Radiation Hazard (The Stasis Stories #3)

by Laurence Dahners

  Carter said, “I can hardly give an opinion. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Um, I didn’t think you would. But their website gives its specifications, um” Eloise glanced at the landing site, “it calls them ‘material properties.’ I was hoping you could look at them so I could tell the President whether this is something exciting or not?”

  Sounding pained, Carter said, “Give me the web address.”

  Eloise did and waited.

  A minute or so later, Carter snickered, then laughed. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “I…” Eloise paused uncertainly, “I don’t think so. It was a news item that Space-Gen’s testing this material for possible use in rocketry.”

  “Well,” Carter chuckled, “this ‘Stade’ would certainly be a wonderful material for rocket engines… if it existed.”

  “You think it’s…”

  “Someone’s fevered daydream. Yes. You can safely tell President Morton that no such material currently exists. And that it never will. They claim it’s not just stronger, but hundreds or thousands of times stronger than the strongest available materials. They claim something far stronger than even the theoretical limits of materials we’ve imagined but never been able to create. If this stuff existed, we could erect buildings two miles high.” She snorted, “Well, taller than that, but there’d be substantial difficulty breathing unless we pressurized the upper floors.”

  “You think Space-Gen’s being hoodwinked?”

  “Someone’s sold them some swampland in Florida, yes.”

  “Um, thank you, Dr. Carter.”

  Eloise sent Morton a message that she had information on the company selling the material to Space-Gen. He called her and she explained what she knew. Though she knew it made good sense, she felt irritated when he asked her to get the Chairman of the Materials Science and Engineering department on the phone for him, “for confirmation.”

  Apparently, the Chairman agreed that the material was someone’s daydream. Eloise could hear Morton laughing with the man shortly after their conversation began. Concerningly, she heard the President calling what Seba and Vaii had done an embarrassment.

  ***

  Art Turpin’s nerves had settled. He’d been very much on edge when the meeting began. They might’ve been calling it a conference and review, but when the higher-ups of Vinargy, your energy company, and a bunch of people from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission got together to hold a “conference” on the accident at the nuclear plant where you were the general manager… it tended to make you feel as if you were on trial.

  After all, it’d gone down on his watch. It might’ve been that the series of physical faults were unpredictable, and that all of them going wrong at the same time had been unlikely, and that he hadn’t been one of the personnel who’d performed poorly. But he’d been in charge of the plant and had directed his people’s training. He’d been the one who’d known Ralph Williams’ temper was problematic but hadn’t recognized it could cause a rookie like Jared Blank to freeze, act without thinking, and flee at the worst possible moment. He even felt somehow, as if Ace Berry’s coronary had been laid at his feet. You could argue that having an older, experienced man watching over a rookie was smart. However, “might not have been the best decision in view of the man’s age,” had been mentioned more than once.

  Bunch of damned second guessers, he thought.

  They hadn’t fired him yet though. They were moving on to what to do next.

  He was supposed to present a plan for the remediation. The question was whether he should play it safe? Or should he tell them about Stade?

  He’d prepared two presentations. One went over the history of the remediations carried out at other nuclear meltdowns from Three Mile Island, to Chernobyl, to Fukushima. It discussed problems and successes and proposed a path intended to replicate the successes while avoiding the failures. The reactor debris from Three Mile Island had eventually been shipped to Idaho, but he didn’t envision that the current political climate would allow such a maneuver. His conventional plan involved pouring additional concrete into the containment, to create a barrier isolating the number two reactor and limiting emissions. A sort of entombment in place somewhat like the Russians had resorted to with Chernobyl. Since most of the radioactivity was restricted by the existing containment, this wouldn’t be nearly as difficult, dangerous, and deadly as the entombment carried out as a last resort at Chernobyl.

