Radiation Hazard (The Stasis Stories #3)

by Laurence Dahners

  Ron had been staring at Gunnar. Now he exploded, “Bullshit! We’d be picking up something if it was still in there. You’ve done some sleight of hand shenanigans and moved it somewhere.” He swept his gaze around the room, “Jerry, look in the water tank.”

  Art Turpin stepped forward, “Calm down Ron. This is exactly what they said they were going to do. They claimed they could neutralize the radioactivity coming from that pellet and they’ve done it.”

  Ron’s eyes widened. “Art, they’re breaking the laws of physics! No matter how well their material blocks radiation, something would be leaking out.”

  Art shook his head. “It isn’t, Ron. The detectors are telling you it isn’t.”

  “They’ve hidden it!” His eyes went back to Jerry, “Is it in the tank?”

  Jerry slowly shook his head.

  Ron said, “Start sweeping around the room. It’s got to be here somewhere.”

  Shaking his head, Art said, “Ron, they weren’t anywhere near it when the radiation cut off.”

  “Their damned device was!”

  Jerry was looking at Art, “You want me to sweep the room, Mr. Turpin?”

  Art gave him an exasperated nod. He glanced at Kaem and shrugged, “Due diligence.”

  Kaem said, “No problem. After you’ve done that, if you could put the Stade back in the bag, we could dissolve the Stade off the pellet so you can be sure of where the pellet was.”

  Lee saw Ron’s eyes go suspiciously to Kaem. This is like the other day with the guy from GLI, she thought. This guy’s sure Gunnar has to be the boss and Kaem’s just some kind of grunt labor. I wonder what he thinks I’m doing here?

  Jerry took the detectors around the room, two at a time. “They don’t register anything above background.”

  “You’ve gotta be shittin’ me,” Ron said. “Run them all over this equipment,” he said, waving at the stazer and the accessory equipment.

  Jerry did so, “Nothing.”

  Art said, “Okay, Jerry, put the Stade back in the Mylar bag.” He turned to Kaem, “Anything else we need to do for you to be able to dissolve the Stade?”

  Ron said, “Move the bag first. Make sure there isn’t some kind of door in the top of that table.”

  Rather than looking irritated, the way Lee felt, Kaem calmly said. “You could also let everyone look into the opening of the bag so they can see there aren’t any holes in the walls of the bag either.”

  Once everyone got a look in the bag; Jerry and Ron both felt around the inside of it for trick flaps, Jerry propped the bag open on the table. Corralling the Stade with the handles of the tongs, he chivvied it back into the bag and laid the tongs across the opening.

  Kaem had been working on his laptop that was attached to the stazer. He looked up. “Everybody ready?”

  There were nods around the room. Lee heard the capacitor charging.

  Kaem said, “Sorry, Mr.… Um, I’m afraid I don’t know your last name. Ron?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Um, you might want to back away from the table. Once the Stade is dissolved from the pellet, there’ll be significant radioactivity again.”

  Ron looked at Gunnar, “Why aren’t you warning me about this stuff?”

  Gunnar gave Ron a little smirk, “Because,” he pointed at Kaem, “he’s the genius.”

  Ron turned surprised eyes on Turpin, who nodded.

  Scoffing, Ron moved back away from the table.

  Kaem pressed a key on his laptop and a loud snap indicated the discharge of a powerful capacitor.

  Lee thought, That sounded like a lot more juice than when Kaem formed the Stade. I wonder if it takes more energy to break stasis than to form it?

  The noise of the radiation detectors’ alarms blared out.

  Ron was saying, “What the hell?!”

  Jerry stepped forward and lifted the tongs off the opening of the Mylar bag. Gingerly opening it, he said, “The shiny stuff’s gone and I can see the pellet again!”

  Kaem said, “Do you want me to staze it again so it’ll be safe?”

  Art nodded distractedly.

  Kaem started typing passwords into the laptop again, speaking as he did it. “Where are you going to store it?”

  Turpin said, “We’ll put it back underwater to keep it safe in case the Stade dissolves.”

  Kaem nodded. “Jerry, squeeze some of the air out of the bag before you close it with the tongs again. Otherwise, it’ll float.”

