Dead or Alive (49 page)

“It’s essentially where deposits will be stored when and if the site goes active. You’ll see the entrance to the drift in a few minutes.”

“We’re not going inside?”

“No, I’m afraid not. We’re still conducting tests to ensure its stability.” This was a vast understatement, of course. The digging of the emplacement drift had taken a relatively short time. Testing and experimentation would take another nine months to a year. “Let’s talk a little geography,” Steve continued.

“The ridge above us was formed about thirteen million years ago by a now-extinct caldera volcano, and is comprised of alternating layers of rock called welded tuff—also known as ‘ignimbrite’—nonwelded tuff and semiwelded tuff.”

A hand went up. “Did I hear you right? You said ‘volcano.’”

“I did. But it’s long extinct.”

“You’ve had earthquakes, though, right?”

“Yes, two of them. One measuring five on the Richter and one measuring 4.4. The first caused some minor damage to the surface buildings, but not so much as a crack down here. I was here—in here—for both of them. Barely felt a thing.”

There were, in fact, thirty-nine earthquake faults and seven baby volcanoes in various stages of activity in the desert surrounding the facility. This was in the information sheet he’d handed out, but if no one brought it up, he certainly wasn’t going to. When people heard the words
volcano
and
fault,
their brains tended to switch into caveman mode.

“The truth is,” Steve continued, “this particular chunk of geology has been under close study for almost twenty-five years, and there’s a mountain of evidence that the three kinds of stuff here is aptly suited for the storage of nuclear waste.”

“How much waste, exactly?”

“Well, that’s one of those questions I’m not allowed to answer.”

“On whose orders?”

“Take your pick. Homeland Security, the FBI, the DOE . . . Suffice it to say, this facility will be the country’s primary storage site for spent nuclear fuel.”

The best estimate put the facility’s eventual maximum capacity at around 135,000 metric tons, or 300 million pounds, some of which would degrade to “safe” levels in decades, and some of which could potentially remain lethal for millions of years. The poster child for nuclear waste, the one most often quoted by journalists—plutonium-239, which had a half-life of about twenty-five thousand years—was far from the longest-lived, Steve knew. Uranium-235, used in both reactors and weapons, had a half-life of about 704,000,000 years.

“By what method would the waste be transported?” This from one of the Oregon delegates.

“By rail and truck, both purpose-designed for the task.”

“What I meant was, I assume we’re not talking about fifty-five-gallon drums.”

“No, sir. You’ll find detailed information about the transportation vessels on the sheets I gave you, but I’ve seen the things up close and watched the stress testing they go through. They’re about as close to indestructible as you can get.”

“They said the same thing about the
Titanic.
”

“Which I’m sure General Atomics has kept well in mind as they’ve worked on these things for the past ten or twelve years.”

This had the desired effect: If one of the project contractors had spent a decade working on the transport cask alone, how much time and care and expense had been spent on the facility itself?

“How about security, Mr. Jenkins?”

“If the facility goes online, primary security will be handled by the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration Protective Forces—the NNSA for short. There would, of course, be . . . supplemental forces on quick standby, should an emergency arise.”

“What kind of supplemental forces?”

Steve smiled. “The kind that give bad guys nightmares.”

More laughter.

“Okay, let’s move on to what you all came for. If you’ll board the little rail carts to the right, we’ll get going.”

 

 

 

T
he trip took fifteen minutes, but frequent questions brought the convoy to a halt. Finally they slowed beside an opening in the main tunnel wall. The delegates climbed out and gathered around Steve at the mouth. “The shaft you see sloping downward is six hundred feet long and connects to the emplacement drift, which is a horizontal grid of smaller tunnels that, in turn, lead to waste-storage areas.”

“How does the waste get from the truck or train down to the storage level?” one of the Utah staffers asked. “Does it stay inside the transport vessel?”

“Sorry, that’s hush-hush territory again. What I can tell you about is how the waste will be stored down in the drift. Each ‘packet’ will be encased in two nested canisters, one made of almost an inch of a highly corrosion-resistant metal called Alloy 22, then a two-inch-thick second canister made of something called 316NG—essentially, nuclear-grade stainless steel. Overhanging the nested canisters will be a titanium shield designed to protect them from seepage and falling rocks.”

“Is that something you’re worried about?”

Steve smiled. “Engineers don’t worry. We plan. We try to model every possible scenario and plan for it. These three components—the two nested canisters and the titanium shield—form what we call a ‘defense-in-depth.’ The packets will be stored horizontally and commingled with different grades of waste, so each chamber maintains a uniform temperature.”

“How big are these packets?”

“About six feet in diameter and ranging in length from twelve to eighteen feet.”

“What happens if the packets get . . . misplaced?” the other California candidate asked.

“Couldn’t happen. The number of steps involved to move a packet and the people that have to sign off on it make that a virtual impossibility. Think of it this way: We’ve all lost our car keys, right? Imagine a family of eight. Each person in the family would have a duplicate set of keys; three times a day, each person would have to sign a form stating the keys are either in their possession or in the agreed-upon key-collection area; three times a day each person would have to verify that their particular set of keys in fact works in the car’s locks and ignition; and finally, three times a day each person would have to go around to the other family members and verify that
that
person has taken all of the above steps. Are you starting to get the picture?”

Nods all around.

“All of that and more would be going on here every shift of every day of the year. And it would be backed up by computer oversight. I promise you, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, nothing is going to get misplaced in this facility.”

