NationStates Jolt Archive

Nuclear powerplant New Manchester-02, 22:15

New Manchester-02 was an ageing powerplant. Built during the great energy scare of the 1970s, the reactor cores of all four reactors had been replaced three times already, and each time the big-wigs who supervised the men who had done the replacing had looked around, tutting and frowning and shaking their heads more with each passing refuelling. The next would probably be the last. The plant was due to receive four new reactors, new designs and with them new men to replace these clunking relics of nearly forty years' vintage with smaller, faster models. The plant's operators were like any other men, attached to their machines, these charges that were the personification of man's ingenuity and skill.

The 22:00 - 05:00 shift was the quiet shift, and in general the least experienced operators were called in to run it, to give them experience of operating the reactors and to get them used to the idea that service of the people was going to be uncomfortable and arduous and involve getting to bed at six in the morning and having to get up three hours later to report in for news and general information for the day. Most of them were young, straight out of the tutoring college up at Izmensyaya Gorod, and eager to learn. Today, they were excited too. They were going to learn from the man himself, the Chief Reactor Supervisor, Abraham Yazov. A short and rotund man, Yazov was generally as cordial and willing as they came; he always said that, should a student ask a question that he didn't know the answer to, he'd say no, and he was as good as his word. "For," as he put it, "what if you gave them the wrong answer and you woke up to find half of the country irradiated?" Generally jovial and occasionally boisterous, Yazov was for all his convivial attributes an absolute terror when he wanted to be, as not a few deputies who had irritated him once too often could attest; he was reputed to have once dragged a particualrly recalcitrant student by the hair to a gauge in order to emphasise to her its importance, and then have given the Disciplinary Board a ten-minute treatise on the oimportance of discipline and knowledge at his hearing, something that had made him a kind of hero with the more browbeaten Supervisors. A well-liked and likeable man, Yazov could turn in an instant if you did something stupid, and this was another reason why the students now stood in semi-mute anticipation, exchanging only looks and whispers and giggles and muffled laughter.

Yazov's belly rounded the corner slightly before Yazov did - his military service had been deferred owing to his exceptional talents in his field, already apparent at 17 years - and he stopped before them, looking appreciatively at them. Imperceptibly (or so they thought) the students straightened backs and rivetted eyes on him. Yazov smiled jovially at them and looked over them all once more.
"Good evening, everyone, and welcome to New Manchester Zero-Two, where you come in green-horned and go out green-skinned. A spattering of laughter, most of it polite, and then Yazov continued. "Right, if you'll all follow me, it's time for you to take your respective shifts. How many of you have worked an OK-700 before?"

Yazov never expected to see many hands, and today was no exception to this expectation. Only one hand went up, that of a dark-haired girl at the back.
"Oh yes?" asked Yazov. "Come on, tell us what you know about them - saves me the work," he said, jokingly. The girl edged forward shyly and turned to face the assembled group. "Go on," he urged gently. The girl looked nervous but with a deep breath launched into it.
"Well, when I was doing my course at IG, we had a model of the OK-700 on-site, you know, for simulations of meltdown scenarios and various operations. Well anyway, my friend's dad was one of the Supers at the plant over in Morosovsk, and he said I could go in there and check it out. So I went in on the graveyard shift, and there was this really nice guy there. He said to me, do you want to havre a try at running her. So I was really scared, in case I blew it up," she laughed, "but I did it. I ran the reactor for about 15 minutes, until the guy's supervisor turned up back and he had to get up and look like he was teaching me, real fast." She smiled at the amusement of the memory. "That's all there is to it...I probably shouldn't have told you really," she said, a little worried.
"Not at all. I always say that there's only one way to understand one of these mosters, and that's by doing it yourself."

