Excerpt: The Exclusion Zone by Alexis von Konigslow

Excerpted with permission from Wolsak & Wynn Publishers Ltd.

“Do you know what the experiment was?” said Renya. “Do you know what they were trying to figure out?”

Nick was staring at her. He touched his silver necklace. It looked nice, set against the flowing lines of the coat. She’d gotten him that. It had been a birthday present. Bastard. “I don’t know,” he said.

“They wanted to know whether they could power the cooling system with the regular wind-down of the turbine. That’s why the plant wasn’t connected to the power grid.”

“What?”

“When they stop the nuclear reactor, the reactor doesn’t just immediately stop.” 

“Of course.”

“There’s still a reaction for a little while. There are still extra neutrons around. The uranium atoms still absorb the neutrons. The unstable uranium still splits apart. It takes some time for it all to stop completely. And in that time, the reaction is still producing energy, and that energy creates heat, and that heat needs to be controlled. They wanted to know if they could use the energy the reactor still produced to power its own cooling system.”

Was the woman prettier? Was she more feminine, whatever that meant. 

“Why did they need that?” said Nick.

“In case of attack.” Did that other woman wear dresses? Nick always complemented Renya when she did, so he must like that. Renya rarely wore dresses however. “It was the cold war,” she found herself saying. “If the Americans took out the power grid, would the plant explode, I assume that’s what they needed to know. They had back-up generators but those take a couple minutes to spin up, so they had to make sure that the leftover reaction could power the cooling systems in the meantime. They thought it could. It was pretty clear that it could. They just wanted to see.”

“What went wrong?” said Nick.

Renya stared hard at the screen. “You want to know?”

“Maybe not.” Did Renya really want to know about the other woman? Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she did. She was thrumming with a strange sort of energy, that she knew for sure, and what had she learned from being here more than energy needs to be released.

“Why not?” Renya asked. “Why don’t you want to know?”

Nick raked his hand through his hair. “I’m scared of you making analogies,” he said softly.

“It was a bad day,” she said.

“You mean, when I went out to play pool?” he whispered.

“The reaction had been generating by-products that day,” Renya went on. “It had been creating extra particles that had been slowing down the nuclear reaction. They didn’t know it though.”

“Oh,” said Nick. “Right. These reactions are still not that well understood. The science is still in its infancy.”

“Don’t tell me that Physicists don’t understand every single thing.”

“I knew this was a trap,” Nick muttered.

Renya reared back.

“Wait, no,” said Nick. “Go on. So the generator wasn’t producing that much energy earlier that day. To get it to produce more heat, I assume that they took away some of the coolant?” He was rubbing his hands together. He was averting his eyes and fidgeting. So he was feeling fear too. His was of a different kind. 

“That’s right,” said Renya. “Except that was the day shift. The night crew didn’t know that, or they didn’t take it seriously enough, on the night of the experiment. So they turned off the reactor, disconnected from the power grid, and all of a sudden, all the extra particles burned away and the generator started creating intense amounts of heat. It spiked. It got out of control. This was when the experiment was just starting.”

“Oh,” said Nick. “So the core must have gotten so hot that the coolant had voids.”

“What are voids?” Renya said flatly.

“What?” 

“Explain your terminology.”

“Oh…. Places where it suddenly didn’t….” He looked up at the computer camera, eyes wide, forehead wrinkled. 

“Air bubbles,” she yelled. “For fuck’s sake. You mean that the coolant had air bubbles.”

He raised his hands. “That’s what I meant.”

“You meant steam. Say steam. The coolant was water, and the water was boiling. So it couldn’t properly cool down the uranium because there were air bubbles and steam.”

“Then what happened?”

“Nobody really knows,” said Renya. “Most people think the technicians panicked. It was the night shift. They probably saw there was too much heat and pressed SCRAM.”

“SCRAM.”

“That pushes the control rods into the reactor.”

“That cools down the core.”

“It’s supposed to stop the reaction,” said Renya. “The control rods absorb neutrons. They take neutrons away so that uranium can’t absorb them and split apart. And the reaction can’t be critical without enough uranium atoms splitting apart.”

“But it didn’t work.”

“No.”

“Why didn’t it work?” 

“That’s the question, right?” said Renya. “If it’s supposed to work that way, then why didn’t it work?”

“It was already too hot?” 

“That’s what they think. The reaction was already too hot. The tips of the coolant rods were made of graphite, the moderator, and that went in first, so for a moment, the neutrons were allowed to do anything they wanted—”

“So they reacted.”

“They caused a chain reaction that went out of control,” said Renya. “It went critical, first.”

Nick was nodding. “Then it must have gone supercritical. Every reaction caused more than one other reaction.”

Renya raised her hand. Nick stopped. “It shouldn’t work that way,” she said.

“Graphite tips on the moderator are a terrible idea,” said Nick. “It was a bad design.”

“It was designed for failure,” said Renya.

“We don’t make reactors that way anymore.”

“So then there was a meltdown,” she said. “The core got so hot that the coolant boiled away. No. It’s more than that. First the coolant was boiling, then the water separated into hydrogen and oxygen. And then there was a hydrogen explosion.”

“Oh,” said Nick. “So that’s when the reactor blew up.”

“Reactor four,” said Renya.

“And then it was burning,” said Nick.

“Graphite is flammable,” said Renya. “So the coolant rods themselves were burning.”

“That was another design problem, clearly,” said Nick. 

Renya raised her hand.

“They should have thought of that,” said Nick.Nick should have thought of that. If he preferred women who wore dresses, he should have told her. She shouldn’t have to guess about it. She shouldn’t be sitting here, kicking herself for not wearing skirts more after the fact. If he preferred blonds, then he never should have asked her to marry him in the first place. Renya didn’t want to talk about faulty designs anymore, about physicists who knew less than they pretended, less than they told the world they knew. “Tell me about her,” she heard herself saying.