P Deutermann - The Moonpool

She bent forward to address Frick. “Are you suitably trained?” she asked. Tony made a small noise in his throat when she bent forward, but Frick merely looked at her for a second and then just barely wrinkled her lip.

“Why yes you are,” the young woman said, straightening up. “We won’t mess with your dog.”

I had to admit that it had been fun watching her straighten up, and she also was no dummy. “The dog is just part of the act,” I said. “But: There is another one out front.”

“Then we’ll need two dog passes, won’t we,” she said and went to get the paperwork. Watching her walk away continued to be fun. I asked her where Mr. Quartermain was. “In a meeting,” she called over her shoulder. I asked if Mr. Trask was in the building.

“You mean Colonel Trask?” she asked, just to make sure we knew how to address His Lordship.

“Older guy, reddish gray hair, face like a hatchet? Really pleased with himself?”

She turned her face away for a moment, trying to control a smile. The nameplate on her desk read SAMANTHA YOUNG, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT. Tony was still standing in the doorway, the veritable picture of a man fallen deeply in lust. Tony did that often.

“Did you really want to see the colonel?” she asked.

“Actually? No. You see one colonel, you’ve kind of seen them all.”

She nodded. “I asked,” she said, “because he’s supposed to sign your security passes. Is that possibly going to be a problem?”

“Why don’t you get Dr. Quartermain to handle that,” I suggested. “Probably save everybody a lot of time.”

At that moment, Aristotle Quartermain came into the office through a second door. “Handle what, Sam?” he asked. She explained the problem, and he waved it off. “I’ll sign these passes,” he said. “Give all your info to Sam here, and then let’s talk. I need them to have vehicle passes and smart-tags, too, Sam, okay?”

We did the paper drill, took mug shots and thumbprints, and then sat down with Quartermain in his inner office while young Samantha went down the hall to emboss and laminate our ID cards. I parked Frick over in one corner, where she decided to stare at our host. He thought that was pretty cool. Pardee had to snatch Tony by the collar to keep him from following Samantha. Quartermain had noticed.

“Ain’t she something?” he said admiringly. “Hired her about a year ago when my original assistant up and moved to Florida for some strange reason. She goes for her noonday run in this little gold spandex outfit? Now half the guys at the station are out exercising. And she can shoot, too. That’s a great dog you got there. He’ll need a pass, too, though.”

“It’s a she, and Samantha is getting the passes.”

Tony had closed his eyes, probably trying to visualize the spandex outfit. Tony’s idea of exercise was to stow two cases of beer in his fridge, not just one, but that might change. Pardee helpfully told him to stop drooling.

I told Quartermain about Special Agent Caswell’s visit, noting that that was the second time we’d had an “exchange of views,” and that between Trask and the FBI, the hospitality angle for H amp;S Investigations was disappointing.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m not too surprised. Let me bring you up to speed.”

He told us that the first attempt to retrieve radioactive particles from Allie’s body had been a bust, which corroborated what Creeps had told us. The docs were pretty sure that whatever it was, water had been the medium and alpha particles the radiation vector. Then he took us all over to the visitors’ center, which had been closed to the public in the wake of the 9/11 disaster. There he showed us a diorama of the power station, a mockup of the control room, and some animated flowcharts that showed how the reactor system worked.

“As you can see, the nuclear reaction provides the heat. Some of the water that cools that reaction boils into steam and goes over here to the power plant, where the steam spins a turbine, which spins a generator, which makes big-time juice. The spent steam goes down here to a condenser, where cooling water from the river turns it from vapor to liquid water, and then it’s pumped back into the reactor vessel, where the whole cycle is repeated.”

“And that water is radioactive?” Pardee asked.

“The whole reactor vessel and everything in it is highly radioactive, but only because it’s an integral part of an ongoing nuclear fission reaction. It’s also pressurized-it’s a boiler, after all. So between the heat, the radiation, and the steam, it’s not something you can just reach into and get yourself a container of water. You’d be dead in about an hour if you tried.”

“So where’s this moonpool you talked about?” I asked.

He took us to another wall chart diagram, which was titled THE REFUELING SYSTEM. “The technical name is the spent fuel storage pool. As fuel elements outlive their usefulness, they’re taken down from the reactor core and transferred underneath the reactor building to an adjacent building, which contains the storage pool. There they stay until the government gets a permanent storage site up and running.”

“And that area’s radioactive?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “It’s a lot like the reactor vessel itself, except the fuel elements aren’t bundled close together because we no longer want them to create a fission reaction. But the more recently they’ve been put into the moonpool, the hotter they are.”

“So what killed Allie could have come from there, as opposed to the main reactor itself?”

He paused for a moment. “ If the stuff came from a power plant, it is much more likely to have come out of a moonpool than the reactor vessel, for the basic reason that the moonpool is not pressurized. As I said, the reactor vessel is a closed, very hot, radioactive, and pressurized system. The pool’s a pool-atmospheric pressure, forty-five, fifty feet deep, a little scary-looking, but it’s just a pool.”

“Can we see it?” I asked.

“Gonna show you the whole shebang, Mr. Investigator, soon as those ID cards are ready.”

Three hours later, we returned to the admin building, following an extensive tour of the power plant. Quartermain himself conducted the tour, and it was obvious he knew his stuff as a nuclear engineer. We’d hit that I-believe button several times in the course of the tour. The shepherd attracted lots of stares, but most people in the plant seemed to be paying close attention to business, which was comforting.

We hadn’t actually seen either reactor-there were two at Helios, Unit One and Unit Two-and, as Ari pointed out, one never did want to actually see the reactor, because that would mean that its containment had been breached. The last persons to have seen an operating reactor had been at Chernobyl, and they were all very dead.

“You see one when it’s being built and installed, and you see it again when the plant gets decommissioned. Otherwise, you don’t want to see it.”

“Why do power plants get decommissioned?” I’d asked.

“Metallurgy,” he’d responded. “After twenty, twenty-five years of living in the energy flux of a uranium fission reaction, metal alloys can change state. The piping, the valves, the pumps, the fuel control mechanisms, even the instrumentation sensors become embrittled or otherwise metallurgically altered, sometimes to the point where the materials they were made out of no longer have the strength characteristics they had when they were brand-new.”

“So they shut ’em down, permanently? As opposed to replacing all that stuff?”

“Cheapest option,” he said. “The military does the same thing-they refuel their ship plants once, maybe twice, but when a warship’s reactor systems wear out, they scrap the whole boat. I’ve seen satellite shots of the Soviet naval bases with entire submarines rusting in the mudflats because the reactors gave out. Two, three billion dollars a copy. Talk about nuclear waste. Incredible.”