Kill Zone

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “But once you do have access to the interior, the crisis will be over,” Secretary Nitta said. “Correct?”

  The stranger’s voice broke in again. “Why weren’t these malfunctions caught before, and why didn’t van Dyckman inform the Secretary there might be problems? Weren’t there test runs? A full-up facility dry run before launching Valiant Locksmith? You’ve been operational for a year.”

  “Numerous test runs, sir, but we couldn’t foresee every conceivable scenario. Even though this facility is equipped with modern digital systems, we’re limited by 1950s analog circuitry, legacy DoD systems. And we didn’t expect a civilian aircraft being forced down on the side of the Mountain during the inspection.” He sighed, gritted his teeth. “Or one of the team members smuggling in a cell phone and making an unauthorized transmission when the systems were already on sensitive lockdown.” He heard muted discussion over the secure line. He tried to keep the frustration out of his voice. “We just have to wait this out.”

  The male voice interrupted, sounding bitter. “So the halothane is still pumping out, and the committee is being forced to the lowest level of the grotto. I’m looking at a diagram now.”

  Harris pressed ahead, talking faster. “Yes, sir. When nuclear warheads were stored here, the lethal countermeasures were the last line of defense down where the devices were assembled. If any intruder managed to penetrate that deep into our nuclear arsenal, they would need to be stopped at all costs.”

  “But that was back during the Cold War!” Secretary Nitta said in a harder voice. “In converting Hydra Mountain, van Dyckman should have dismantled the old military security systems and supplemented them with new, nonlethal systems developed to incapacitate rather than kill. And now you’ve got a U.S. Senator and several high-ranking political appointees trapped in there. Those people are not terrorists, and they are not expendable!”

  Harris struggled to control his breathing. Words caught in his throat like barbed wire. He would be unable to help the trapped team even if he could reveal why the Mountain still required the lethal countermeasures, no matter what this stranger or even the DOE Secretary thought.

  “All procedures were followed,” he insisted. “Over twelve months ago, when Hydra Mountain opened its doors, each decision was approved by the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee, as clearly recorded in the authorization of Valiant Locksmith.”

  He had done all the paperwork properly, followed every regulation, even though he suspected van Dyckman had circumvented the classified interagency approvals in his rush to impress the President. It was a technicality, but a legal one that could come back to haunt the Assistant Secretary.

  Secretary Nitta sounded somewhat cowed when Harris refused to back down. “Due to the urgency of the waste storage problem, I did approve an accelerated process to make the program operational as soon as possible, at the President’s insistence—but I insisted that we follow all SAP procedures. Stanley must have pulled some strings, and apparently he cut a few corners as well.”

  Harris didn’t want to cast blame, but the finger-pointing had already begun. Damn the straitjacket of regulations and political blinders that kept one SAP from knowing what the other was doing! “And there were other, uh, security considerations,” he said. “As I said before, a cascade of unintended interactions occurred between the legacy and modern systems. We expected to have time to work out the wrinkles, but Senator Pulaski’s oversight hearing forced us to move up the timetable.”

  He heard muffled whispering over the secure comm link. The Secretary seemed to be arguing with the other person in her office. She came back on the line. “We can address this later, Rob. For now, do you know what’ll happen next?”

  Holding the red phone, Harris stared through the Eagle’s Nest window at the operations board on the far wall below. The interior tunnel cameras were still fried, and he had no visual contact with the stranded team. Nevertheless, the heat, oxygen, carbon dioxide, halothane, and other biosensors showed that Adonia and her companions had reached the upper ledge of the high bay above the lower cavern, and that pained him.

  Halothane was still flowing down the tunnel, and soon the gas would pool around them and spill over the ledge. They had to get to higher ground before the knockout gas rendered them unconscious. If only he had a way to warn them!

  Forcing calm, he spoke to the DOE Secretary. “The team’s best bet would be to head up onto the catwalks and climb as high as possible. Again, they’d have a chance to sit tight.”

