The Tides of March by S D Price

Author:S D Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller
Publisher: Amolibros
Published: 2024-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

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Chapter Twenty-five

11 March 2011 07.15

It was a cloudy, overcast morning when Fujiwara Tadashi entered Reactor Four’s high security level-controlled area. He and his team of eight personnel were experts in the handling of the nuclear fuel rods and their internal transportation within the plant and onto the site’s internal port where the loading and unloading of the fissile material took place.

Today’s procedure was the final part of this ‘fuel rod shuffle’ operation on Reactor Four. There was a defined programme which was run for each of the six reactors at the Fukushima Plant, specifically defining when fuel rods would be removed and/or replaced. This operation was normally undertaken every two years on each unit and with six units at the site, this meant that a replacement operation was carried out on an average cycle of four months. Each time this took place the process was supported by a small army of people, consisting of contractors and company personnel and would take approximately four weeks to complete.

This particular replacement was an unscheduled event, prompted by an issue with the plant’s cooling system. It was determined that there was a fifteen per cent chance this part of the cooling system would fail to maintain the necessary cooling levels for the fuel rods it regulated over their expected lifespan. In the risk-adverse area of nuclear energy, this relatively insignificant system failure prediction was enough of an issue to move the risk category to the status of ‘Very High’, demanding an appropriate response. Consequently, it had been decided to shorten the operational life span of the uranium 235 rods, by removing them as soon as possible.

To enable the safe shutdown of the reactor, it had required a reduced and intensified reactor period around the use of the fuel rods. This amplified interaction would create an extra dimension to the already complex logistical situation.

The intensity of the process would reduce the source neutrons available for uptake by the uranium 235 rods, allowing them to produce an enhanced type of plutonium within its atomic structure. One with less of the more volatile PU-240 element, which does not readily present itself to weapons manufacture due to its high neutron emittance. This makes handling more complicated, and in addition causes it to be unsuitable for use in a nuclear weapon. The molecular deviation having a tendency to create a ‘Fizzle’ in a hydrogen bomb, the equivalent of a ‘Damp Squib’ in the nuclear weapons world.

This meant that the uranium they would be removing would have less than seven per cent of the contaminating PU-240, holding a greater amount of the more desirable plutonium type PU-239. This was classed as weapons-grade material, which would be required to be eventually added to the twenty–plus tons of weapons-grade plutonium Japan had stockpiled since the inception of its nuclear energy programme, at secret locations across the country, thus giving it the potential to create many hundreds of nuclear weapons if it ever felt the need to do so. The capability regarded by the Japanese government as a tacit nuclear deterrent held as a latent threat.

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