"Anyone else?" Yazov enquired, knowing the answer. None. "Right, in that case, come with me." He set off down the maze of corridors with surprising speed. The students looked with interest at the pipes, boards, dials, gauges and switches lining each of the walls, many covered with enigmatic markings and stencilled letters, threatening white cyrillic and latin letters, in English, German, French and Russian, proclaiming "Danger!" or "Not to be accessed by unauthorised personnel" or occasionally somewhat less dramatic but equally inexplicable utterances such as "For use only with D3/2 MCU" or "NLS Port, P Loop 1" or even the simple "D-03 SCRAM." Suddenly, Yazov turned and bellowed, "SCRAM!"
Confused, the students looked around wildly for something, but they neither knew why they were looking for it nor what "it" was. Yazov smiled, but it was a cold smile. "Step aside." The students parted to allow him through, and he stood in their midst, pointing at the innocuous red switch, labelled "A-01 SCRAM."
"This switch here," he said, resting his hand on the cold metal lever, "could be the one thing saving you from death. What happens if you can't stop an uncontrolled chain reaction from the control room? What if the circuits are burned out? What if they're already dead from a fire?" He gazed into all of their eyes, and not a few seemed to shudder slightly. "You find one of these and you yank it down to the horizontal as fast as you can." Yazov was utterly serious. "These SCRAM switches are placed throughout the facility. Every corridor and every access shaft has somewhere a SCRAM switch in it for the nearest reactor, and if ever, ever the alarms start sounding or things start going funny in the reactor, you find one of those switches and you pull it. A few hours' lost electricity is a damned sight better than a lost reactor and a few tonnes of plutonium in the atmosphere. ALWAYS know where your SCRAM switches are. Learn their positions so that you can find them in the pitch black and pull them if you've lost both your hands and feet." He paused for effect, and noted with satisfaction that all of them were either looking at the floor or staring in reverent silence at the burnished red SCRAM switch.

Tag.

Taggage.

"Right," Yazov breathed as he and his by now somewhat tired party entered the control room of Reactor Unit One. "Welcome to Reacotr Unit One control. This particular station, as in all of our powerplants, has control over reactors one and two, and this, ladies and gents, is where you'll be working this night." He smiled ebenvolently and split the group into two of six each. "Right. Now you," he said, pointing to the first goup, "will be with Greg SImons over there, and running Reactor One. The others will be with Miss Lorentino here, at station Two. Listen damn hard to what they say, they're experts in their field and they're taking the time to educate you lot when they could be working a quiet shift." He turned to Lorentino and grinned. "Thought I'd give you the rabble."
"You're too kind," she replied sardonically. "You owe me at least three espressos for this." Yazov grinned and walked out, heading to check on Reactor Unit Two. The two groups moved to their respective stations, and soon twelve nervous youths were in control of two nuclear reactors.

OOC: Tag for Chernobyl-goodness.

Yazov proceeded with his rounds. He checked over each reactor control ststion in the facility, pausing to chat with the operators, get a feeling for the reactor's performance. He was always careful to examine the list of recently maintenance operations of problems concerning the reactors; tonight, nothing apart from routine mantenance and the known individualities of each reactor unit was recorded on the pads or the electronic records. Eternally careful and scrupulous, he nevertheless took the time to examine all of the instruments for each reactor himself. Yazov was a careful man.

Lorentino and Simons monitored their two groups with equal care and dedication. These students were, generally, better-qualified than they had been when they first joined the nuclear profession, for which they were both deeploy thankful. Simons particularly recalled one moment when he had mistekanly ordered the water pressure in the main reactor lowered, only to find he was reading the pressure gauge that wrong way and it was in fact dangerously low already. Only a quick flooding of water into the system had saved the reactor from melting down. He still grimaced slightly at that memory, and he raised himself and walked around, checking the dials and gauges and displays to make certain for himself that everything was working smoothly, and to forget what he had almost done the memory still rankled, and refused to leave him.

Down in the containment, the giant concrete shield that surrounded the reactor vessel, reactor one lay humming and rumbling to itself, hunched threateningly in the darkness. Within it, the unimaginable fury of the nuclear fission reaction raged, releasing energies so immense that they could destroy the containment and the reactor vessel with ease, and yet tamed, and turned into nothing more than heating for water. The thick layers of lead, concrete and plastics kept the deadly neutrons within the pile exactly there, and indeed allowed nothing more to escape than a few degrees of heat and that eerie humming rumble. But what wasn't clear to be seen was what was going on within the containment.

What was going on within that hulking concrete shell was that the reactor's cooling water pipes were falling apart. They were constructed from stainless steel, designed to withstand almost any conditions that they would encounter within that harshest of environments. But the steel had lost that coating of chrome oxide that kept the metal below safe through years of neglect within the chamber. The occasional tiny leaks from the pipelines had taken their toll upon it too, and the main pipeline for the primary water loop was starting to feel the strain at one of its joints. The joint from section to section was selaed with brazing metal, itslef coated in anti-corrosion agents, but as on the pipe the protection it had offered was long since gone. The reactors' last inspection had predicted that it would hold out until the next refuelling, when it would be replaced with new piping to see the machine through to the end of its days; but that prediction was wrong.