it this way: We’ve all lost our car keys, right? Imagine a family of eight. Each person in the family would have a duplicate set of keys; three times a day, each person would have to sign a form stating the keys are either in their possession or in the agreed-upon key-collection area; three times a day each person would have to verify that their particular set of keys in fact works in the car’s locks and ignition; and finally, three times a day each person would have to go around to the other family members and verify that that person has taken all of the above steps. Are you starting to get the picture?”
Nods all around.
“All of that and more would be going on here every shift of every day of the year. And it would be backed up by computer oversight. I promise you, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, nothing is going to get misplaced in this facility.”
“Talk to us about corrosion, Mr. Jenkins.”
“Our corrosion testing is done at the LTCTF—sorry, the Livermore’s Long-Term Corrosion Test Facility.”
“As in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory?”
Thanks for the softball, Jenkins thought but didn’t say. Lawrence Livermore was a household name, and while most people couldn’t tell you exactly what LLNL did, it was nevertheless held in high regard. Again, if Lawrence Livermore was on the job, what was there to worry about?
“Right,” he said. “The testing process involves aging and stressing metal samples called ‘coupons.’ Right now they’re testing eighteen thousand coupons representing fourteen different alloys in solutions common to this area. As of now, the average corrosion rate on the coupons is twenty nanometers a year. A human hair is five thousand times wider than that. At this rate, the Alloy 22 used in the nested canisters would hold up for about a hundred thousand years.”
“Impressive,” said a man in a cowboy hat, one of the Idaho delegates, Jenkins assumed. “What say we talk worst-case scenario. What if something leaks and starts seeping into the earth.”
“The chances of that are—”
“Humor us.”
“First of all, what you need to know is the water table beneath our feet is unusually deep, running at an average of fifteen hundred feet, which would be eleven hundred feet below this emplacement drift.”
This was another point of heated debate, Steve knew. While what he’d just told the delegates was true, some of the project scientists were lobbying for deeper emplacement drifts—some three hundred feet below this one. The truth was, there was no firm answer to the percolation question. How fast various liquids would seep through the rock beneath the facility was an unknown, as were the effects an earthquake might have on percolation rates. Then again, he reminded himself, the best estimates put the chances of a catastrophic earthquake affecting the storage levels at one in seventy million.
If anything was going to be the inescapable death knell for the facility, it would be the nature of the water table. Up until ten months earlier, it was uniformly believed that the area beneath the facility was what’s known as a closed hydrologic basin, an inward-sloping formation that offered outlets to neither oceans or rivers. Two exhaustive studies, one by the EPA and one by the USGS, now contradicted that belief. If accurate, aquifers might extend as far as the West Coast and the Gulf of California. Until the matter was settled, however, Steve’s orders were clear: The closed hydrologic basin model was the gold standard.
He said, “For waste to even begin seeping into the rock, dozens of systems and subsystems—both human and computer—would have to fail. Again, we need to put this into perspective: Compared to the security protocols this facility would operate on, sneaking into an ICBM silo and launching a missile would be a stroll in the park.”
“Is any of this material fissionable?”
“You mean can any of it explode?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it would take someone with a couple Ph.D.s at the end of their name to answer the whys, but the answer is no.”
“Say someone managed to sneak through security and get down to the storage levels with a bomb—”
“By ‘someone,’ I assume you mean Superman or the Incredible Hulk?”
This got outright laughter.
“Sure, why not? Let’s say they did. What kind of damage could they do?”
Steve shook his head. “Sorry to rain on your parade, but the logistics alone make that incredibly unlikely. First of all, you’ll notice this diagonal tunnel is ten feet wide. The amount of conventional explosives it would take to do