It had been over twenty-six hours since Katashi’s shift had started and he had only managed to grab a thirty-minute nap during that time. He was exhausted but, fuelled by adrenalin and caffeine, he was still able to focus on the job in hand.
The initial shockwave had wiped out the power supply to the reactors, causing them to shut down immediately. Without power, the reactors would overheat, causing a meltdown. The backup diesel generators had kicked in, as they were programmed to do in such an event, pumping around thousands of gallons of water to cool the residual heat in the reactors. As long as the pumps maintained the flow, the fuel rods would cool down over several hours, making them safe.
Unfortunately, the tsunami had put paid to that idea. An hour after the initial seismic tremor, the twenty-foot wave had breached the compound’s outer walls and flooded the diesel generators.
***
Katashi Negano was in charge of the Containment of Hazardous Materials Team (CHMT) based on-site at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. His father had worked at the plant from when it had first been commissioned in 1971, but had to give up work through ill health. He now lived with his wife, Hikari, and their four-year-old daughter, Kimiko, in the coastal town of Soma. Katashi’s mother had died when he was still a child, but he’d had an abundance of aunties to supplement his upbringing by his father.
He joined the Fukushima Power Corporation after graduating from Kyoto University with a master’s degree in nuclear engineering. Because of his imperturbable, analytical nature, Katashi progressed rapidly through the company and joined the CHMT as second-in-command, being promoted to team leader three years later, when his superior retired. He was trained to deal with all conceivable man-made and natural disasters; unfortunately, the magnitude of the earthquake that hit the plant, and subsequent tsunami which followed, were outside the conceivable boundaries that the safety systems were designed for.
The initial earthquake siren instigated the deployment of the six-man CHMT, whose first task was to evacuate all nonessential personnel from the plant. Roll calls were taken and employees were loaded onto waiting coaches, to be ferried to the designated ‘safe’ town of Yonezawa, some thirty miles away, which was protected from the plant by the mountain range of Nishi Agatsuma.
Katashi had been through these measures several times before, but only as a training exercise. It wasn’t exactly routine to him, but the constant enactments of ‘what if’ scenarios had ingrained the procedures into his, and his team’s, psyche. He was regarded as a firm but fair taskmaster, practising emergency drills over and over again, until each member of his team knew their role and what was expected of them.
Whilst the evacuees were being boarded, Katashi and a three-man detail donned white, all-in-one protective suits with full head visors and breathing equipment, and went to ascertain what damage had been sustained to the three operational reactors. Luckily, only two days before, reactors 2, 4 and 6 had been closed down for routine maintenance. He would have had a communiqué from the control room if there had been a problem, but it was in his nature to check and double-check.
They arrived at the first reactor building, a forty-foot high, pre-fabricated construction made entirely of corrugated iron sheets. The surprisingly flimsy structure was originally designed simply to keep the weather out and would offer no protection from anything generated during a nuclear reaction. Inside the building, the reactor core itself was encased in a thick steel vessel, capable of withstanding high pressures. This, in turn, was housed in a hermetically-sealed concrete and steel structure, known as the containment chamber.
After a thorough inspection of the outside of the building, Katashi was satisfied that there had been no external damage during the earthquake, probably due to the flexibility of the materials it was made from.
‘All clear, we’re going in!’ Katashi gestured to the small door at the side of the building. Putting on his mask and breathing equipment, he led the team through the entrance.
The reactor building itself had no windows and was wholly lit by florescent tubes. The air smelt of diesel from the generators, which were producing the power to perform the crucial task of pumping water, through a series of pipes in the reactor core, to cool it down.
The noise generated by the massive turbines made communicating in such a confined area very difficult. In front of them was the containment chamber itself, a massive conical structure, with walls over six feet in depth, resembling a giant white beehive. The only way in was through a two-foot thick, lead-lined steel door.
Tamotsu, the youngest member of the CHMT, held a Geiger counter out in front of him. Katashi had a soft spot for Tamotsu; he reminded him of himself. He had only been with the company six months, but he was eager to learn. Qualified in Engineering Science, this was his first job since leaving university and he was keen to make an impression. Unlike Katashi, who had spent time in every department on the plant learning the ropes, Tamotsu had applied directly to fill the vacant position that became available when Katashi was promoted. His psychometric and aptitude tests weren’t that outstanding, but it was down to Katashi to decide who he wanted in his team and, after interviewing Tamotsu for several hours, he had made up his mind. Tamotsu had the one thing crucial trait needed in this role: a cool head.
As Tamotsu surveyed the area around the outer building for radiation leaks, the others inspected the external surfaces of the containment chamber with flashlights for any damage.
‘No sign of any radiation leaks, so far,’ Tamotsu shouted to his superior.
The visibility in their masks was limited; not having full peripheral vision meant they had to turn their whole bodies in the direction they wanted to see, which slowed them down. Katashi was aware they had another two reactors to inspect after this one, but he wasn’t prepared to cut corners; the slightest crack in any of the walls of the containment chamber could spell disaster, not just for the people in the plant, but for miles around.