  When he arrived at the podium, he paused to look out over the people, mostly men, in the small auditorium. Now’s my chance to dazzle them with my brilliance or make it completely evident I’m not to be trusted. To outdraw and outshoot… or shoot myself in the foot. He took a breath, and thought, Go for it. He clicked on the icon for his second presentation and said, “Though I’ve prepared a conventional plan for dealing with the problems at reactor two, I’m not going to present it… Instead, I’m going to propose something radical.” He studied his audience. They didn’t look at all impressed.

  He decided it was too late to turn back. “The day after the event occurred, I received a call from Aaron Marks, the CEO of Space-Gen.” He could see people turning to look at one another, wondering what the hell Marks could have to do with a nuclear meltdown event. Art continued, “He suggested that I talk to Kaem Seba, a physics student at UVA and one of the founders of a new company based in Charlottesville. A student who claimed he had a new material that could block radiation.”

  Art’s audience looked baffled. “Now, I know what you’re thinking. There are, after all, a lot of materials that block radiation, from paper, to lead, to water, to plastic. Each has different efficacies with different forms of radiation.” Art held up the three by six-inch Stade he’d received that day. “This is a sample of Stade, Kaem Seba’s material. In fact, it’s the sample I received that very first day. It’s the one that we tested to get the results I’m about to show you. Its major dimensions are 7.5 by 15 centimeters or very close to three by six inches.” He turned it so its edge-on profile swept past the audience. “It’s one millimeter thick. I expect that you’re wondering what percentage of alpha or beta radiation it blocks? What you’re not expecting me to say is that it blocks one hundred percent of all radiation. This stuff completely blocks neutrons. Not by absorbing them, but by reflecting them.” Art paused a moment for dramatic effect, then said, “It’d make a lousy control rod.”

  Art had hoped for a laugh. He didn’t even get a snicker. He did get rolled eyes and looks of concern. They think I’ve gone off the deep end, he thought. He’d worried this might happen and wondered what he’d do. Keep going, he told himself. You’re in too deep to back out. He let go of the Stade, leaving it drifting in the air. He said, “As you can see, reflecting radiation isn’t the only astonishing property it has.”

  At first, most of the people in the room didn’t notice the fact that the Stade was airborne, but curses and exclamations from those who did notice quickly focused everyone else’s attention on the drifting Stade. Art continued his talk, “As you can see, this piece of Stade has the same density as air. Now you’re probably thinking something this light can’t possibly block radiation the way I’ve claimed. And even if it does block some radiation, it must be so flimsy it still couldn’t have a place in a nuclear facility.”

  The Stade had sunk a bit under the weight of the string at its corner. Art reached up and plucked it from the air. He carried it to the closest member of his audience and, speaking loudly since he was away from the microphone, said, “I’m going to pass this sample around in hopes it’ll convince you I haven’t completely lost touch with reality. Now I know that you have no way to test my claim that it blocks radiation. But there are some claims you can test with your own hands and eyes. For instance, it’s coefficient of friction is zero.” Art held it out to a person in the first row who reached up to take it. The man’s fingers slipped off. The guy grabbed it again but still couldn’t take it.

  Art said, “I’m holding
onto this sample by gripping it where a fine piece of string has been tied through a hole in one corner. This lets me hold onto it. The other way you can hold it is like this,” he clawed his large fingers around it and held it up with one hand so the people could see. “Many of you whose hands are small will have to use two hands. While you’ve got it in two hands, try to bend it. Try as hard as you like. Because, even though you’re thinking it’s light and therefore it must be flimsy, it isn’t.”

  He handed the sample to the man who’d been trying to take it and started to walk back to the little podium. It promptly got away from the man, who knocked it farther away from himself while trying to catch it. Art caught it in a basket of fingers and handed it back saying, “Hold it like this or by the string at the corner.”

  Back at the podium, he said, “I’m about to show you a list of Stade’s mechanical properties. You aren’t going to believe them, but before you scoff, think about what you’ve just seen with your own eyes and what you’re soon going to be feeling with your own fingers. Stade may be unbelievable, but it exists. Denying that fact will make you look foolish.” He advanced the image on the big screen to show the list of properties and said, “Here they are.”