  “At least they won’t be able to trigger any more countermeasures from up there,” said the Secretary. “Simon Garibaldi should come to that conclusion, if no one else does. Can you tell them that?”

  “No! They’re not near any intercoms, and the loudspeakers are down!” He calmed himself, heaved in a deep breath again. “Once the cavern sensors detect the halothane, the catwalks will retract up into their lockdown position. If the team members can climb up and out of the way before that happens, they will be safe near the grotto ceiling.”

  The man’s voice asked, “And what if they don’t think to get onto the catwalks in time?”

  Harris longed for another antacid. “Then once they fall unconscious, the system reset time will pass very quickly for them.” He hesitated. “Unless the halothane increases to a lethal concentration.”

  “Why can’t they just get out onto the open floor of the lower cavern? Won’t the space be large enough to dilute the gas?” Nitta asked.

  “For a time,” Harris said. “The reservoir was designed to hold enough halothane to cover that lower floor before any adversary could steal the active plutonium pits. The freight elevators are the main means of transporting personnel and equipment down to the cavern, but they’ll be locked down as well, retracted to their safe position and out of reach from the upper ledge.”

  It took a moment for the Secretary to answer. “Considering how persistent the team has been against your countermeasures so far, Rob, and with Garibaldi’s presence, I wouldn’t underestimate them.”

  25

  Adonia grasped Shawn’s arm as they both looked over the ledge. Over the dizzying drop, she saw in the distance exactly what van Dyckman was building at the bottom of the lower cavern: eight massive, in-ground concrete pools in various stages of completion, each forty feet deep and nearly half the size of a football field. At the bottom of each partially constructed pool was a rigid metal frame, a support structure that could hold an array of hundreds upon hundreds of rods upright.

  Senator Pulaski frowned as he peered down, following Victoria Doyle’s accusing finger, but he didn’t seem to understand. “Swimming pools?”

  Adonia felt defeated and appalled. “Wet-storage cooling tanks for spent fuel rods.” How could Stanley have done this? “He’s going to cover the cavern floor with cooling pools.”

  As spent fuel rods built up at her own nuclear power plant, Adonia had been forced to build similar concrete reservoirs behind the Granite Bay security fences for stopgap storage. She had no place else to put the fuel rods, no sanctioned holding facility where she was allowed to send them. But her pools were much smaller than this. The scale of Stanley’s project made her own temporary holding tanks at Granite Bay look like wading pools.

  “Sixteen of them, when we’re all finished.” Van Dyckman sounded proud. “We already have two completed and filled, with six more nearly finished, and excavations for an additional eight. Plus,” he pointed directly below them, “that large temporary pool just below. We’re relieving the backlog of spent fuel rods as quickly as possible, making all those nuclear power plants safer by the day.”

  Directly below them, Adonia saw another reservoir, an above-ground circular pool full of water. It was constructed with inch-thick plastic panels and crowded with submerged fuel rods arranged in an array, held upright at the bottom by a flimsy support structure. This wasn’t a secure, concrete-walled, in-ground storage pool like the others being built; rather, it looked like a gian
t backyard swimming pool, more than a hundred feet in diameter. She couldn’t judge the depth of the water from directly above, but the side of the pool was over twenty feet high; basically, a water tank.

  Flush with the top of the round pool, a metal mesh platform ten feet wide encircled the outer perimeter, three feet above the water’s surface, which would presumably allow inspectors to walk around the top. The platform was supported by a matrix of crisscrossed struts that provided further support to the pool. The surface of the water lay thirty feet below them as they stood on the ledge.

  Van Dyckman’s eyes were bright. “Those two concrete pools at the far end of the cavern are already packed with rods at the highest allowable density approved by the NRC. I removed them from the most problematic waste sites around the country, and that eased the greatest pressure. We had to do what we could, as fast as we could. I’m sure you’ll all agree.” He nodded to himself, though no one else chimed in. “But that wasn’t enough. As you see from the above-ground pool below us, we’re maintaining our momentum and receiving even more spent fuel rods so we can keep nuclear power plants safe around the country.” He gave them an embarrassed smile. “The other permanent cooling pools aren’t completed yet.”