  Art gave Kaem a surprised look, but when Jerry asked him what to do, he said, “Push the pellet down to the small end of the bag and put the tongs across it up close.”

  As soon as Jerry laid the tongs across it, the capacitor snapped—more quietly, Lee thought—and the radiation detectors fell silent again. This time they could all see the shape of the pellet inside the Mylar. When Jerry dumped it out you could see the shape of the pellet within the new Stade as well. It slid across the table and fell to the floor, where it headed for a corner. Jerry blocked it with his shoes and tried to pick the Stade up with the tongs, which was fruitless.

  “Sorry, Jerry,” Art said, “the stuff’s incredibly slippery. You’ll have to make a basket of your fingers to pick it up.”

  When Jerry gave him a concerned look, Art said, “It isn’t radiating anymore.” He stepped forward, “But I shouldn’t ask you to do something I won’t.” Turpin knelt and picked up the Stade in a basket of fingers from both hands.

  Ron said, “I’m going to have to report you.”

  Turpin gave the man an exasperated look. “I suppose you think I’ve taken unnecessary risks?”

  Ron nodded.

  Turpin walked over to the array of detectors on the table and passed his hands holding the Stade in front of them. “Does everyone see that this thing I picked up was not radioactive and therefore posed no risk to me or others?” He looked around the group, gathering nods, including after a reluctant moment, Ron’s. He walked over to the tank the pellet had been in and dropped the Stade into the water. “It sinks,” he said, “Though slower than uranium does.”

  Ron said, “It isn’t the uranium then! I told you they were doing some kind of sleight of hand!”

  “Ron,” Turpin said exasperatedly, “give it a rest. It’s sinking slower because there was some air in the bag.”

