Rubric's Cube

Chapter 1 Meltdown

 I pushed open the cushioned door to the arctic brightness of the control room. The almost subliminal sound of thousands of semiconductors and tens of screens filled my ears with a cotton wool of semi-deafness. The door silently closed behind me trapping me in pressured silence.

"What's up Dave?" I asked.

"Erm - boss there's something going on I don't quite understand."

A cutting thrill of fear temporarily paralysed my thoughts. My best nuclear engineer on the site not quite understanding the plant we had carefully commissioned, and run for three years. That was bad news.

"OK, reel it out."

"Jason, the reactor pressure is rising but all the valves are indicated as set correctly."

"OK. First get the damper rods in and pull the fuel rods out when you can."

"But that'll shut the plant down."

"If half of South East England has no electricity for a couple of hours that'll be better than covering it with radioactive dust. So just do it."

The klaxon hooter sounded and the yellow rotating prime emergency lights flashed on. 

I hit the switch shutting the klaxon off. We were still in control.  

Shutting down a 2,400 MW reactor doesn't happen in a millisecond. It's a hot beast. It still needs cooling water,

I turned over the last drawer in my desk and withdrew the unauthorised adjustable spanner and long reach screwdriver from it.

"I'm going out to fix it." I told Dave.

"What? You can't. You don't know what it is. "

"There isn't time for a committee meeting. That what happened at Chernobyl. A committee meeting while do nothings did nothing. Besides five years of cost cutting and I'm almost certain it's a footling micro-switch sending a wrong signal to the expensive kit in here."

I struggled into a radiation suit and banged out of the control room and through the double doors and the two dog leg twists of the corridor to the secondary containment.

The hot end of a nuclear power station is eerily quiet, cocooned in its steel and concrete primary containment, once the ventilation fans in the secondary containment are shut off for an emergency shut down.

I walked quickly to the valve train that fed pressurised water into the reactor. The top of the valve was standard kit although the double back up switch system had been replaced by the cheaper valve intended for non-critical locations.

It was with some satisfaction at the confirmation of my theory I rapped the the switch head of the valve with the spanner.

Darkness enveloped me. Thunderous impacts of lumps of concrete met my ears and my nose was flattened on the floor. Blue lightning of escaping radiation flickered around me.

I awoke, semi prone, my sight blurred in the close vision of coarse carpet fabric. My eyes cleared as I raised my head to reveal our sitting room in semi darkness, a whisky glass on its side next to me, and regular flashing blue light filtering though the curtains. The thunderous banging still reverberated in my head, but now it came from the front door.

I struggled to the door and opened it.

"Good God, man, what's happened to you?"

Still muddling reality of the now with my whisky driven dream I mumbled "Sizewell B went runaway on me."

"You what? Your face man."

I wiped my chin and looked at my hand. It was covered with blood.

"Let me sort this," I croaked.