The Thanatos Syndrome

LMFBR, liquid metal fast breeder reactor. You’ve got your core here, a mixture of oxides of plutonium and uranium, and around it you’ve got your blanket of uranium, U-238. Now here’s your primary coolant loop of liquid Na-24, used because of its heat-transfer properties—it’s liquid over a large range of temperatures. Here is your secondary nonradioactive sodium loop, which cooks the steam, which in turn drives the turbines. And here is your water loop, which cools your condenser and turbine.” With an odd little deprecatory gesture, Vergil both offers the drawing and shakes his head at it.
    We gaze at the loops and the small tidy blacked-in core.
    â€œI still don’t get it,” says Lucy. “Are you telling me that stuff from here”—she taps the primary coolant loop—“gets over to here?” She taps the Ratliff intake an inch away.
    Vergil is silent. His eyes are black and blank.
    â€œHow?” Lucy asks both of us.
    â€œBy a pipe,” I say, watching Vergil. He nods.
    â€œBut who—?” she begins.
    We are silent.
    â€œBy a pipe, you say. But if that stuff was in a pipe in the willows here, it would be a liquid, wouldn’t it? So how—”
    We’re back in Vergil’s territory. “That’s right. It would have to be treated, converted to a water-soluble salt, probably a chloride—like this.” He picks up a crystal cellar from a corner of the map.
    â€œBut somebody has to do this!” Lucy accuses him. Vergil cuts his eyes, passes her to me.
    â€œThat’s right, Lucy. Somebody designed it and built it.”
    We think it over. Now Lucy has the import.
    â€œYou mean to tell me,” says Lucy in a measured voice, tapping pencil on table with each word, “that somebody has deliberately diverted heavy sodium from here, through a pipe, through the Tunica Swamp here, to put it in the water supply at Ratliff number one here?”
    Vergil gazes at the map as if the answer were there.
    â€œThat’s what we mean to tell you, Lucy.”
    â€œDoes that mean it is something done officially, with NRC approval, perhaps by NRC, or could someone have done it surreptitiously?”
    Lucy looks at me. I look at Vergil. Vergil shrugs.
    Lucy puts her head down, raises a finger. “We’re talking about somebody official, right? Nobody could have slipped in there and done it.” We both shrug.
    â€œWell, I’ll be goddamned.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBut why?”
    â€œA good question.”
    â€œNow wait,” says Lucy.
    We wait for her.
    â€œAssuming there is a pipe there, why is it leaking? Why the yellowing?”
    I look at Vergil—he shrugs. “It don’t take much of a leak— especially if somebody was doing the plumbing in secret without routine pipe checks.”
    Lucy is gazing at me. “We don’t know this,” she says at last. “We’re guessing.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œWe need more to go on, Tom, Vergil. Hard evidence. A piece of pipe. Let’s go back and look. But look for what?”
    Vergil clears his throat. “We could check out the pumping station.”
    We both look at him.
    â€œPumping station?” I say.
    â€œRight here.” He puts the point of the pencil on the stippled green of the Tunica Swamp between the tower and the intake.
    â€œPumping station?” says Lucy. “What for?”
    Vergil is almost apologetic. “Well, your liquid here is not going to run by gravity upriver to your intake here.”
    â€œIt’s not going to run by gravity upriver,” Lucy tells me.
    â€œThat’s right, Lucy.”
    â€œI don’t believe it. Who would put a pumping station there?”
    Vergil smiles for the first time. “Ask him,” he says, nodding to the window. There’s the uncle, trudging across the overgrown yard, headed for the woods, down shoulder angled forward leading the way, the pointer at his heels. Vergil, smiling and good-humored, has allowed himself to lapse into local freejack talk. “He the one showed it to me. We went hunting birds last Christmas, you remember, Miss Lucy?”
    â€œI remember,” says Lucy absently. “We still got some of those quail frozen. We had some this morning.”
    â€œMist’ Hugh think it’s an electric substation. I didn’t say nothing. But there no wires except a little line to run the pump,