  “Oh,” Ron said, having the grace to look a little embarrassed.

  ~~~

  As they walked out Art asked, “How long will that Stade last?”

  Kaem shrugged, “It should last millions of years unless someone de-stazes it. Of course,” he laughed, “we haven’t tested that theory yet.”

  “Oh,” Turpin said, sounding surprised. “How hard would it be to break one open?”

  “Ah, I take it you haven’t tested Stade’s material properties yet?”

  “No. We don’t have the equipment to do that.”

  “Well if you want to hire it out, your testing lab will tell you that they absolutely cannot damage it, no matter what they do.” Kaem looked like he had a sudden thought. “Though that testing sample of Stade we sent you will only last three megaseconds.”

  “Megaseconds?”

  “Yeah, the settings for how long a Stade’s going to last are easiest to translate into seconds. Um, three megaseconds are about thirty-five days, but that Stade was made a week or so before I brought it down to you, so you’ve probably only got another three weeks or so. I can send you another if you decide to do the testing.”

  They’d reached the exit and Turpin stopped just inside the door. “What I’m most worried about is the fact that it reflects neutrons. We tested it as you suggested and if it isn’t reflecting a hundred percent of the neutrons, it’s damned close. I’m not worried about that pellet you stazed today because it’s pretty spent. But I’d be worried about putting fresher fuel inside a neutron mirror. If those reflected neutrons induced criticality… I’m afraid I just don’t trust your theory that Stade’s strong enough to withstand an atomic explosion
.”

  Kaem studied him a minute, then said, “What the hell. This secret isn’t going to last much longer so I guess you’d just as well be the first one we tell. The segment of space-time inside a Stade’s in stasis. By that I mean that time isn’t passing inside it. That’s the main reason it isn’t radioactive. Sure, if it only had an outer skin of Stade around the pellet, that skin would reflect any radiation before it exited, but what’s actually going on inside the Stade we made around that fuel pellet is that the pellet and the air around it are in suspended time. It isn’t radiating inside the Stade because time isn’t passing in there. No atoms are splitting. No neutrons are flying. No atomic chain reactions are progressing.” Kaem grinned, “Therefore, no explosions can or would happen.”

  Turpin stopped and stared at Kaem for a moment, then braced his hand against the wall, “Holy…” he breathed. He shambled the few steps it took to get through the doors to the outside. There he collapsed onto a bench shaded by an awning.

  Kaem followed him and took a seat in the chair next to Turpin’s. “Are you okay?” he asked, taking Turpin’s wrist, evidently feeling for the man’s pulse.

  Looking dazed, Turpin said, “Just a little light-headed. Sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for.”

  Turpin turned slowly to look at Kaem, “So… assuming we test and decide that Stade’s truly indestructible. And assuming you’re correct and it’ll last… what’d you say? Millions of years?”

  “Actually,” Kaem said, “according to theory, that one around the pellet will last sixty-four billion years. The theory’s surprisingly precise for the shorter time periods we’ve tested. Of course, we can’t be sure it’s that exact on geologic time-scales. But, if it were wrong by a few hundred million years, it certainly wouldn’t matter to the human race.”

  Turpin shook his head. He pointed to a slab about a hundred meters away covered with large concrete cylinders lined up like soldiers in formation. “Could you put one of those dry casks in stasis? They’re filled with spent nuclear fuel.”

  Lee estimated the cylinders to be about two meters in diameter and seven meters high.

  Kaem nodded, “We’ve stazed a cylindrical volume fifty by one hundred meters and our head honcho’s currently designing a stazer for much larger volumes than that.”

  “You’ve obviously given this some thought. Once a dry cask was stazed, what would you do with it?”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Kaem said, “I’d drop it into a sub-oceanic crustal subduction zone.”

  “What if we someday found a use for spent nuclear fuel?”

  Kaem shrugged, “If I thought that might happen, I’d put at least some of the casks somewhere else.”

  “Could anyone break into a stazed cask? Say, dissolve the Stade from around it the way you did from around the pellet?”

  This time Kaem hesitated. Speaking slowly, he said, “It’s our company’s intent that commercially available stazers capable of dissolving Stade will be small. That the company will be the only entity capable of breaking down Stades as large as those casks. However, you could make it impossible to break them down by welding a large number of them together into a unit too big to fit inside the company’s largest stazer.”

  Turpin gave him a surprised look. “You can weld Stade?”

  Kaem nodded. “It isn’t really a weld, but it’s easiest to think of it that way.” He shrugged, “So, that’s what we’ve been calling it. People understand the term and functionally the outcome’s the same.”

  “And if your company, or someone else, just built an even bigger stazer?”

  “There’s a theoretical limit on how big a stazer can be,” Kaem said. He shrugged, “However, we haven’t tested that limit to know if it’s correct.”

  Turpin stared at the casks in the distance. After a moment he said, “This all seems too good to be true.” He turned to face Kaem, “I’ll have to talk to the higher-ups and they’ll want to talk to the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission). Say I got permission to staze a cask as a test, how much would it cost?”

  Kaem was also staring at the casks. He said, “You’d have to lift the cask and position it onto a Stade plate for us. Then we’d have to bring down a team to envelop and staze it. I’d estimate we could do a test for a hundred thousand dollars, though I’d have to confirm that figure with our CFO. Perhaps if you were satisfied with the outcome, we could staze the rest of them for double the test fee.”

  Turpin frowned, “That’s a lot of money.”

  Kaem said, “Aren’t you paying about a million dollars each for the casks, then still having to store and guard them carefully? In the long run, I’d think having us convert them to something safe would be a lot more economical.”

  “Maybe, I’d have to have our numbers people go over it.”

  Kaem said, “Might I also suggest you consider using Stade instead of casks in the future? We could staze you a batch of Stade cylinders with the same dimensions as a cask. You submerge one in your spent fuel pool the way you do casks when you’re loading them. Once the Stade cylinder’s full, we could put a stazing lid on, staze the interior for you, and then you could immediately move the Stade to storage. You could quickly empty your spent fuel pool… Um, it’s my understanding the spent fuel pools are considered to be at risk of terrorist attack, correct?”

  Turpin winced, “Yeah. How much would you charge us for a stazing cylinder?”

  Kaem grinned, “I’d have to talk to my numbers people, but I’m estimating four million dollars for a setup to do it.”

  Turpin’s eye’s widened, “Four times as much as a cask. And here I thought the prices they charge us for casks were outrageous!”

  “Ah, yes, but you only need one stazing setup. It’ll include a set of forms that make Stade cans you fill with spent fuel. Even recent and hot spent fuel. We put the stazing lid on and staze the interior of the can. You pull out the Stade, let’s call it a ‘wet cask,’—since the fuel rods in it would still be submerged in water inside the Stade—and send it wherever you like. You drop another Stade can in your spent fuel pool and load more fuel into it, repeating the process. In the long run, it’ll be much cheaper as well as more secure.”

  “Really? How much are you going to charge for stazing each of those wet casks?”

  Kaem shrugged, “I’m guessing a hundred thousand, half as much as the dry casks. Maybe more, maybe less. Price should come down once we work out the issues. Safe to say, a lot less than your current casks. And, I’m thinking that, even if the government doesn’t go for my plan of putting the waste in the subduction zones to be ingested into the Earth’s crust, it might decide it’s okay to ship indestructible, non-radioactive Stade casks out to Yucca Mountain and store them there.”

  Turpin was staring out at the cask farm again. “This’s a lot to think about. Would you be willing to make us some Stade samples with various expiration dates so we could see how accurate you are in the short term?” He looked at Kaem, “You said you liked to do it in seconds, right? How about some kilosecond specimens, some megasecond specimens, and some gigasecond specimens?”

  Looking puzzled, Kaem said, “Um, a kilosecond is only 16.7 minutes, a megasecond is 11.6 days, and a gigasecond’s thirty-two years. We can provide such samples, but I’d think that a gigasecond would be longer than would be useful. Perhaps samples at one, ten, and a hundred megaseconds instead?”

  Turpin frowned, “Do you happen to have just how long ten and a hundred megaseconds are at the tip of your tongue as well?”

  Kaem gave him a puzzled look, then said, “Um, a hundred and sixty-seven days and 3.2 years.”

  Lee realized Kaem had been surprised a man in charge of a nuclear reactor needed someone else to multiply 16.7 days by ten and divide thirty-two years by the same. Generously, she thought, Turpin would’ve figured it out if he needed to. He was just back on his heels after all Kaem’s revelations.

  After some more discussion, Kaem agreed to send firm pricing after
“discussing the costs with the CFO.” He also agreed to send test samples with lifespans of one, ten, and a hundred megaseconds.