  Art waited while the audience studied the screen. The number of exclamations of disbelief built. As they rose toward a crescendo, he interrupted, “Now, I can tell from your tone that my warning didn’t keep most of you from finding these listed properties awfully hard to swallow. But what of those of you in the front row? You’ve had an opportunity to handle the specimen. Are you as doubtful as the others?”

  One or two people shook their heads. The guy currently holding the specimen lifted his hand, “You said we could try to break it. Can I try to scratch it with my knife?”

  “Sure,” Art replied. “You can try to scratch it with a diamond if you have one.” He looked over the rest of the audience. “I know most of you can’t believe the figures I’ve got up on the screen. I want to tell you that the figures displayed for strength are the lower limits. The strongest steels have a tensile strength of around 2,700 megapascals. In an effort to make Stade fail in tensile testing we lifted a hundred and fifty-ton dry cask with a one square millimeter Stade rod. That would have been a tensile strength of 1,470,900 megapascals or the 1.47 terapascals you see displayed. But it did, not, break. That figure doesn’t represent its strength. It is stronger than that figure. If you count that as its strength, that would mean it was at least 545 times stronger than the strongest steels.

  “That figure of a hundred and fifty terapascals for flexural strength under three-point bending?” He turned and picked up the meter long, one-millimeter test specimen Kaem had made for him. “This is our test specimen.” He used the plate on one end of it to wave the other end around. “As you can see it consists of two plates like the one that’s being passed around. You may be having a hard time seeing that they’re joined by a one square millimeter rod that’s a meter long. The testing lab I sent it to supported the two plates on the ends of that rod on steel posts, then pushed down in the middle, pressing on it through a third Stade plate to load it in three-point bending. The hydraulic press applied a load of ten metric tons-force to the middle plate. That was the loading limit of the press, so it stopped at that point.”

  Art advanced to the next image in his PowerPoint. “Here you see it under that ten-ton load.” He used his pointer to indicate the three plates and the hydraulic press on the image, “Because it’s so thin, you probably can’t see the one-millimeter rod, but you can see that the supports and the press are all in a line.” He advanced to the next image which had lines overlaid, just above and below the rod, to make it easier to see that the rod was still straight. “I want you to realize that this Stade not only didn’t break under that load, it didn’t even deform. Not, at, all. Resisting that load would require a flexural strength of a hundred and fifty million megapascals.”

  “If anyone wonders why the hydraulic press pushed down on the rod through a Stade plate, that’s because, under that kind of pressure, that one-millimeter rod would have cut through a steel plate like a cheese cutter’s wire.”

  He carried the meter-long specimen out and handed it to the same man he’d given the first specimen. Speaking loudly again, he said, “Pass this around as well, but be careful about trying to bend it. You might cheese cutter yourself.”

  Back at the podium, he said, “Has anyone managed to scratch or in any other way damage the sample that’s going around?”

  No one said anything, but a lot of heads were shaking.

  Art took a breath. “I suspect that you’re going to remember this day, the day you heard about Stade, for the rest of your life. This material’s going to change our industry. I don’t want to bring something radioactive into the room so I can prove that Stade blocks all radioactivity, but we’ve tested it and it does. If we built the containments around our reactors out of it, they’d be far, far stronger than the steel and concrete ones we build today. If we built our reactor vessels out of it, a meltdown couldn’t melt through.”

  He paused a moment for dramatic effect, then said, “If we built something like this…” Art changed the slide to show the diagrams drawn up by April Lee at Staze, “someone could safely enter the containment at Surbury and perform an inspection of the reactor despite the radiation.”

  Several people had their hands up, including someone from the NRC. Art considered pausing but decided to bull ahead. He said, “I can see that many of you have questions. I suspect many of you have comments about my sanity. I’m going to ask you to consider that, if this is all a flight of my fevered imagination, it’s not going to change anything except my level of embarrassment. However, it is true. This substance is just as unbelievable as I’m saying. And if you start proclaiming I’m an idiot, you’re going to be embarrassed when I’m proved right. So, please, let me finish.”

