Beth was right, as she almost always is. I needed to approach this question from the other end. If I could devise my own plan to assault the nuke plant, using the materials and information I already knew about, I could work backwards.
Excellent idea!
Our hands joined across the table. Our eyes held one another’s.
"You are as insightful as you are beautiful," I said.
"That might be tough," Beth replied.
"True."
We ordered dinner and dessert, enjoying the rest of the evening without further thought or mention of my dilemma.
CHAPTER 20
It was a Wednesday morning and the law office was in high gear. My eccentric office sharing mate, Frank, was telephoning frenetically. And my second office sharing mate, Bill, had a legal brief due. Between connecting callers to Frank and deflecting them from Bill, our receptionist, Debbie, barely had time to copy and collate the brief.
We three lawyers had devised this office sharing arrangement to save on our collective overhead expenses and consolidate staff personnel. I rented the office space and hired the employees. The other guys rented space and secretarial time from me. It worked particularly well for my practice, because I needed a secretary at the office at all times to deal with clients. I assumed the other attorneys reaped similar benefits.
Beth frequently helps out at the office, too. She was at her desk preparing accounting reports this morning. The journal entries were finished and she was in the process of running trial balances.
I understand accounting fine. But its excitement coefficient is something even less than lawyering. I didn’t pay much attention to the credits and debits, though I did kill an accountant once, in the line of duty. He was a very bad man. Probably a bad accountant, too.
Anyway, I was thankful that Beth took on the accounting responsibilities. She had an undergraduate accounting degree and actually enjoyed the symmetry of coaxing the numbers to balance. I allowed her to process the business data uninterrupted.
Alone in my private office, I perched tentatively on my infinitely adjustable, comfy lawyer chair and stared at the piles of legal files. My mind kept drifting back to the terrorist activities I suspected to be in progress.
Although it was early, and I hadn’t actually accomplished anything, I knew I’d already reached my maximum legal work potential for the day. Exiting my office, I leaned over the oak-trimmed half-wall toward Beth. "I gotta get out of here."
I twitched my eye, as if in spasm.
She looked up and flashed the smile that made my heart turn to mush. "Have fun, Babe. I’ll be through here soon. Then I’m leaving as well. Think I’ll hit the Fine Arts Center. See if inspiration strikes."
"Great idea," I agreed. "See you later. I’m heading out."
I made a beeline for the receptionist’s desk. "Gone for the rest of the day, Debbie. Please route my calls through Karen."
"Yes, sir. Have a nice afternoon."
I said a quick goodbye to all, then exited the legal miasma in search of investigational enlightenment.
CHAPTER 21
Two evenings later, while perusing the paper in our living room, I discovered something very unusual and disturbing. Another fertilizer truck had been hi-jacked later last week — sometimes it takes the news a while to hit the local paper. Two fertilizer trucks stolen within a few days? This could not be a coincidence.
What kind of fertilizer was this truck carrying? I read on. Potash. The main ingredient in potash is… potassium!
Another star in my constellation. The stolen potash somewhat confirmed that potassium was to play a part in whatever plan was unfolding. But what part? And how the hell was I going to find out?
"Beth. I have to skip dinner tonight and do some work at the office. I need to get a handle on this nuke thing and I can focus better there by myself."
"Do what you need to do, Babe. You know I’ll be here. Any idea how long?"
"Probably going to be late. Don’t wait up."
I kissed her on the lips and headed out the door.
Unlike almost everything else in Red Wing, Becker Law Office is not within comfortable walking distance. I took the Pilot.
Once at the office, my ceiling fluorescents were the only sign of life. No Frank. No Karen. No pool. No Pets. I turned to my computer. I needed to do more research.
First, I confirmed what Bull and Chuck had told me. Elemental potassium is highly reactive with water, even water in the air. Although it is the eighth most common element on earth, because of its tendency to react readily with other elements, pure elemental potassium does not exist naturally anywhere in the world.
Manmade potassium has a few industrial uses. The potassium isolation processes employed to make large quantities of the element available for industry involved highly complex, technologically advanced, and very large, equipment — not to mention enormous processing facilities.
I reclined in my comfy lawyer chair for a moment. It didn’t seem likely that any terrorist group could operate a potassium production facility of such magnitude in Ottawa County and still escape notice by law enforcement.
Yet there was the professor’s invention. Might it be capable of isolating enough pure potassium for some specialized purpose? I knew nothing of its production capacities.
Leaning forward into my keyboard, I next researched nuclear power plants. Much of the technological information that had been easily accessible on the web before 9/11 was no longer available. Web links led to blank pages where the juicy design and engineering details had once resided. But I was able to find out a few things.
Liberal scientific groups had warned the NRC concerning the vulnerability of spent fuel pools. Many pools, including those at Prairie River, were in fact, located outside the heavily reinforced containment buildings. And because Prairie River had not one, but two separate reactors, its fuel pool was larger than most, and contained more of the dangerous fuel.
I also learned something surprising about spent fuel storage pools. Many of them are located entirely above ground. The elevated design was intended to allow plant operators to monitor any leaks that might develop in the pool. In my mind, it also made the pools susceptible to sabotage.
Although the pool walls and floor are usually built of five-foot-thick concrete, such material does not pose the same sort of barrier as the heavy steel reinforcement of the containment buildings. A precisely placed chunk of C4 might well crack the pool, allowing the water to drain out. Even a crude fertilizer bomb could have the same effect.
But you would have to get that bomb to the pool. And direct access to the pool area must surely be guarded — at least from land.
One web article contended that the spent fuel pools were completely safe — including from air attack. According to this author, a well directed airplane crash into a typical, metal spent fuel building would not create enough force to damage the pool. Nor would the resulting fire generate enough heat to boil off the pool’s protective water. Since the pools are a minimum of forty feet deep, with only a forty by forty foot surface area, the author argued, there simply wasn’t enough surface area for a fire to boil the water off fast enough to cause a problem.
The article went on to say that most of the fuel in commercial planes is stored in the wings. Being made of lightweight aluminum, the wings would most probably peel off the fuselage as the plane penetrated the spent fuel building, leaving the bulk of the burning fuel outside.