After five years of cooling down, the still-radioactive rods were removed from the deep pools and encased in massive steel and concrete containers, which were filled with inert gas. These containers were then stored inside newer “temporary” buildings.
And just sat there. The dry, high-level nuclear material kept accumulating in storage.
That was where the process ground to a halt. Granite Bay — as with every other nuclear power plant in the nation — had no place to store the deadly material. The containers of high-level waste were ready to be shipped to permanent storage, far from Granite Bay, where they would be safe from any mishaps. But with decades of politics and inaction, there was no facility to receive them. Anywhere.
That was what kept Adonia up at night. It was a disaster waiting to happen. Granite Bay was a power-generating plant, not a permanent storage facility, but all those cooled rods just sat here temporarily — in other words, “forever”—in a place not designed for long-term storage. And she couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
Adonia’s only consolation was that at least she wasn’t alone. Her fellow site managers in thirty states were in the same boat. Granite Bay, like every one of the sixty-one commercially operating nuclear power plants in the U.S., was simply running out of room.
As the early-morning storm blew in, wind whipped dust and leaves around the site and swift clouds closed in to smother the brightening dawn. When the outside temperature plummeted twenty-one degrees in ten minutes, moisture condensed on her office window.
Adonia watched the back of the fuel tanker truck come around the corner near where the workers were welding the vacuum tank, rushing to finish before the storm. Flashers on, the fuel truck backed up slowly toward the bright welder’s arc. A shower of sparks swirled in a macabre dance, swept up by the errant breezes, fed by the welder’s arc, rising high.
Adonia looked up into the darkening clouds high above the site, saw one spark much brighter and higher than the others. For a moment she didn’t realize this wasn’t just a spark from the welder. It moved in a straight line, heading down, growing larger. Like an incoming missile.
She sucked in a quick breath. It wasn’t a spark at all, but rather light reflecting off a single-engine plane. The plane accelerated in a nearly vertical dive toward the wet-storage facility one building away. The cooling pools inside that facility housed thousands of uranium rods.
What the hell! That plane couldn’t be overhead — Granite Bay’s restricted airspace stretched five miles in all directions!
She heard the whine of the engines now as the aircraft continued its dive, hurtling toward the storage building as if on a bombing run. Adonia realized that the pilot wasn’t going to pull up. Intentionally.
She spun from the window, raced to her desk, knowing she had only seconds. She had to do something, contact emergency ops, stop that pilot—
Before she could grab the phone, the plane smashed into the building’s roof, and a bright, double-pulsed light erupted and overwhelmed her view, like a giant flashbulb.
Adonia’s vision was saturated by flash-blindness. She collided with her desk and fumbled for the phone, trying to find the intercom button. The handset skittered across the desktop.
A second later a boom slammed the windows, and the entire admin building seemed to sway from the explosion.
Stunned, she tried to clear the dazzling blotches from her vision. Outside on the ground below, she saw the welders scramble to their cutoff valves, but before they could kill the power, a sheet of yellow and red flames gushed over the ground, transported by thick, viscous fluid that spewed from the tanker truck.
A piercing siren warbled throughout the admin building. Identical alarms would be sounding throughout the site.
Adonia slapped the red intercom button that tied directly to Granite Bay’s emergency operations desk, but nothing happened.
As the waves of flame and smoke expanded from the crash site, she jabbed at the button again, but heard no response. She worked her way around the desk, still trying to see through her flash-blindness. She found the phone handset dangling from its cord over the side of her desk. Again, nothing. The explosion must have cut the landline.
She found her purse and grabbed her cell phone instead. She speed-dialed the ops center, hoping that cell coverage hadn’t failed as well. As the phone clicked and tried to connect, she grabbed an old emergency handheld radio from the back credenza. She needed to get to the crash site, do something to help.
She ran out of her office holding the bulky radio with one hand and her cell phone to her ear with the other. She bypassed the elevator and veered to the emergency stairwell. How many times had it been drummed into her: never use the elevator in an emergency.
The ops number rang, but no one answered as she jogged down the empty stairwell. It was still early morning, just at shift transition, but the emergency desk had to be manned! Granite Bay was a twenty-four/seven operation.
She made it down five of the ten flights when a voice finally answered her cell. “Ops desk!” Half a dozen people were shouting over each other in the background.
Still running down the steps, she yelled into the phone. “This is Adonia Rojas. Give me an update.”
The man’s voice stiffened when he realized who she was. “Radar picked up a small plane at thirty-one thousand feet two minutes ago, heading for our restricted airspace at high speed. We couldn’t raise the pilot, so we notified the Air National Guard and started broadcasting warnings to the plane. But it kept coming. And… and it hit Wet-Storage Building 22A.”
“Status?”
“The impact breached the roof and a Class B fire is spreading outside the facility. Extent of damage is unknown, but we’re preparing to go to General Emergency. Fire crews are on their way, should arrive within minutes.”
“Copy.” Adonia’s stomach twisted. The plane had crashed into the overflow wet-storage facility — intentionally. That building was hardened, but not against that type of attack. The structure was never meant to be more than a stopgap measure to house the additional cooling pools.
When the government refused to let her ship the deadly waste to a proper storage complex, she had begged for facility upgrades on the “temporary” holding structures, including measures to strengthen the buildings to meet nuclear standards against even a terrorist attack. Her pleas had fallen on deaf ears and tight wallets back in Washington, so Adonia had taken the initiative and scraped together enough funds to fortify what she could. She now hoped it had been enough to avert a complete disaster.
As the new set of alarms kicked in, she knew this was the first time since Three Mile Island that a nuclear plant had gone to General Emergency — and on her watch. “Response?”
“Emergency response and cleanup teams deployed. We’re in voice contact, but no detail has been forwarded.” The speaker consulted with someone in the background, then said, “We don’t have an optical link set up yet. We’ll notify you ASAP when we’re receiving visuals from inside.”
She approached the second-floor stairwell. “Copy. I’m heading to the wet-storage facility to assist the on-scene commander.” She didn’t want to think about how hazardous the area would be. “Did the containment hold? Have you implemented the emergency planning zone?” One more flight of stairs, and she was out of breath.
“Yes, ma’am, and we’re preparing potassium iodide tablets for distribution to the general public if any radiation is detected, all part of General Emergency.”