An Atomic Romance by Bobbie Ann Mason

Author:Bobbie Ann Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307430632
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

22

All over the city plutonium continued to be the topic of rumor and gossip, like a celebrity awash in the aftermath of a fresh transgression. The official word was minimal. “We’re looking into it.” “It’s not part of any present function of the plant.” “It’s of no danger to employees or the community.” The Department of Energy was sending a representative. According to a press release, the plutonium that had entered the plant was “an insignificant amount.”

Reed swam through the theories and the official statements, the terse assurances of the well-oiled managers.

“They’re saying it came in the fucking feed stock—back in the fifties,” Teddy said. “It’s been here all along, I heard.”

“They brought in reactor tails,” Jeremy J. offered. He was leaving the day shift, and he ambled out the door indifferently.

Reed pieced together a version of the story from the guys coming and going. It was part rumor, part speculation, part memories of men who remembered the tales from older, now retired workers. They claimed the plutonium had arrived over a period of twenty years in secret shipments of reactor tails—spent uranium fuel rods that had been used in nuclear reactors to make plutonium for atomic bombs. The plant recycled the fuel by retrieving the last remaining traces of valuable uranium. But plutonium—and other bomb-making by-products—had contaminated the material. When the stuff sped through gaseous diffusion, the contaminants lingered behind, clinging to the lining of the pipes in the Cascade.

“The plutonium got into the nickel lining,” a chemical engineer with an office job explained to a group of process workers from Reed’s division. “You can’t get nickel really clean and purified. So my guess is there’s a residue of plutonium in the system—but that would be totally insignificant.”

“So that accounts for the technetium too,” Reed said. And neptunium, he thought.

“What about the warheads? Didn’t some of it come in on the warheads?” an older man in the gathering asked. His name was Bert, and he was an old-timer Cascade operator.

“What were warheads doing here?” Reed demanded. “Warheads? What the fuck?”

“Not my bailiwick,” the chemical engineer said.

As the engineer bustled away with his clipboard and his advanced degree, Bert turned to Reed. He was gray haired, probably in his early sixties.

“I know who knows all of that, Reed,” he said. “Wes Thornhill. You know him. He used to work with your daddy.”

Reed nodded. He hadn’t seen Thornhill in years.

“He probably knows all about it,” Bert said. “They were both here when those reactor tails came in. And the warheads. I heard a lot about the warheads.”

“Thanks, Bert. I’ll look him up.” Reed disappeared into the break-room kitchen and found a bag of pretzels and a ginger ale.

In full C-zone dress, he squeezed through narrow niches inside a dusty cell on the cell floor, where the UF6 gas rushed through the pipes in dizzying monotony, washing through the barrier sieves again and again until the uranium-235 isotopes were isolated. Tonight, the process seemed different. If transuranics had somehow gotten into the

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