With a series of hand gestures and nods, Katashi indicated that the inspection of the outer area was complete and that he and Tamotsu should go through the reinforced door to inspect the containment chamber, whilst the other two waited outside. He walked up the few steps to the entrance and placed his chin on the shelf, just below the retinal scanner. Staring down the lens he heard a hiss as the heavy door parted a fraction, breaking the seal between the purified air of the chamber and the polluted air outside.
Tamotsu, who had followed Katashi up the steps, was the first into the chamber. The door opened with surprising ease, given its size and weight. Inside, the chamber was brightly-lit and clinically white. A panel on the side wall indicated the status, temperature, pressure and output capacity of the reactor, through a series of green, amber and red lights. At that moment, it indicated that the core was in shut-down mode, but the temperature and pressure were still about half of its normal operating levels.
Tamotsu panned the room with his Geiger counter, but again it did not register any radiation, other than the small amount expected as a background reading, which was no more than an X-ray would deliver in a hospital. The steel-encased core had withstood one of the most violent earthquakes in Japan’s history. Theoretically, the buildings were constructed to withstand twice the magnitude of the quake they had just experienced, a phenomena that, to date, had never occurred.
‘All clear in reactor one. No signs of damage.’ Katashi relayed the message to the control room via his walkie-talkie. ‘Moving on to reactor three.’ With that, he led Tamotsu out of the chamber, closing the heavy door behind them, to meet up with the other two members of the team who were waiting outside.
As Katashi stepped out into the open air, he was immediately struck by an eerie stillness. His first thought was that the loudness of the generators had dulled his hearing; however, as he strained, he could hear a low rumble in the distance, that grew louder and louder.
Thinking it was the aftershocks from the initial earthquake, he ordered his men out into the open,
away from the building and any possible falling debris. As he turned, he could feel the air being sucked from around him; he had to brace himself against the unseen force for fear of it pulling him along, too.
And then he saw it. A huge wall of water came crashing into the compound, carrying with it remnants from its destructive path: uprooted trees and telegraph poles bobbed along like matchsticks down a storm drain; cars being driven remotely, turning, reversing and crashing into each other, like some macabre funfair ride; sections of houses, roofs, windows, doors and porches, all being swept along, incessantly, by millions of gallons of water. The perimeter of the compound offered no resistance to the sheer power of the wave, its walls dissolving instantly, like chalk, into the murky depths of the tsunami.
With no time to act, Takashi steeled himself for the inevitable. The second before the wave hit him, he sucked in a lungful of air from his respirator and held his breath. However, nothing could have prepared him for the solid mass of water that engulfed him, knocking him off his feet and tumbling him over and over. His only thought was to swim upwards, out of the maelstrom and ride with the wave; he knew it would be pointless to swim against the tide. He was so disoriented, and the visibility was so limited, that he couldn’t work out which direction he was facing. As he was being carried along, at an incredible rate of knots, he could see shadows, but couldn’t make out what objects they were.
For an instant, he thought he could see daylight and kicked as hard as he could towards the light, his protective suit giving him added buoyancy. He broke the surface, narrowly missing an upturned car which floated past just inches from his face, before being dragged back down by the undercurrent. He kicked out for the surface again, this time managing to grab hold of a thin branch which, fortunately, was still attached to a floating tree. He hauled himself up onto the trunk, exhausted. All he could do now was hope and pray.
CHAPTER 2
Over six thousand miles away, wearing an almost identical protective suit, Professor Erik Morantz finished inspecting the thermal shields in Atlas, one of four particle detectors equispaced around CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
This was the first time the collider had been fired up in over a year and everybody was, justifiably, on edge. During that occasion, a catastrophe was narrowly averted by the quick-thinking actions of one of the maintenance crew, who noticed a build-up of condensation around a pipe leading to one of the helium coolant tanks which supplied the heat shields. He quickly deduced that the only way this could happen would be if the supercooled helium was escaping. He raised the alarm and the collider was immediately shut down. If the leak had gone undetected, the gigantic magnetic coils at the heart of the collider would have overheated, endangering the lives of the two thousand people working there.
‘The heat shields are working fine,’ Professor Morantz spoke into the microphone in his helmet. ‘Increase the power to seventy per cent capacity.’
Normally, Professor Erik Morantz would be directing operations from his office, in the control centre, but this time he was taking a personal interest. The publicity surrounding the numerous breakdowns of the collider was jeopardising his position as Director General and he couldn’t afford to have another failure on his hands so soon after the last one.
‘They’re holding. Increase power to maximum.’ He could tell by the computerised console on the side of Atlas that the thermal shields were functioning correctly. ‘Okay, release the proton beams.’
The two beams were positioned in opposite directions around the 27-kilometre circular tunnel, which made up the particle accelerator. The theory was that the protons would increase speed as they passed through a series of superconducting radio frequency (RF) cavities, located around the tunnel. Just like pushing a child’s swing, these RF cavities would give the particles a push each time they passed, steadily increasing the energy of the particles, until they reached the speed of light. The aftermath of the particles collision would be recorded by Atlas, or one of the other three detectors.
