RE: Anatomy of a nuclear woops.
01-24-2018, 03:36 PM (This post was last modified: 06-26-2019, 05:21 PM by Dartz.)
01-24-2018, 03:36 PM (This post was last modified: 06-26-2019, 05:21 PM by Dartz.)
From: Split-Personality
To: "The Glow in the Dark Brigade"
Subj: An anatomy of an atomic fuckup Part 4
Scraping through by their skin of the teeth. It's time to find out just how close we came to disaster...
---
The situation is explained to the residents of Frigga in the coldest of terms.
"The engineering committee has determined that the core will likely burn through to the water tanks within two days. .... Further evacuation is not possible in the time that is available to us. We cannot be reached in time by a suitable craft." - Announcement from Station Council on Frigga's internal bulletin system
Nobody panicked. When told the truth, the people accepted it. As much as they could accept such things.
"The Soviet Union is the only country to ever truly fight Godzilla. The failings of the system of the Soviet Union gave birth to it's Godzilla. The blood of the Soviet Citizen entombed him again. In the end, it may have brought about the death of the Soviet Union itself. But in the process, the Soviet Union saved the world. I saw the same courage again - not in thousands perhaps, but still.. We trusted the people. We told them the truth. We told them exactly how grave it was and allowed their bravery to shine" -Lun Alekseeva - Navigator, SC Lun. Speaking with Maico Tange.
"We might not have been saving the entire world. We were saving our own little one. That's what mattered." -Steinar Amundsen. Drill Team B Leader. Statement to ARSC investigation.
Some could draw on personal experience.
"I was worried, but I wasn't panicking. On Earth, they evacuated my home because of an accident. More people died because of the evacuation, than would've because of the accident." -Kotono Ito. Prop, Phitness Bee gym. Statement to ARSC investigation.
Others were more circumspect.
"We were told to close the bar. We kept it open. The Midoriyah stayed open too, along with half the shops on the Mezzanine. Sure the reactor might explode and kill everyone, but if it didn't, life needed to go on tomorrow. We couldn't do anything about it." - Gabriel Ermine, Prop. 'The Rock and Hard Place'. Speaking with Maico Tange.
"It was exciting! To have something to do. Something to challenge. Something to fight. Something to do. Life can get so monotonous out here sometimes, with the same schedule. It never really occurred to me that we might fail. We had a problem, we knew what the solution was, we just had to make it happen. We couldn't lose," -Nerima Tabby. Drill Team B operator.
There were a few dissenting voices, but they resigned themselves to their fate.
"I wanted to Evacuate. Some of us didn't have confidence in the whole 'shelter in place' thing. But we didn't have a choice, with the bay occupied, nobody could leave. Seemed like it defeated the purpose of sheltering in place if everybody was down there trying to stop the core exploding, when the core exploded." -Kim Deckman, resident. Online post.
There were those aware of the paradox of sending a hundred people into the teeth of danger to 'minimise the risk'.
"In hindsight, we knew it was bollocks. We just didn't want to sit around and wait." - Mirai Yashima -Drill Team B cutter. Statement to ARSC investigation.
A few were thrilled.
"Fuck it up and die. For us, this was Tuesday. Only now everyone else got to join in!" -Jake Applebee. Drill Team B operator. Statement to ARSC investigation.
The reality of the situation however, dawned. This was not a toy. It was not the big bad guy that existed just to be defeated. Inside that reactor lay the cruellest of deaths. And solving this problem meant making systems work in a way they were never meant to, on what was effectively a moment's notice.
"Nothing in reactor the system was made to do this. We had nothing capable of powering the sump-pumps. Which meant we needed to rig up something else. Which had to work. And keep working. Or else it would either have to be fixed by somebody who wouldn't survive the repair, or we'd have a radioactive disaster. We still only had an accident." - Keisuke Morita - Operations Officer Dayshift, Frigga. Statement to ARSC investigation.
This is a situation that leaves no margin for error. The price of any mistakes is obvious to those on the frontline.
"I had to cut the lines to the holding tank, blank them, then weld on the couplings which the brigade would hook their hoses up to. When I was told how much radiation would be flowing through that pipe, I decided I did not want to have to come back to fix that weld." Bao Chang, Frigga Third-Shift Engineering Team Lead, Statement to ARSC Investigation.
The fire continues to burn. The reactor core melts closer and closer to the water pool. At any moment it might break through. There is no way for anyone on Frigga to know how close they were coming to death.
"I tried not to think about it, in the end." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.