“Talk to us about corrosion, Mr. Jenkins.”

“Our corrosion testing is done at the LTCTF—sorry, the Livermore’s Long-Term Corrosion Test Facility.”

“As in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory?”

Thanks for the softball,
Jenkins thought but didn’t say. Lawrence Livermore was a household name, and while most people couldn’t tell you exactly what LLNL did, it was nevertheless held in high regard. Again, if Lawrence Livermore was on the job, what was there to worry about?

“Right,” he said. “The testing process involves aging and stressing metal samples called ‘coupons.’ Right now they’re testing eighteen thousand coupons representing fourteen different alloys in solutions common to this area. As of now, the average corrosion rate on the coupons is twenty nanometers a year. A human hair is
five thousand
times wider than that. At this rate, the Alloy 22 used in the nested canisters would hold up for about a hundred thousand years.”

“Impressive,” said a man in a cowboy hat, one of the Idaho delegates, Jenkins assumed. “What say we talk worst-case scenario. What if something leaks and starts seeping into the earth.”

“The chances of that are—”

“Humor us.”

“First of all, what you need to know is the water table beneath our feet is unusually deep, running at an average of fifteen hundred feet, which would be eleven hundred feet below this emplacement drift.”

This was another point of heated debate, Steve knew. While what he’d just told the delegates was true, some of the project scientists were lobbying for deeper emplacement drifts—some three hundred feet below this one. The truth was, there was no firm answer to the percolation question. How fast various liquids would seep through the rock beneath the facility was an unknown, as were the effects an earthquake might have on percolation rates. Then again, he reminded himself, the best estimates put the chances of a catastrophic earthquake affecting the storage levels at one in seventy million.

If anything was going to be the inescapable death knell for the facility, it would be the nature of the water table. Up until ten months earlier, it was uniformly believed that the area beneath the facility was what’s known as a
closed hydrologic basin,
an inward-sloping formation that offered outlets to neither oceans or rivers. Two exhaustive studies, one by the EPA and one by the USGS, now contradicted that belief. If accurate, aquifers might extend as far as the West Coast and the Gulf of California. Until the matter was settled, however, Steve’s orders were clear: The closed hydrologic basin model was the gold standard.

He said, “For waste to even begin seeping into the rock, dozens of systems and subsystems—both human and computer—would have to fail. Again, we need to put this into perspective: Compared to the security protocols this facility would operate on, sneaking into an ICBM silo and launching a missile would be a stroll in the park.”

“Is any of this material fissionable?”

“You mean can any of it explode?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it would take someone with a couple Ph.D.s at the end of their name to answer the whys, but the answer is no.”

“Say someone managed to sneak through security and get down to the storage levels with a bomb—”

“By ‘someone,’ I assume you mean Superman or the Incredible Hulk?”

This got outright laughter.

“Sure, why not? Let’s say they did. What kind of damage could they do?”

Steve shook his head. “Sorry to rain on your parade, but the logistics alone make that incredibly unlikely. First of all, you’ll notice this diagonal tunnel is ten feet wide. The amount of conventional explosives it would take to do any significant damage to the storage levels wouldn’t fit into a moving truck.”

“And nonconventional explosives?” asked the Idaho delegate.

Then,
Steve thought,
we’d have a problem.

O
KAY, PEOPLE, time to change up the game,” Gerry

Hendley announced as he filed into the conference room and found a seat.

It was another morning at The Campus, and the conference table was laid out with carafes of steaming coffee and platters of pastries and doughnuts and bagels. Jack poured himself a cup of coffee, grabbed a whole-wheat bagel—no cream cheese—and found an empty spot at the table. Also present were Jerry Rounds, chief of analysis/intelligence; Sam Granger, chief of operations; Clark and Chavez; and the Caruso brothers.

“It’s time we start taking a focused approach. From this point on, every person in this room is going to have nothing else on his plate except for the Emir and the Umayyad Revolutionary Council—except for myself, Sam, and Jerry, of course. We’ll also be keeping the lights on and the doughnuts fresh, but the rest of you start shifting your workload. We’re going to live, breathe, and eat Emir twenty-four-seven until he’s caught or dead.”

“Hoo-yah,” Brian Caruso said, getting a round of laughter.

“To that end, we’ve given the group a fitting name: Kingfisher. The Emir thinks he’s a king of sorts, fine. We’re going to fish him out. From now on, this is your workspace, and everyone’s door is always open—that means me, it means Sam, and it means Jerry.”

Holy crap,
Jack thought.
Where’s this coming from?

“First things first. Dom and Brian were tracking down leads in Sweden,” Hendley said, then recounted Jack’s discovery of the DHS/FBI intercept about Hlasek Air. “We’re going to keep pulling at that thread, but nothing jumped out. Mechanic’s turned himself into the Swedish national police, but he’s got nothing to give. Cash transaction for a little work on a transponder and a charter full of maybe Middle Easterners.”

“Kingfisher,” Hendley continued. “If you’ve got an idea, tell someone. If you want to try something new, ask. If you just want to brainstorm or play what-if, get together and do. The only dumb questions or ideas are the ones we don’t ask or put out there. We’re going organic, people. Forget the way we were doing things and start thinking outside the box. You can bet your ass the Emir is. So: Questions?”

“Yeah,” Dominic Caruso said. “Why the change?”

“Got a piece of good advice recently.”

Jack saw Hendley give John Clark a barely perceptible glance, and then it made sense.