensors.” She turned to controls at the side of the vault and looked up at a camera installed in the metal ducts along the ceiling. After making a cryptic motion to some unseen observer, she turned to another inset panel and ran her fingers over an LED display.

“As you saw, I had to give the authentication code before I could switch off the motion detectors. Otherwise, alarms would go off and initiate all sorts of old, nasty countermeasures specifically designed for the military — sticky foam, knockout gas, that sort of thing. During the Cold War days, they weren’t messing around.” She entered the Disable code and motioned for everyone to follow her inside the large storage chamber. “Don’t touch anything, or you might trigger one of the other sensors. Nobody wants that.”

As the visitors crowded into the vault, Garibaldi hung back outside the chamber. Mrs. Garcia urged him to join them. “Come on in. There’s plenty of room.” She stepped back and motioned with her arm.

Garibaldi drew in a breath. “No… thank you. I can hear you fine.”

“But you can’t see,” van Dyckman said, annoyed. “How are you going to give an unbiased assessment if you can’t even see what she’s showing us?”

“I’m fine staying here.”

“Not an option.” With a huff, van Dyckman grasped Garibaldi by the elbow, steered him into the vault, and brought him to the front of the group. “Here.” He turned to Mrs. Garcia. “Go ahead, please.”

The technician nodded curtly, then started explaining the packing, transportation, and storage procedures for the dry containers. From her experience at Granite Bay, Adonia could have given the tutorial herself.

Garibaldi barely paid attention; he fidgeted and appeared to be trying to find something that didn’t make sense, or uncover a bad procedure. He was clearly uncomfortable in the chamber.

In contrast, Senator Pulaski showed little understanding of the technical details, although he tried to look intent and even nodded once in a while. He glanced around the chamber. “I don’t see any fuel rods. Where are they?”

When Harris and van Dyckman hesitated, Adonia explained, “After they’ve been removed from a reactor, spent fuel rods are submerged in pools for up to five years so the water can absorb the radiation they emit. Once they’ve cooled sufficiently, the rods can be broken down and sealed inside these dry containers, which are much safer to handle and store.”

Mrs. Garcia motioned them closer. “Here, take a look.”

As the visitors crowded closer to the alcoves, a young man in tan pants, short-sleeved blue shirt, and yellow tie hurried down the corridor and stuck his head into the chamber. Adonia remembered seeing him at one of the stations in the operations center, but now he looked alarmed. “Mr. Harris, you’re needed in ops.” He swallowed visibly, but tried to hide it. “It’ll take only a few minutes of your time.”

Harris did not like to have the routine interrupted. “What is it, Mr. Drexler? Can it wait?”

“No, sir. It’s… important. The Operations Officer requires your presence.”

Harris kept his expression carefully neutral as he turned to the group. “I apologize. Hopefully, I’ll be back before we go to the next vault. Ms. Rojas, since you’re the only site manager present, will you accept temporary transfer of safety responsibility for this committee in my absence? I don’t have a handover-of-liability form for you to sign, but we can do this verbally if you agree.”

Regulation Rob. She had not forgotten that Harris was such a by-the-book person. “Of course.”

“Thank you, I relinquish my responsibility.” Without waiting for their reply, he hurried after Drexler down the tunnel, leaving the committee to wonder about the emergency.