Chapter 19

The Ice Tube, Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i

They were in a cave about twelve feet in diameter with smooth walls.

MacGregor said, "This is a lava tube."

"We've always referred to it as the Ice Tube," Briggs said. "At one time, it was cold enough to have ice on the walls in winter. Goes into the mountain about half a mile."

During eruptions, lava flowed in channels down the flanks of the volcano. The surface of the lava flow cooled and formed a crust, while the lava below the hardened surface continued to flow. At the end of an eruption, the lava drained out, leaving empty tubes behind. Most lava tubes were only a few yards wide; some, though, were large caves. The HVO had mapped more than eighty tubes, and many of them were very deep.

Mac hadn't known that this one, at the base of Mauna Kea, existed.

They went past massive air coolers with fans six feet in diameter. But John MacGregor could still feel the heat radiating from the depths ahead.

They were now walking on a metal deck covered in thick foam. On either side were stacked metal lockers, each four feet square and padlocked. Up ahead, pale blue light reflected off the ceiling.

MacGregor said, "What is this place?"

"Storage facility."

"And what are you storing?"

Briggs opened a heavy grate door. It creaked open. "Look."

On both sides of the walk were row after row of cylindrical glass canisters, each glowing a deep, unreal blue. The canisters were identical: five feet high and capped at either end by a heavy foam block.

"Technically," Briggs said, "this material is gel-matrixed compound HL-512. It's high-level radwaste, stored in lead-glass canisters."

"You're telling me this is radioactive waste?"

"Of a kind."

MacGregor looked at the glowing canisters stretching away into the distance. He could feel his chest constrict, like a fist closing. "How much have you got here?"

"Six hundred and forty-three canisters," Briggs said. "All together, about thirty-two thousand pounds of material. And we can't risk lava coming anywhere close to it."

No kidding.MacGregor frowned. "Where'd the canisters come from?"

"Possibly from the Hanford Site in Washington State, the original plutonium production facility for the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Before that, maybe from Fort Detrick, U.S. Army Environmental Command, in Maryland."

MacGregor said, "You're telling me you're not certain who sent it here?"

Briggs nodded. "And we don't know where it was from originally."

Mac felt as dizzy as he had inside the crater. "So you have six hundred forty-three canisters of radioactive waste and you don't know where it came from?"

"That's correct."

Mac bent to look at the nearest canister. The glass was about an inch thick. Behind the glass there seemed to be a liquid containing suspended particles. Up close, he saw that the glass was not clear but covered with a spidery network of fine white lines. The foam bases were dusty. There was a thick layer of dust on the floor.

"How long has this stuff been here?" he said.

"Since 1978."

They walked down the cave past the rows of canisters. "Back in the 1950s," Briggs said, "it was standard procedure to dispose of radioactive waste by dumping it in the ocean. We did it until 1976; the Russians did it until 1991. Everybody did it. By 1977, the material had been sent to the Hanford Site in Washington State. When Hanford's facilities became too crowded, the stuff was shipped to Hawai‘i to be encased in concrete blocks and deep-sixed in the ocean. We don't know who put a stop to that, but somebody did. The canisters were kept in a Honolulu warehouse, but nobody liked having them so close to a large population center. Finally," Briggs continued, "they told us to store the waste on one of the outer islands until a new disposal plan could be agreed on."

Briggs's shoulders rose and fell in what appeared to be resignation. "So in 1978 or so, it came here to the Big Island. In 1982, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was passed, and in 1987, the Department of Energy designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the national disposal site. But Washington decided that this particular material could not withstand a trip stateside, which is why the canisters are still here."

"Wait—there wasn't a protest?" MacGregor asked.

Briggs smiled behind his glass faceplate. "There wasn't a protest because nobody knew it was here."

"And nobody found out?"

"It was the 1970s," Briggs said as if that explained everything. "Another world back then. Until 1959, Hawai‘i wasn't even a state. It was a trust territory. The military's strong presence on all the islands continued, and this corner of Hawai‘i was basically one big military base, so it wasn't a problem to put it here. And here it has remained ever since."

"And the military never tried to remove it?"

"Of course we tried," Briggs snapped, sounding defensive. "The army wanted to get rid of it. But the Senate Appropriations subcommittee wouldn't authorize funding, and we couldn't make a public fuss because the state of Hawai‘i wanted it kept secret. Sometime in the 1980s, state officials learned this stuff was here, and they wanted it gone, but they didn't want any headlines. You know, ‘Radioactive Waste Removed from Hawaiian Island Site.' That would be bad for tourism."

"Jesus," Mac said. "You think?"

Briggs said, "Sadly, the cost of removal got higher every year." He pointed to the canisters. "Those glass tubes were supposed to be encased in concrete. They were never meant to stand in the air for decades. Over the years, the decay heat from radioactivity has changed the qualities of the glass. You noticed the fine white lines all over the canisters?"

"Hard to miss."

"Well, those are cracks."

"Jesus," MacGregor said again.

"Yes. The glass is now extremely friable. It's not impossible to remove them, but at this point it'd be very difficult and very dangerous."

"And what exactly is in them?" Mac said.

"There is some dispute about that."

"Dispute?"

"We know that the material contains large amounts of unusual isotopes, in particular iodine-143, and that confused the experts we consulted. Portable proton scanning gave us unclear results."

MacGregor said, "No offense, sir. But how can this possibly be?"

"No offense taken," Briggs said. "Blame it on modern technology. Unfortunately for us, the relevant data was stored on computers."

"And that's a problem in the modern world?"

"In this case it is," Briggs said.

As they walked out of the cave, he explained. In the 1980s, the military, like most modern American organizations, used mainframe computers to keep track of their data. "Everything from personnel pay schedules to PX orders to nuclear warhead locations," Briggs said. "It was all on big mainframes. The programs that manipulated the data were written in Ada, the language chosen by the Department of Defense for the embedded systems used in military projects. There were no hard drives back then. Data was stored on eight-inch floppy disks that were kept in sleeves in air-conditioned rooms."

"Those were the days," Mac said.

Briggs ignored him. "But each year," he continued, "there was more stored data. And with each upgrade, it became more and more expensive to transfer the old data. On top of that, a lot of the old data wasn't relevant anymore. Who cared how much canned tuna was put aboard the USS Missouri in May 1986? Tanks and airplanes from that time had been decommissioned. Eventually, the military decided not to transfer the old data unless it was needed. So the old disks were left in storage for decades."

"And?"

"One night Mauna Kea was struck by lightning that generated an electromagnetic field so powerful it degaussed the disks and erased all the information stored there."

"There were no backups?"

"The backups were unreadable too."

"And that's why you don't know what this material is?"

"Well, we didn't," Briggs said. "For twenty years, we had no idea."

He paused and looked directly at Mac.

"We found out when we had an accident," Briggs said.