"The plan was in motion. We had no choice but to see it through, to whatever end." - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, statement to ARSC investigation.
"Looking up at bare concrete, I remember thinking, on the other side of this is death. If we hit water, we'd get a lethal dose in minutes. If we didn't drown or boil first. Or if the core blew. I touched it with my hand and it felt warm and I wondered if it was the radiation or just my imagination. Our counter chirped to itself, telling us we had an hour or more at least to get set up. We set the drills in minutes, bracing them on the channel walls, then set the target depth. Hopefully we got the depth right." -Steinar Amundsen. Drill Team B Leader, statement to ARSC investigation.
It takes nearly eight hours to properly drill the concrete. Some tasks, such as planting and laying require extreme care and precision - best left to the hands of experts with years of experience.
"People assume that planting explosives is just a matter of sticking it in and hoping for the best. Yeah, and if they thought about sex the same way, it's no wonder their partner goes home disappointed. Demolitions is an art form. There're explosive that push. Explosives that shatter. Explosives that cut. Fast explosives. Slow explosives. The wrong combination - a bad shape on a charge or just teency bit too much brisance and instead of bringing down the wall, you bring down the entire building. Or instead of dropping the roof, I'd collapse the entire reactor chamber," - Minnie May Hopkins, operator of 'The Purple Kitten', and explosives and blasting specialist, speaking with Maico Tange.
Naturally, not everyone is thrilled.
"Watching little miss ekrixiphilia wire the entire thing to blow was the most unnerving part of the whole thing. Nobody should be *that* into explosives." - Name witheld.
"With everything ready to go, we began the long ride back u the tunnel, behind the emergency blast line. If the reactor went, we'd have a chance to blow it before the cloud of death caught up." -Hans Krömeier - Fitter, Reactor Team A. Statement to ARSC investigation.
33 hours and 30 minutes after the accident had begun, the button was pushed. The explosives detonate.
"This was the moment when we could do nothing but pray. To whatever Gods we thought would listen. Whatever happened, we would have to go in." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
Nobody had anything left to do but wait.
"We heard nothing. We felt nothing. The blast triggered a shock-trip on the remaining reactors, but they had already been shut-down. Then we waited." - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, statement to ARSC investigation
"The explosives triggered. And we waited for the big boom." -Anika Daini, computer systems operator, statement to ARSC investigation.
"The counters in the shaft went off-scale high. The water drained. We'd bought time. But, eventually the core would still reach the water." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.
After half an hour, the hatches are opened.
"Jet told us to go. We went. I breathed a sigh of relief when my dosimeter didn't twitch." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
"We had at least five thousand cubes of water to pump. The Sabres could just about manage two and a half a minute, each in the best of conditions, giving us ten cubes a minute. I guessed it would take at least eight hours to drain it all - if nothing went wrong. " - Guy Montag, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
"We had four motors doing the pumping, leaving just one spare in case a regular ordinary fire started elsewhere. Those four, we filled the tanks with fresh water, then stacked some steel plates around the tanks and in the back of the cab to try and take the sting out the radiation. We could still only spend a minute at most, checking, or refuelling." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
The trucks, of course, would eventually run out of fuel. Running at full throttle drained the fuel tanks almost as fast as they could be filed
"Spend too long getting the diesel nozzle in the tank, and your arm'd rot off in a month's time. It encouraged you to be quick!" - Basil 'BamBam' Bambridge, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
"One of the motors overheated. We caught it before the head blew. The water was coming out so hot from its own radioactivity, it wasn't cooling the engine properly through the heat exchanger. We had to run them at a lower power, but that meant taking longer with that reactor still burning. The harder we pushed the motors, the more likely we'd lose one, or more of them. If we took it easy, we risked the core reaching the water." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC
A relay is set up, firefighters running in for a minute to check each engine, or start refuelling, then out before the dose gets too high. The hoses, the pump units, everything has begun to glow with hot radiation. The computer systems on the trucks begin to go haywire, generating false alarms, but the diesel engines keep running. The forty-year old engines are fully mechanical. The radiation doesn't affect them.
They run.
And run.
And run.
47 hours and 35 minutes after the core was breached the first of the engines stops pumping on dry run protection. Then the second. The third and fourth followed within a minute.
"That was it, no more water. We were done." - Guy Montag, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
"We no water left to fuel the fire, all that had to be done, was to open the chamber to vacuum. The dregs boiled off and froze. The fire extinguished. The melt would remain hot and liquid. But it was contained - it had no way out. Everyone cheered. We had done it. We saved the station" - Keisuke Morita, statement to ARSC investigation.
