IN RETROSPECT, Jenkins realized he should have seen it coming, this “promotion” that was in fact nothing more than a grade-A pain in the ass. The facility got regular visits from a plethora of government agencies and officials, from the Environmental Protection Agency and Homeland Security to the U.S. Geological Survey and the Army Corps of Engineers, all of which had thus far been handled by a Department of Energy spokesperson. The recently reheated battle in Washington over the future of the facility had changed all that, and it seemed every pol or bureaucrat who could find his or her way here was showing up, armed with probing questions generated by underpaid staffers and a deep desire to understand every nuance of the facility.
“What they want, Steve,” his boss had told him, “is a peek behind the curtain, and you’re just unpolished enough to make ’em think they’re getting it.”
Backhanded compliment notwithstanding, Steve had to admit he knew the facility inside and out, backward and forward, having started here just three years out of college, which was, in the lifespan of the project, nineteen years after the site had been initially identified as a possible candidate, along with ten others in six states; twelve years after it was nominated for intensive “site-characterization” studies; and ten years after it was crowned the winner of the beauty contest. He’d worked at this not-so-little patch of desert for most of his adult life, and at a current cost of $11 billion, it was one of the most extensively studied chunks of land in the world. And depending on who won the battle in Washington, that $11 billion might be written off as a loss. How did one do that? he wondered. In what column on the federal balance sheet did such a sum fall?
The project’s completion had become a point of pride for the nine hundred or so members of the team, and while opinion varied from employee to employee whether they would want to live next to it, their collective investment in its success was enormous. Though only thirty-seven, Steve was considered one of the site’s old hands, along with a hundred or so others who’d been here since the project had gone from a notion on a piece of paper to a shovel-in-the-dirt concern. Unfortunately, he could tell no one much about what he did, a restriction he hadn’t minded until he’d met Allison. She was keenly and genuinely interested in his work, about how he spent his days, a trait neither of his previous two girlfriends had displayed. God, he was a lucky man. To find a woman like her, and to have her attracted to him… And the sex. God almighty. Admittedly, his experience was somewhat limited, but the things she did to him, with her hands, with her mouth… Every time they were together, he felt like he was living a Penthouse Forum letter.
His musings were interrupted by a telltale plume of dust appearing over the hill opposite the main tunnel entrance, indicating vehicles approaching. Sixty seconds later, two black Chevy Suburbans appeared on the north road and pulled into the parking lot. Afternoon work had been halted, and all the trucks and equipment pallets moved to the perimeter of the lot. The Suburbans slowed to a stop about fifty feet away and sat idling. None of the doors opened, and Steve imagined the occupants dreading the idea of leaving the air-conditioned interiors. And it wasn’t even hot, he thought, not summer-hot, at least. Funny how delegation visits like this one tended to taper off in June, July, and August.
Now the doors opened, and out climbed the ten staffers who had been dispatched by their respective governors. Two for each of the five bordering states. Having already rolled up their shirtsleeves and loosened their ties, the group stood for a moment, blinking and looking around, before seeing Steve waving his arm at them. En masse, they walked over to him and gathered in a semicircle.
“Afternoon, and welcome,” he said. “My name is Steve Jenkins, and I’m one of the senior on-site engineers here. I’ll do my best to learn your names before we’re through, but for now I’ll leave it to you to sort out your visitor badges.”
He held out a shoebox, and one by one each delegate came forward and found his or her badge.
“Just a couple quick reminders, and then we’ll get out of the heat. I’ll be passing out information sheets that will cover everything we’re going to talk about this afternoon, and everything I’m allowed to say.”
This got a few chuckles. Steve relaxed a bit. Might not be so bad after all.
“That said, I’ll ask you not to take notes, either on paper or on a PDA. Same with voice recorders and cameras.”
“Why is that?” one of the delegates, a blond California-type woman, asked. “There are plenty of pictures on the Internet.”
“True, but only the ones we want there,” Steve replied. “Believe me, if I can answer a question, I’ll do it. Our goal is to give you as much information as we can. One last thing before we step inside: This contraption next to me that looks like part rocket booster, part mobile home, and part oil pipeline is our TBM, or tunnel boring machine, known affectionately as the Yucca Mucker. For those of you that love facts and figures, the Mucker is four hundred sixty feet long, twenty-five feet wide, weighs seven hundred tons, and can cut through solid rock at up to eighteen feet an hour. To put that into perspective, that’s about the length of one of the Suburbans you arrived in.
There were appreciative murmurs and chuckles from the delegation.
“Okay, if you’ll follow me to the tunnel entrance, we’ll get started.”
We’re now standing in what we call the Exploratory Studies Facility,” Jenkins said. “It is shaped like a horseshoe, about five miles long and twenty-five feet wide. In several places in the ESF we constructed eight alcoves about the size of pole barns, in which we store equipment and conduct experiments, and six weeks ago we completed the first experimental emplacement drift.”
“Which is what?” one of the delegates asked.
“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.”
The 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.