  “Permanent?” Garibaldi asked, as if he had caught van Dyckman in a lie. “Well, I thought Hydra Mountain was just a temporary measure until we all agreed on a full-scale acceptable solution.”

  “Or until unicorns fly out my ass,” Pulaski muttered. “People like you would prevent any solution from ever being constructed.”

  “Sorry, that was only a figure of speech,” van Dyckman said. “Senator Pulaski understood what we meant when he approved the additional funds for construction down here. A good manager improvises. If this day had gone as planned, we would have shown you all aspects of Valiant Locksmith, one step at a time, leading up to this grand finale, so you could put it all into perspective.”

  Victoria Doyle looked sickened. “Perspective! All these spent fuel rods in here—in here!—and some of them in a flimsy plastic pool! You don’t have a clue why this is so dangerous.”

  Undersecretary Doyle always made van Dyckman particularly defensive, and he rounded on her. “I know what I’m doing, Victoria. Is it any less safe than what Ms. Rojas is storing at Granite Bay right now? Some nutcase crashed a plane into one of her holding facilities!”

  He huffed. “Before we did anything here in the Mountain, I arranged temporary access to specially cleared inspectors so they could certify every aspect of the construction and operation of these pools.” He pointed to the half-built structures scattered across the grotto floor. “When the other in-ground pools are completed, we’ll fund a full-time NRC inspector resident in Albuquerque to ensure continued safety of operations. Nothing to worry about, everything by the book. Even Rob Harris is comfortable with the arrangement.”

  Victoria narrowed her eyes, as if she knew something the rest of them didn’t. “I doubt he is.”

  Adonia was put off by Stanley’s arrogance. Yes, she supposed it was better that the spent fuel rods were deep inside Hydra Mountain than scattered around nuclear power plants, where they were far more vulnerable, but she also remembered how van Dyckman’s erroneous calculations had nearly caused a complete disaster in packing the Granite Bay cooling array. Could she really trust him to do everything properly with a nation’s worth of high-level nuclear waste? “Stanley, I have grave reservations about this.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t,” he said, dismissing her concerns. “We have more than adequate administrative inspection and oversight.”

  Another Stanley-ism. She felt exasperated with him. “Administrative oversight doesn’t ensure safety. You’re the Assistant Secretary, and you’re the program manager here, but have you ever actually worked at a functioning nuclear site? Spent time in practical day-to-day operations? Ever?”

  “Of course. At Brown I interacted with NRC officials. I also ran experiments just down the road on MIT’s test reactor. I was responsible for modeling—”

  “Universities are not equivalent to commercial nuclear or DOE operations. They’re great for learning basics and theory, but they cannot simulate large-scale operations, and they certainly don’t cover all conceivable situations in real-world operations. You can’t play fast and loose with nuclear waste.”

  Shawn asked a different question. “What will you do when that above-ground pool is full, and the spent fuel rods keep coming?”

  “Then we need a new contractor, one who builds pools faster!” he joked. Nobody laughed. “If the in-ground pools aren’t yet completed, we’ll just have to put up another temporary one. We have enough materials, and we’ll catch up sooner or later. Look, you’re missing the point. Every shipment of fuel rods we bring into the Mountain makes the nation safer.”

  “Safer?” Garibaldi groaned. “That is exactly what I warned everyone about. A hasty, easy solution! You are much too confident in design specifications, Stanley.”

  Feeling increasingly uneasy, Adonia pointed at the massive concrete casks stacked against the ledge’s far wall, each one marked with radiation symbols. “How dangerous do you think it is to move the fuel rods from transportation casks into the pools using that crane or the freight elevators? What happens if one of the casks accidentally drops and cracks open?”

  “Impossible. Tests at Sandia dropped the casks from twice that height, and they survived.”