"We Triumphed. And five hundred lives were saved." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.
The report here is glowing, praising the collective effort of everyone on the station. Once the accident happened, it was dealt with 'exceptional skill, bravery and courage in the face of absolute danger.'
An accident occurred. But a disaster was prevented. That, on some level, must not be forgotten. Frigga came as close as it was possible to come to utter disaster. And Frigga saved itself.
The remnants of the reactor core would ultimately flood the galleries below. The molten steel, lithium, graphite and concrete mix would insinuate its way through broken steel pipes, bubbling and boiling off shallow pools of condensate, cooling as it diluted itself with more and more iron, steel, stone and concrete, before eventually coming to rest in a frozen glass waterfall, at the bottom of the blast-cut shaft.
The single most intensely radioactive object known to humankind came to its final resting place in its concrete tomb.
And that would've been that.
But for one small water leak from a storage tank.
---
NOTAN: 220472025
ORIG: XBNB-FRIGGA77
PRIORITY: RED
STATUS: CLOSED TO ALL NAVIGATION
SDATE: 0000
EDATE: 0000
REASON: REACTOR CORE ON FIRE
"We got the NOTAN just like every other ship in Fenspace. I actually checked the sequence to be sure it hadn't been missed. No date meant an immediate close. No end date meant an indefinite close. A priority rating of Emergency. And that reason, Reactor Core on Fire. I bet Lorca any amount of money that, whatever was happening on Frigga right now, wasn't a reactor Fire at all. The fire had happened months ago. It explained everything that we discovered - the radiation, the wreckage - all of it. Except for why they were only telling Fenspace about it now," -Shizuka Hayama, Engineer, SCSS Challenger.
Because, they had no choice.
A small leak in a storage tank containing the still radioactive coolant water had found its way into an access tunnel beneath unit 3, where it caused a radiation detector to read off-scale high.
An engineer went to repair the 'obviously faulty' detector. A nearby detector read zero. So he didn't bother bringing a geiger counter. He didn't pay any attention to the water pooled by his feet, until he replaced the defective detector with another one, which immediately read off-scale high. He checked the zero-reading one - to find it had long been replaced by a resistor to keep a fault alarm from sounding.
By the time he checked his dosimeter, he was already dying.
20 others would receive serious doses, stopping the leak.
To: "The Glow in the Dark Brigade"
Subj: An anatomy of an atomic fuckup Part 4
Scraping through by their skin of the teeth. It's time to find out just how close we came to disaster...
---
The situation is explained to the residents of Frigga in the coldest of terms.
"The engineering committee has determined that the core will likely burn through to the water tanks within two days. .... Further evacuation is not possible in the time that is available to us. We cannot be reached in time by a suitable craft." - Announcement from Station Council on Frigga's internal bulletin system
Nobody panicked. When told the truth, the people accepted it. As much as they could accept such things.
"The Soviet Union is the only country to ever truly fight Godzilla. The failings of the system of the Soviet Union gave birth to it's Godzilla. The blood of the Soviet Citizen entombed him again. In the end, it may have brought about the death of the Soviet Union itself. But in the process, the Soviet Union saved the world. I saw the same courage again - not in thousands perhaps, but still.. We trusted the people. We told them the truth. We told them exactly how grave it was and allowed their bravery to shine" -Lun Alekseeva - Navigator, SC Lun. Speaking with Maico Tange.
"We might not have been saving the entire world. We were saving our own little one. That's what mattered." -Steinar Amundsen. Drill Team B Leader. Statement to ARSC investigation.
Some could draw on personal experience.
"I was worried, but I wasn't panicking. On Earth, they evacuated my home because of an accident. More people died because of the evacuation, than would've because of the accident." -Kotono Ito. Prop, Phitness Bee gym. Statement to ARSC investigation.
Others were more circumspect.
"We were told to close the bar. We kept it open. The Midoriyah stayed open too, along with half the shops on the Mezzanine. Sure the reactor might explode and kill everyone, but if it didn't, life needed to go on tomorrow. We couldn't do anything about it." - Gabriel Ermine, Prop. 'The Rock and Hard Place'. Speaking with Maico Tange.
"It was exciting! To have something to do. Something to challenge. Something to fight. Something to do. Life can get so monotonous out here sometimes, with the same schedule. It never really occurred to me that we might fail. We had a problem, we knew what the solution was, we just had to make it happen. We couldn't lose," -Nerima Tabby. Drill Team B operator.