  ~~~

  As soon as they got back in Gunnar’s truck, the old man exploded. “Did you know you were going to put us under the government’s thumb with this harebrained ploy?”

  Lee had taken the middle seat this time. Kaem leaned forward to give Gunnar a mildly surprised look. “You mean with the NRC?”

  “Yes! I thought this was a commercial nuclear reactor!”

  “Um, it is, but they’re all under very tight governmental supervision Gunnar.” Kaem shrugged. “Personally, I think that’s a good thing.”

  Doggedly shaking his head, Gunnar said, “They’re gonna be all up in our business.”

  Kaem said, “Somebody ought to be checking on people who think they can manage nuclear waste. It’s something we should all want to be done right.”

  Gunnar turned to stare silently out the window.

  Seeing her chance, Lee turned to Kaem, “I’m sorry. I’m not that familiar with nuclear technology. Can you explain that bit about stazing spent nuclear fuel in a pool and why the pools are susceptible to terrorism?”

  Kaem nodded, “I’m not an expert either, but the spent fuel’s highly radioactive, emitting all across the spectrum. It’s also thermally hot. The kinds of radiation that’re emitted are readily blocked by water so they keep the fuel underwater in deep pools that’re cooled to keep the rods from getting too hot. That way they can work on the fuel in a medium, water, that’s transparent enough that they can see to move stuff around. A medium that also protects the workers from radiation. Interestingly, you can safely swim in one of the pools, as long as you don’t dive down close to the fuel rods. They have divers do maintenance in them. So, the water blocks radiation but still allows manipulation of the fuel rods. After one to ten years in the spent fuel pool, when the radiation’s diminished and the rods aren’t as hot, they’re moved into steel and concrete dry casks while they’re still underwater because that’s the safe way to handle them. After that, the casks are closed, raised to the surface, drained of water, filled with inert gas, securely closed, and moved out onto that concrete pad where we saw them.”