‘How long do you want us to run the experiment for, Professor?’ The voice of Deiter Weiss, Professor Morantz’s second-in-command, came through his headset.
‘Give it another fifteen minutes and then reduce power to fifty per cent,’ Morantz responded. ‘I’m on my way back to the control room now.’
He climbed into the white golf buggy, which was the preferred mode of transport in the tunnels, the alternatives being bicycles or walk. It would take him fifteen minutes to cover the three-mile journey back to the control room, through the service tunnels that ran parallel to the collider; enough time to contemplate his position at CERN.
He was one of the original founding members and had joined the project to identify the God particle when it was first conceived in 1984, at a symposium in Lausanne, Switzerland. It took a further ten years of lobbying to convince CERN that the Large Hadron Collider was a viable project; however, with the support of twenty countries, they finally gave their approval for the construction.
For the next fourteen years, Professor Morantz worked alongside architects, civil engineers, scientists, accountants and pen-pushers, to build the world’s largest machine. Officially, he was employed by the Department of Quantum Physics at CERN, but he reported directly to the governing council. When it was time to choose a Director General to oversee all experiments associated with the LHC, there really was only one candidate. Morantz had lived and breathed what he referred to as ‘The Creator’ for practically a third of his life, shunning any and all social or family commitments, in the pursuit of knowledge. The knowledge consisted of one thing: the definitive proof that the God particle – or, to give it its scientific name, the Higgs boson – existed.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t had his fair share of female admirers when he was younger. Now in his early sixties, his portly stature had only developed over the last few years; prior to that, he’d had a lean and compact frame, which he was lucky enough not to have had to work at maintaining. The numerous times he had laboured through the night, on projects that had so engrossed him, that he’d lost all track of time, were now showing as deep furrows across his forehead. The copious hours of studying in dimly-lit rooms had etched lines around his eyes. His once full head of wavy black hair was now wispy, unkempt and silver-grey. But the one feature that hadn’t changed over time, and was responsible for attracting so much female attention as a young man, was his piercing blue eyes. They were as bright and sparkly as they had ever been.
He arrived at the control room entrance, still debating as to whether he should step down from the project and let someone else take the helm. He wasn’t getting any younger, and the amount of pressure he was under from the council, because of the negative publicity surrounding the previous breakdowns, was making him reconsider whether the role of Director General was right for him.
He was a scientist, not a politician, which invariably accounted for the abrasive relationship he had with the press. Whenever they asked him a direct question regarding the collider’s lack of performance, he would tell them, honestly, that he didn’t know why these failures were occurring, but he would look into it and report back to them when he had conclusive evidence. Unfortunately, this never happened; the breakdowns seemed unrelated and random, isolated incidences of leaks, power surges and malfunctions.
If he were more politically-minded, like Deiter, he would have been able to put a more positive spin on the situation at the press conferences. ‘Yes, everything’s under control. These are minor setbacks, and we are making giant strides forward into new scientific frontiers.’ But that just wasn’t in his nature.
Deiter, on the other hand, was a totally different scientific animal. He was about ten years younger than Morantz. He hadn’t really taken the time to get to know the man. In fact, he didn’t actually care much for Deiter. He had been appointed at the same time as Morantz, by the council, and was everything that his boss wasn’t. He was articulate and charismatic, self-assured to the point of a
rrogant, and meticulously groomed, from his tightly-cropped salt and pepper hair to his manicured fingernails. He wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look. He spoke English with a clipped German accent. He was very much the archetypal corporate scientist, the one seen espousing the virtues of a newly-formulated ingredient in a shampoo commercial.
Perhaps this is what the project needed, mused Morantz, somebody like Deiter to head it up. But, then again, Deiter lacked the passion, commitment and dedication that Morantz brought to the role. No, he concluded, Deiter was far too superficial and self-serving to carry the mantle of such a momentous chapter in scientific history forward to the next level. He would continue as Director General, but appoint Deiter as his spokesperson; that way, he could concentrate on what he considered to be the all-important task of finding the God particle and let Deiter deal with the minor distractions of the press.
He swiped his security card in the card reader on the wall and the door to the control room slid open.
‘Any issues?’ shouted Morantz, to nobody in particular, as he took off his protective suit.
‘We’re still checking the data from Atlas, but at the moment everything seems normal.’ It was Serena Mayer that was the first to respond. Serena had been on the team for just over a year and was responsible for analysing the output from the four particle detectors.
‘Great! Deiter, can you organise a press conference? It’s about time we gave them some good news.’
‘OK. Do you want to do it on-site or in town?’ Deiter queried.
‘Neither. I want you to take this one. I’m always delivering bad news, so I think it would be good for the project to have a new spokesperson.’
Deiter looked surprised, but pleased. ‘Of course, I’ll organise it immediately.’ With that, he picked up the phone and dialled the switchboard.
The God Particle Page 2