There were a few dissenting voices, but they resigned themselves to their fate.
"I wanted to Evacuate. Some of us didn't have confidence in the whole 'shelter in place' thing. But we didn't have a choice, with the bay occupied, nobody could leave. Seemed like it defeated the purpose of sheltering in place if everybody was down there trying to stop the core exploding, when the core exploded." -Kim Deckman, resident. Online post.
There were those aware of the paradox of sending a hundred people into the teeth of danger to 'minimise the risk'.
"In hindsight, we knew it was bollocks. We just didn't want to sit around and wait." - Mirai Yashima -Drill Team B cutter. Statement to ARSC investigation.
A few were thrilled.
"Fuck it up and die. For us, this was Tuesday. Only now everyone else got to join in!" -Jake Applebee. Drill Team B operator. Statement to ARSC investigation.
The reality of the situation however, dawned. This was not a toy. It was not the big bad guy that existed just to be defeated. Inside that reactor lay the cruellest of deaths. And solving this problem meant making systems work in a way they were never meant to, on what was effectively a moment's notice.
"Nothing in reactor the system was made to do this. We had nothing capable of powering the sump-pumps. Which meant we needed to rig up something else. Which had to work. And keep working. Or else it would either have to be fixed by somebody who wouldn't survive the repair, or we'd have a radioactive disaster. We still only had an accident." - Keisuke Morita - Operations Officer Dayshift, Frigga. Statement to ARSC investigation.
This is a situation that leaves no margin for error. The price of any mistakes is obvious to those on the frontline.
"I had to cut the lines to the holding tank, blank them, then weld on the couplings which the brigade would hook their hoses up to. When I was told how much radiation would be flowing through that pipe, I decided I did not want to have to come back to fix that weld." Bao Chang, Frigga Third-Shift Engineering Team Lead, Statement to ARSC Investigation.
The fire continues to burn. The reactor core melts closer and closer to the water pool. At any moment it might break through. There is no way for anyone on Frigga to know how close they were coming to death.
"I tried not to think about it, in the end." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.
"The plan was in motion. We had no choice but to see it through, to whatever end." - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, statement to ARSC investigation.
"Looking up at bare concrete, I remember thinking, on the other side of this is death. If we hit water, we'd get a lethal dose in minutes. If we didn't drown or boil first. Or if the core blew. I touched it with my hand and it felt warm and I wondered if it was the radiation or just my imagination. Our counter chirped to itself, telling us we had an hour or more at least to get set up. We set the drills in minutes, bracing them on the channel walls, then set the target depth. Hopefully we got the depth right." -Steinar Amundsen. Drill Team B Leader, statement to ARSC investigation.
It takes nearly eight hours to properly drill the concrete. Some tasks, such as planting and laying require extreme care and precision - best left to the hands of experts with years of experience.
"People assume that planting explosives is just a matter of sticking it in and hoping for the best. Yeah, and if they thought about sex the same way, it's no wonder their partner goes home disappointed. Demolitions is an art form. There're explosive that push. Explosives that shatter. Explosives that cut. Fast explosives. Slow explosives. The wrong combination - a bad shape on a charge or just teency bit too much brisance and instead of bringing down the wall, you bring down the entire building. Or instead of dropping the roof, I'd collapse the entire reactor chamber," - Minnie May Hopkins, operator of 'The Purple Kitten', and explosives and blasting specialist, speaking with Maico Tange.
Naturally, not everyone is thrilled.
"Watching little miss ekrixiphilia wire the entire thing to blow was the most unnerving part of the whole thing. Nobody should be *that* into explosives." - Name witheld.
"With everything ready to go, we began the long ride back u the tunnel, behind the emergency blast line. If the reactor went, we'd have a chance to blow it before the cloud of death caught up." -Hans Krömeier - Fitter, Reactor Team A. Statement to ARSC investigation.
33 hours and 30 minutes after the accident had begun, the button was pushed. The explosives detonate.
"This was the moment when we could do nothing but pray. To whatever Gods we thought would listen. Whatever happened, we would have to go in." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
Nobody had anything left to do but wait.
"We heard nothing. We felt nothing. The blast triggered a shock-trip on the remaining reactors, but they had already been shut-down. Then we waited." - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, statement to ARSC investigation
"The explosives triggered. And we waited for the big boom." -Anika Daini, computer systems operator, statement to ARSC investigation.
"The counters in the shaft went off-scale high. The water drained. We'd bought time. But, eventually the core would still reach the water." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.