  No one shouted an objection, so he went on, “The next thing I want to tell you is that, even though I’ve been calling it a material and describing its material properties, it isn’t actually a substance at all. Staze, the company that’s developed it, claims that in reality it’s a,” Art made finger quotes, “‘segment of space-time within which time has stopped.’ A Stade contains whatever matter was in that space-time segment when the Stade was formed. The ones I’m passing around to you contain air. That’s why they’re the same density as air and float in it. This is important because a Stade could contain spent nuclear fuel…” he paused to give his audience’s thoughts a moment to catch up, “and that spent fuel, since time wouldn’t be passing inside of it, would no longer undergo fission events or be radioactive.”

  Evidently, this was too much. The room exploded with conversation. Several people shouted questions. A few shouted obscenities.

  Art stepped to one side, picked up a Geiger counter, and switched it on. He turned it so they could see the readout LEDs and turned it up so they could hear its occasional popping response to the background radiation. He pulled a drape off a can familiar to many in the room because it was the kind often used to transport radioactive specimens.

  One of the NRC people shouted angrily, yet nervously, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Art spoke calmly. “Nothing dangerous. The people who invented Stade were kind enough to come down to Surbury and staze a spent fuel pellet for us. ‘Staze’ is the verb they use when they form a Stade. Please take note of the background radioactivity the counter’s registering out here in the room.” He opened the lid on the can. “Note that opening this can didn’t change the background count.” He brought the Geiger counter over to it. “As you can see, the counts here right over the open can are the same as the background levels in the room.” He reached in the can and lifted the slippery stazed fuel pellet out in a cluster of fingers. Holding up the shiny silvery lump, he said, “This is the stazed spent fuel pellet, which as you might expect was quite radioactive when it was stazed. You’ll notice the Geiger coun
ter is not reacting, even when I bring the specimen close to the tube. In fact, notice that when I cover the Geiger-Muller tube’s window with the Stade, the counts drop to zero.”

  He covered the window with the Stade, then uncovered it, then covered it again so everyone could see and hear the background counts stop and resume. In case someone didn’t understand, he said, “I am blocking the background radiation with a highly radioactive spent fuel pellet that’s been stazed.” He looked up at the audience. “Staze, the company, says they can staze the dry casks where we currently store our spent fuel. Suppose we stazed spent fuel right after it came out of a reactor? Staze says that can be done more cheaply and safely than our current storage in spent fuel pools. Once done, that fuel would suddenly be completely indestructible and absolutely non-radioactive. Suppose we stazed Surbury’s number two reactor? I haven’t asked Staze whether that’s possible, but what if we could find a way?”

  When Art finished speaking, the noise level in the room boomed as if someone had set off a bomb. A few people were shouting. He heard some speaking as if they thought he was insane. A few quickly left, possibly worried that the pellet was radiating the room despite the evidence of the counter. Others felt sure that there wasn’t, in fact, a spent fuel pellet in the Stade. Most worrisome were the ones who thought Art was dangerously insane. He’d considered the possibility that he might lose his job over this stunt. He hadn’t wondered whether someone might bring criminal charges.

  It was Dan Blackmore, a man wearing an NRC badge, who walked to the front of the room and brought everyone to order. He organized the discussion, starting with a check of the Geiger counter using its test card—a plastic card containing a bit of low-grade uranium ore which set off the counter nicely. Then he performed a test—one Art wished he’d thought to demonstrate, even though it didn’t prove much. He had someone bring up the Stade sample that was still circulating the room and he passed it between the test card and the Geiger-Muller tube. The sudden silence proved the Stade not only blocked the low-level radiation from the card but that it blocked the background radiation from the room as well. Since many materials could block low energy radiation, this wasn’t too exciting in its own right. However, he next did something else Art wished he’d thought to do. He held the Stade behind the test card. The resultant near doubling of the Geiger count showed that the Stade was reflecting the radiation emitted from the reverse side of the card, bouncing it back through the card and into the counter.