  She turned to the pool directly below. “We’re deep underground and isolated. What if the water supply is disrupted? What if the power goes off, and the water can’t be circulated or cooled? The water would get superheated, boil away, and if the rods are exposed to the air—”

  “Or what if an asteroid slams into New Mexico?” van Dyckman said with a snort.

  “Or what if a small plane crashes into Hydra Mountain?” Shawn muttered. “Sometimes unlikely events happen.”

  “Those scenarios have been assessed, and the risks were deemed acceptable.” He scowled around the group that seemed to have turned against him. “Are there any other questions, or should I give you a complete safety briefing?”

  Victoria Doyle looked increasingly agitated, struggling with something she refused to say.

  Garibaldi stepped closer to the edge, into the red crosshatched area, and pointed to the above-ground pool directly below. “Your in-ground concrete pools may adhere to NRC guidelines, but your temporary pool only has plastic walls—to hold radioactive spent fuel rods! It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

  “It’s fiber-reinforced plastic, Dr. Garibaldi—over an inch thick, greater than industrial standard. And this FRP uses carbon fiber, giving the sides a tensile strength greater than steel. It exceeds the specs for commercial water tanks.”

  “Except that everyday water tanks don’t store nuclear waste.” Garibaldi pointed at numerous water outlets, filters, and temperature gauges embedded in the wall near the bottom of the pool, barely visible through the water. “And those fittings make the pool more susceptible to a leak.”

  Undersecretary Doyle finally blurted out, aghast, “This is ridiculous! If that pool leaks and floods the lower level, a radiation release down here would have … unprecedented consequences.”

  Van Dyckman’s tone was withering and defensive. “In a complete worst-case scenario, it would be a mess, yes, but easily contained. We are deep inside a mountain, after all. Who is going to get hurt, even in a disaster?”

  Victoria was sweating. Her face had a look of disgust, even fear. “You still don’t understand. Even moderated by all this water, those rods have already raised the background radiation level in this cavern well above ambient. With so much nuclear material present, if that damned tank of yours leaks, it would take only a few stray neutrons to cause a potential disaster.”

  Adonia frowned. What kind of disaster? Was Doyle misinformed? Her expertise was in nuclear weapons, not power reactors, but surely the Undersecretary could see that the fuel rods in the pool below weren’t packed
densely enough to go supercritical.

  Garibaldi leaned over the edge as he spoke, as if he felt compelled to stare at the temporary holding pool far below. His voice had a different tenor—unlike his previous biting sarcasms, he now sounded deeply frightened. “Stanley, are you storing standard-sized fuel rods in that temporary pool?”

  “Of course.”

  Garibaldi nodded. “So, those rods are four meters long, but that pool below us is clearly not as deep as NRC standards would dictate.”

  Van Dyckman grew more agitated. “It’s twenty feet deep—the maximum depth we could use and still guarantee the FRP integrity, so that the water wouldn’t burst out the sides. There’s at least six feet of water above the top of the fuel rods, and that’s acceptable to moderate the emitted neutrons.” He looked around the committee members, flushed, and then insisted again. “That is fully within the NRC’s safety guidelines!”

  “Six feet of water is plenty,” Senator Pulaski repeated, clearly repeating what van Dyckman had told him.

  Garibaldi said in a scornful tone, “Yes, I’m sure you completed the rigorous calculations, Senator.”

  “It’s barely within the guidelines,” Adonia said. “That temporary pool has almost zero safety margin, fiber-reinforced plastic or not. And any drop in the water level could result in an enormous increase in radioactivity.” She glanced at Doyle, who seemed unaccountably worried. “But probably not the disastrous scenario the Undersecretary is so worried about.”

  Doyle shook her head. “You don’t have a clue. None of you.”

  Stanley grew increasingly agitated. “This is only for three months, max! The next six concrete pools should be completed soon. The contractors are penalized for every day they go over the schedule, and we’re still constructing eight more.”