When the giant metal door fully opened, Adonia heard the guttural growl of truck engines as the two flatbed eighteen-wheelers crawled inside. The sound of alarms and diesel engines filled the chamber, along with exhaust fumes. Several minutes later, after the flatbeds had completely entered the chamber, the mammoth vault door slowly swung shut behind them and seated itself into place with a reverberating bang. The truck drivers throttled off the rumbling engines, and exhaust air rushed through vents along the tunnel ceiling, pulling the diesel fumes away.
When the alarm horn stopped pulsating, a startling silence filled the tunnel. Five workers in blue facility overalls came forward to pull the tarps from the flatbeds, unveiling the cargo. Each flatbed held two large upright concrete cylinders, fifteen feet high and six feet wide, adorned with the bright yellow-and-black labels of the universal radiation symbol.
Garibaldi’s eyes widened. “Those are high-level nuclear waste containers! You’re transporting radioactive casks across country under a… tarp?”
“Nothing to worry about,” van Dyckman said. “These casks weigh one hundred thirty-seven tons apiece, so nobody is going to steal them.”
“Also,” Shawn pointed out, “they have unmarked, armed security escorts along the entire route.”
As she looked at the tunnels, the transport trucks, and the excessive security, Adonia began to put the pieces together. She muttered, “Waste casks delivered to a mothballed nuclear weapons storage depot, on a secure military base…”
“That’s right,” van Dyckman said, still grinning. “On Federal property, not public, a place with a full suite of safety and security systems already in place.”
Garibaldi’s expression changed. “You’re storing high-level waste! Hydra Mountain was designed to secure nuclear weapons, and now you’re using the facility for spent fuel rods and other radioactive waste without public oversight.”
“It has to go somewhere,” van Dyckman said.
Rob Harris looked relieved that he was finally able to reveal the answer. “This is Valiant Locksmith, and Dr. van Dyckman is my supervisor and the program’s manager. His job position is an unacknowledged, waived fact.”
Adonia tried to wrap her mind around the idea. Her ex-boss was a political appointee, an assistant secretary, and he was also secretly the national program manager of an unacknowledged SAP? How was that possible?
Grinning from ear to ear, van Dyckman spoke quickly. “Valiant Locksmith is a covert Special Access Program established by the President himself to solve a crucial problem facing our nation. And Hydra Mountain is the perfect place, a ready-made, turnkey facility exactly suited to the requirements of the mission. It was empty, just waiting to be used.”
Adonia couldn’t cover her surprise. The lack of any approved place to store the power industry’s backlog of hazardous waste created an ongoing crisis that no one wanted to talk about. For years, politicians had ignored the issue, as if the problem would just go away on its own. The only permanent solution, the giant Yucca Mountain complex deep in the Nevada wasteland, had been stymied at every turn by legal challenges and politics, until even its staunchest proponents were forced to surrender. The problem of waste storage remained unsolved. For decades.
Now Stanley was storing deadly waste in this mothballed nuclear weapons facility? No wonder the Nuclear Regulatory Commission kept deferring to him. Even Adonia couldn’t deny the appropriateness of the solution.
Victoria Doyle seemed both annoyed and confused by this revelation, and Garibaldi was clearly alarmed. He said, “You can’t possibly be authorized to turn this into a permanent storage facility. We’re practically within the Albuquerque city limits! Yucca Mountain took decades to build, with countless levels of oversight and review, and it was finally shut down because studies clearly showed—”
“It was shut down because of politics, not science,” van Dyckman interrupted. “Even outside experts confirmed it could safely store high-level waste for over a million years.”
“Plus or minus a few hundred thousand years!” Garibaldi snorted. “Have you seen the error bars?”
Shawn said, “The President is fully aware that Valiant Locksmith is only a temporary program, but he has embraced Hydra Mountain as an immediate stopgap solution to a problem that was growing more and more out of control every day. Reopening the Mountain allows us to store the nation’s high-level waste in one safe and secure location until a permanent storage facility is approved, built, and opened.”
“Or until Hell freezes over,” Senator Pulaski muttered.
Adonia knew what he meant, doubting that a permanent nuclear waste storage facility would ever be opened. Despite the obvious and vital need, any public storage site would be strangled by politics before it got off the ground. Every facility ever proposed had been embroiled in decades of lawsuits, political grandstanding, and environmental protests.
But the plane crash at Granite Bay had only demonstrated how vulnerable the numerous inadequate holding areas were. This place certainly couldn’t be any worse.
At Granite Bay, Adonia was forced to deal with the escalating problem every day. Such a staggering amount of nuclear waste at nearly a hundred different sites was a disaster waiting to happen, even without extremists flying small planes.
Hydra Mountain had been designed to securely store nuclear weapons, which were far more dangerous than spent fuel rods. Though she was inclined to make a quietly sarcastic comment, Adonia realized she was impressed that Stanley van Dyckman — of all people! — had somehow pulled the strings to make it all happen. The more she pondered the idea, the more she decided that this did make sense, at least in the interim. “You may be onto something here.”
While an overhead crane swung down over the flatbeds, jumpsuited workers drove two low-slung tractor-crawlers up to the containers. Wearing gloves, the workers secured the crane’s hook assembly to a large concrete cask, carefully moving one giant cylinder at a time from the flatbed to the crawlers. Like ants struggling with a gigantic crumb, they prepared to haul their treasure off to a hoard somewhere in the tunnel.
Harris spoke to the group. “The President had no choice but to establish Valiant Locksmith, because Congress wouldn’t act, and the environmentalists wouldn’t let them. Over the years, several nuclear accidents were hushed up around the country, each one increasingly more severe.” He nodded to Adonia. “Ms. Rojas knows from personal experience how we dodged a bullet and avoided a real catastrophe at Granite Bay. If just one minor detail hadn’t gone right that day, we might have been looking at an incident worse than Three Mile Island or Japan’s Fukushima.”
Adonia shot a quick glance to van Dyckman, thinking of how he had meddled during the response, as well as his earlier botched calculations for the density of the fuel rod storage array. A lot of other bullets, she thought, barely dodged.
Stanley studiously ignored her.
Harris continued, “There were many other incidents before Granite Bay, such as the incident at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. Fortunately, only low-level waste is stored in WIPP, but several workers were accidentally exposed to a slight amount of radiation. There was no real danger to the public, and the incident itself should have been inconsequential, but the slipup was indicative of the much larger high-level nuclear waste problem. Even because of that minor lapse, the contractor lost its $2.5 billion yearly contract to run the Los Alamos National Laboratory.”
Garibaldi looked queasy. “There’s no such thing as an inconsequential radiation incident.”