Chapter Twenty-Nine

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

COUNTDOWN TO ZERO HOUR 51 MINUTES

EVERYONE IN THE control room thought the crisis was over.

Joss knew it had just begun.

She swept her arm across the desk, pushing everything off and onto the floor, and unrolled the blueprints. Running her trembling fingers over the plant’s designs, Joss mumbled to herself while everyone waited, exchanging glances. After a few moments, Ethan said her name a couple of times. She didn’t respond.

“Jocelyn,” he said finally. She looked up.

“The—the tail,” she stuttered, pulling out the blueprints for Clover Hill’s plumbing system and laying it on the top of the pile. “The plane’s tail. It hit. It smashed up against one of R2’s outer buildings.” She looked directly at Ethan and spoke clearly and slowly: “The tail is rammed into the exterior of the EDG storage building for R2. It’s located right”—Joss searched the blueprint, then pointed—“here. Which is exactly where the water main is. The plane’s tail ruptured the line.”

“Couldn’t have,” Dwight countered. “The main water line is underground. Buried. Exactly because of a possible attack or accident like this. If it had ruptured, there would have been alarms. We would have—”

“No, not the water line for the reactor,” Joss said. “The water line for the building. Your everyday plumbing. Bathroom, break room, drinking fountain. Which is why it didn’t set off any of our alarms. Which is why we didn’t know it was happening.”

“But you said radioactive water,” Ethan said. “If it’s not the reactor’s water—”

“All roads lead to Rome,” Dwight said, studying the blueprint. “There aren’t separate plumbing systems. It’s all connected. Look.” He spun the design around to face Ethan. “The building plumbing is like a small tributary off the more substantial line. That’s where they merge”—he pointed—“which means the building water is downstream of…”

Maggie helped him shuffle through the pages until they found the right one.

“Here. If it’s ruptured like that, the building water would intercept the reactor water and the pool, which would mean it would absolutely be radiated.”

“You’re missing the point,” Joss said through clenched teeth. “It’s not about how contaminated the water is. That’s the least of our problems. Based on what I saw and looking at these designs, I’m pretty sure all day—since the moment that plane crashed—water has been pouring out of those pipes. Which means it’s filling—”

“The inside of the building,” Ethan said, bent over the blueprints. He looked up at Joss. “The basement.”

The room was silent. George, who had been in the control room to relay details from the cleanup, raised his hand.

“Sorry,” he said. “Dumb firefighter question. What does that mean?”

“It means,” Ethan said, “the building whose basement houses the three emergency backup generators that are connected to Reactor Two and Reactor Two’s spent fuel pool—you know, the building practically being held together by duct tape—that basement may be flooded. Which means at any minute, those generators could fail.”

“ Will fail,” Joss said. “If they’re flooded, they will fail, and that will blow the power to R2, shutting off the coolant pumps. When they go down, there won’t be enough time to connect batteries or backup generators before—”

“The lower water in the pool heats up and boils off the water, exposing the rods and igniting a fire we have no way of putting out,” George finished. “That part I remember.”

“But not just the pool,” she said. “This time it’d also mean the reactor itself. No power, no coolant pumps. The reactor core will overheat and melt down.”

Ethan held up his hand. “Just hold on. Say the generators do fail, and the pumps for the coolant water stop working because of it. How long would we have to get and connect battery power before the water started to boil in the pool?”

Maggie, Vikram, Dwight, and Joss were already running calculations. When they finished, they compared their work, and they all agreed on the answer.

“From the time of loss of power,” Joss said, “we’d have less than half an hour.”