TEARS OF RAGE

Chapter 42

Thrust amongst a circle of corruption and crime, a man has no room to take anything for granted.

Failure and success can not exist within the same sphere.

One has to supersede the other.

And knowledge is like a flashlight amidst a world of darkness...

It allows a man to establish some semblance of direction, not recalibrate his past, or change a decision.

Swaylo listened as Nathan Briggs continued to explain how he had gotten involved in the murder of a U.S. Senator.

His face was a mask of expressionless anger, but there was too much at stake to allow his emotions to cloud his judgment.

"You've got to understand," Briggs pleaded.

"Melissa... Senator Weatherby had amassed some very damaging secrets about a few powerful politicians. She had convinced her husband to make a prearranged ruling on a case where billions of dollars were on the line." Nathan Briggs took a deep breath and continued to talk.

His eyes remained fixated on the gun, afraid that a bullet would emerge from its barrel, to excavate his skull.

According to the story that Nathan Briggs told him, federal district court judge Johnathan Weatherby had taken a five million dollar payoff; to undermine an environmental protection suit.

Less than eighteen months prior, judge Weatherby had been the presiding judge over an Augusta case, in which Briggs had been hired to lobby for the passage of a bill that would give the state the power to pass a law that would allow his employers to secure the rights to build a nuclear waste storage facility.

Nathan Briggs explained to him how the Department of Energy had developed a projected plan to reclassify residual sludge, from nuclear waste in tanks at the Savannah River Site.

Several states across the country were vying to secure the contract, but the facility in Augusta was more equipped to handle the project.

The law stipulated the terms in which governed how companies could classify nuclear sludge, from high-level radioactive waste to low-level waste, under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act.

Nathan Briggs explained how the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act required all nuclear facilities to route their high-level waste to permanent storage facilities at Yucca Mountain, in Nevada.

Johnathan Weatherby's initial ruling had created a very complicated problem for the corporate investors.

The storage facilities that had been approved by Congress had not been completed, due to insufficient funds from the State Department.

The Department of Energy had been tasked with establishing an operable mandate for the removal of strontium-90, plutonium, uranium, and other high-level radioactive substances from the tanks that had held nuclear waste at various test sites for nearly five decades.

From the days of the Cold War, the Department of Energy had been given a budget of over sixteen billion to handle the expense of cleanup costs; resulting from nuclear weapons research.

Through a planned cleanup proposal that was supposed to shorten the time span, at the Savannah River Site, by an estimated twenty-two years, the corporate investors were able to gain government approval for the project.

But no one could just change the terms of the Bill, Briggs told him.

The only way for them to proceed with the plan, they had to get the courts to approve of the renewed plans, for the nuclear waste to be treated at the site.