They drove into town. Empty shops, homes, and restaurants packed block after block. Some had been reduced to rubble. Many were partially damaged, with blown-out windows and caved-in roofs. Others stood untouched and abandoned. Electric wires ran along the side of the street, still in place high along poles. Traffic lights blinked yellow at intersections.
The scene mesmerized Bobby. The town dwarfed Pripyat, made it look like a college campus that had been overtaken by the wilderness. This was a twenty-first-century city turned ghost town. Pripyat was so overgrown one didn’t expect to see humans. Here one held his breath expecting someone to step out of a door any minute. But no one did. To Bobby, Okuda cast an eerier spell than Pripyat. It was a modern town in a wealthy country, which made its emptiness all the more stark and remarkable.
They came across eight folding chairs lined up in the middle of the street. One of the chairs had been kicked over. The rest looked as though they were waiting for their owners to come out of the nearby coffee shop with cups of green tea. Dr. Nakamura drove onto the sidewalk to pass them. The chairs had been left by people who’d waited until the last second, Bobby thought. People who didn’t want to leave their properties regardless of the risks, and were forced to evacuate by the government. There had been plenty of those in Chornobyl, too.
And then there were the animals. Cats sat in windows by themselves, or prowled the alleys in groups. A dog dug through a garbage can. A pair of cows stood at an intersection beneath a red traffic light. They looked lost and hopeless. They refused to move until Dr. Nakamura sounded his horn. Two blocks further up the road, a horse ran around the corner and disappeared.
They turned right. A sign said they were headed toward the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
“The power plant was built too close to the sea,” Dr. Nakamura said. “The tsunami flooded the generators that provide the power to the pumps. The pumps that sent cooling waters to the reactors. When the pumps failed, the only thing that would have prevented the reactors from melting down was seawater. But the government hesitated because the seawater would ruin the reactors, which were very expensive to build. By the time they changed their minds and flooded the reactors with seawater, three reactors had full meltdown.”
“Government men,” Bobby said. “Never trust government men.”
“I wouldn’t have said this before the nuclear disaster,” Dr. Nakamura said. “But you may be right. The situation in Fukushima today is far worse than the outside world knows. In a few minutes, I will show you. Once you have seen with your eyes, all will be clear. Then we will meet with Genesis II.”
CHAPTER 16
Nadia craned her neck as Nakamura stopped along an elevated road above the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. It looked like an industrial city unto itself. It was divided into two sections. The part furthest inland stood on higher ground. It consisted of several office buildings. A football-field-sized parking lot contained twenty to thirty cars.
The area beyond the office buildings stretched for half a mile to the sea. Cranes, communication towers, and water tanks stood on the horizon. A web of dirt roads surrounded them. Six rectangular buildings stood amidst the cranes. Four of the buildings looked like they’d been stripped to their metal studs.
“Are those the reactors?” Nadia said.
“Yes.” Nakamura pulled out binoculars and handed them to her. “Reactors one, two, and three were the ones that experienced full meltdown. The Fukushima reactors released eighty-five times the amount of cesium as the reactor in Chornobyl. But it is our reactor four that is the main concern today.”
Nakamura told her to count four rectangular buildings from the left.
Nadia looked through the binoculars. “I see a half-melted pile of iron in the shape of what used to be a building.” She shifted her focus to the sides of the reactor. “With some sort of support beams on the sides.”
“The support columns were added later to keep the building intact,” Nakamura said. “It’s the iron you see in the middle of the building that’s the problem.”
“Why?” Nadia said.
“That iron consists of one thousand, five hundred and thirty-two spent nuclear fuel rods. They are surrounded by cooling waters thirty meters above the ground. You just can’t see the water from here.”
Nadia stared at the exposed, radioactive rods. “How can that be? They’re uncovered. Open to the air.”
“Yes,” Nakamura said. “They’re just sitting there. Waiting for disaster to strike again.”
Nadia couldn’t believe her eyes. Even the Soviet Union knew better. They’d dumped a gazillion tons of sand over the reactor and then built a metal tomb around it. Granted, the tomb was less than robust and it was falling apart now and in the process of being replaced, but at least they’d followed a path of common sense.
Bobby asked her for the binoculars and took a look himself. “No sarcophagus,” he said. He, too, sounded incredulous. “Why is there no sarcophagus?”
“The response of the people of Japan to the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster has been strength and solidarity. The response of the government to the cleanup and nuclear risk has been weakness and cronyism. Cleanup efforts have been given to large Japanese corporations that have no experience with nuclear matters. Small companies and foreign companies were encouraged to make proposals. None were accepted.
“On July 22, 2013, more than two years after the disaster, the government finally confirmed what local fisherman had been saying all along. The plant was leaking radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean since the tsunami. It took all that time for the government to admit that TEPCO — Tokyo Electric Power — was still lying about plant conditions. The Prime Minister ordered the government to step in. A month later, seven hundred metric tons leaked out of a storage tank and they stepped in to secure that, too.
“If the building crumbles for any reason, if it is weaker than the government says, if there is another earthquake of a magnitude seven or higher, the water would pour out, the fuel rods would burn, and you would have an oxygen-eating fire that could not be put out with water. That would lead to the kind of contamination science has never contemplated. It could make Japan uninhabitable, and with the oceans and wind, lead to global disaster.”
“The kind the Western press predicted,” Nadia said.
“This time,” Nakamura said, “they would be right. Emergency workers would not be able to get close to the fire. Robots would melt. There would be no immediate solution to putting out the fire. Radiation would leak into the air and sea and could not be stopped.”
“Why don’t they move the rods to someplace safe?” Bobby said.
“They cannot dislodge the individual rods. It is too dangerous. The only way to move them is to move the entire fuel rod canister.”
Bobby’s voice picked up urgency. “Then why don’t they do it?”
“It would take a crane that can lift one hundred tons. The only crane that could do that was destroyed in the disaster. This is the truth. These are the stakes. This is what Genesis II wanted you to understand. This is how important the formula may soon be to Japan. To the entire world. We must not let personal agendas get in the way of the greater good.”
Nadia remembered the original e-mail from Genesis II, and the phrase that sounded so familiar. “Fate of the free world,” she said.