4.4. The first caused some minor damage to the surface buildings, but not so much as a crack down here. I was here—in here—for both of them. Barely felt a thing.”
There were, in fact, thirty-nine earthquake faults and seven baby volcanoes in various stages of activity in the desert surrounding the facility. This was in the information sheet he’d handed out, but if no one brought it up, he certainly wasn’t going to. When people heard the words volcano and fault, their brains tended to switch into caveman mode.
“The truth is,” Steve continued, “this particular chunk of geology has been under close study for almost twenty-five years, and there’s a mountain of evidence that the three kinds of stuff here is aptly suited for the storage of nuclear waste.”
“How much waste, exactly?”
“Well, that’s one of those questions I’m not allowed to answer.”
“On whose orders?”
“Take your pick. Homeland Security, the FBI, the DOE . . . Suffice it to say, this facility will be the country’s primary storage site for spent nuclear fuel.”
The best estimate put the facility’s eventual maximum capacity at around 135,000 metric tons, or 300 million pounds, some of which would degrade to “safe” levels in decades, and some of which could potentially remain lethal for millions of years. The poster child for nuclear waste, the one most often quoted by journalists—plutonium-239, which had a half-life of about twenty-five thousand years—was far from the longest-lived, Steve knew. Uranium-235, used in both reactors and weapons, had a half-life of about 704,000,000 years.
“By what method would the waste be transported?” This from one of the Oregon delegates.
“By rail and truck, both purpose-designed for the task.”
“What I meant was, I assume we’re not talking about fifty-five-gallon drums.”
“No, sir. You’ll find detailed information about the transportation vessels on the sheets I gave you, but I’ve seen the things up close and watched the stress testing they go through. They’re about as close to indestructible as you can get.”
“They said the same thing about the Titanic.”
“Which I’m sure General Atomics has kept well in mind as they’ve worked on these things for the past ten or twelve years.”
This had the desired effect: If one of the project contractors had spent a decade working on the transport cask alone, how much time and care and expense had been spent on the facility itself?
“How about security, Mr. Jenkins?”
“If the facility goes online, primary security will be handled by the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration Protective Forces—the NNSA for short. There would, of course, be . . . supplemental forces on quick standby, should an emergency arise.”
“What kind of supplemental forces?”
Steve smiled. “The kind that give bad guys nightmares.”
More laughter.
“Okay, let’s move on to what you all came for. If you’ll board the little rail carts to the right, we’ll get going.”
The trip took fifteen minutes, but frequent questions brought the convoy to a halt. Finally they slowed beside an opening in the main tunnel wall. The delegates climbed out and gathered around Steve at the mouth. “The shaft you see sloping downward is six hundred feet long and connects to the emplacement drift, which is a horizontal grid of smaller tunnels that, in turn, lead to waste-storage areas.”
“How does the waste get from the truck or train down to the storage level?” one of the Utah staffers asked. “Does it stay inside the transport vessel?”
“Sorry, that’s hush-hush territory again. What I can tell you about is how the waste will be stored down in the drift. Each ‘packet’ will be encased in two nested canisters, one made of almost an inch of a highly corrosion-resistant metal called Alloy 22, then a two-inch-thick second canister made of something called 316NG—essentially, nuclear-grade stainless steel. Overhanging the nested canisters will be a titanium shield designed to protect them from seepage and falling rocks.”
“Is that something you’re worried about?”
Steve smiled. “Engineers don’t worry. We plan. We try to model every possible scenario and plan for it. These three components—the two nested canisters and the titanium shield—form what we call a ‘defense-in-depth.’ The packets will be stored horizontally and commingled with different grades of waste, so each chamber maintains a uniform temperature.”
“How big are these packets?”
“About six feet in diameter and ranging in length from twelve to eighteen feet.”
“What happens if the packets get . . . misplaced?” the other California candidate asked.
“Couldn’t happen. The number of steps involved to move a packet and the people that have to sign off on it make that a virtual impossibility. Think of