After half an hour, the hatches are opened.
"Jet told us to go. We went. I breathed a sigh of relief when my dosimeter didn't twitch." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
"We had at least five thousand cubes of water to pump. The Sabres could just about manage two and a half a minute, each in the best of conditions, giving us ten cubes a minute. I guessed it would take at least eight hours to drain it all - if nothing went wrong. " - Guy Montag, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
"We had four motors doing the pumping, leaving just one spare in case a regular ordinary fire started elsewhere. Those four, we filled the tanks with fresh water, then stacked some steel plates around the tanks and in the back of the cab to try and take the sting out the radiation. We could still only spend a minute at most, checking, or refuelling." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
The trucks, of course, would eventually run out of fuel. Running at full throttle drained the fuel tanks almost as fast as they could be filed
"Spend too long getting the diesel nozzle in the tank, and your arm'd rot off in a month's time. It encouraged you to be quick!" - Basil 'BamBam' Bambridge, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
"One of the motors overheated. We caught it before the head blew. The water was coming out so hot from its own radioactivity, it wasn't cooling the engine properly through the heat exchanger. We had to run them at a lower power, but that meant taking longer with that reactor still burning. The harder we pushed the motors, the more likely we'd lose one, or more of them. If we took it easy, we risked the core reaching the water." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC
A relay is set up, firefighters running in for a minute to check each engine, or start refuelling, then out before the dose gets too high. The hoses, the pump units, everything has begun to glow with hot radiation. The computer systems on the trucks begin to go haywire, generating false alarms, but the diesel engines keep running. The forty-year old engines are fully mechanical. The radiation doesn't affect them.
They run.
And run.
And run.
47 hours and 35 minutes after the core was breached the first of the engines stops pumping on dry run protection. Then the second. The third and fourth followed within a minute.
"That was it, no more water. We were done." - Guy Montag, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.
"We no water left to fuel the fire, all that had to be done, was to open the chamber to vacuum. The dregs boiled off and froze. The fire extinguished. The melt would remain hot and liquid. But it was contained - it had no way out. Everyone cheered. We had done it. We saved the station" - Keisuke Morita, statement to ARSC investigation.
"We Triumphed. And five hundred lives were saved." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.
The report here is glowing, praising the collective effort of everyone on the station. Once the accident happened, it was dealt with 'exceptional skill, bravery and courage in the face of absolute danger.'
An accident occurred. But a disaster was prevented. That, on some level, must not be forgotten. Frigga came as close as it was possible to come to utter disaster. And Frigga saved itself.
The remnants of the reactor core would ultimately flood the galleries below. The molten steel, lithium, graphite and concrete mix would insinuate its way through broken steel pipes, bubbling and boiling off shallow pools of condensate, cooling as it diluted itself with more and more iron, steel, stone and concrete, before eventually coming to rest in a frozen glass waterfall, at the bottom of the blast-cut shaft.
The single most intensely radioactive object known to humankind came to its final resting place in its concrete tomb.
And that would've been that.
But for one small water leak from a storage tank.
---
NOTAN: 220472025
ORIG: XBNB-FRIGGA77
PRIORITY: RED
STATUS: CLOSED TO ALL NAVIGATION
SDATE: 0000
EDATE: 0000
REASON: REACTOR CORE ON FIRE
"We got the NOTAN just like every other ship in Fenspace. I actually checked the sequence to be sure it hadn't been missed. No date meant an immediate close. No end date meant an indefinite close. A priority rating of Emergency. And that reason, Reactor Core on Fire. I bet Lorca any amount of money that, whatever was happening on Frigga right now, wasn't a reactor Fire at all. The fire had happened months ago. It explained everything that we discovered - the radiation, the wreckage - all of it. Except for why they were only telling Fenspace about it now," -Shizuka Hayama, Engineer, SCSS Challenger.
Because, they had no choice.
A small leak in a storage tank containing the still radioactive coolant water had found its way into an access tunnel beneath unit 3, where it caused a radiation detector to read off-scale high.
An engineer went to repair the 'obviously faulty' detector. A nearby detector read zero. So he didn't bother bringing a geiger counter. He didn't pay any attention to the water pooled by his feet, until he replaced the defective detector with another one, which immediately read off-scale high. He checked the zero-reading one - to find it had long been replaced by a resistor to keep a fault alarm from sounding.
By the time he checked his dosimeter, he was already dying.
20 others would receive serious doses, stopping the leak.
I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.
One day they're going to ban them.