Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [46]
Mrs. Gunderson went over to try. She hefted at the four foot piece of pipe but was unable to move it.
"Now, for us to lose coolant, that would have to break completely," Barry said. "I'm not sure how that could happen, but suppose it did. Inside the containment the men are putting in the emergency cooling tanks now. Yes, those big things. If the water pressure from the primary cooling lines ever falls, those dump water at high pressure directly into the reactor core."
He led them through the structure, making them look at everything. He showed them the pumps which would keep the reactor vessel filled with water, and the 30,000-gallon tank that would contain makeup water for the turbines. "All of that is available for emergency cooling," Barry said.
"How much does it take?" Mrs. Gunderson asked.
"One hundred gallons a minute. About what six garden hoses can put out."
"That doesn't seem like very much. And it's all you need?"
"All we need. Believe me, Mrs. Gunderson, there's nobody more concerned about your children's safety than we are. Most of these so-called accidents we prepare for have never happened. We have people whose job it is to think up strange accidents, silly things that we're sure will never happen, just so that we can prepare for them." He let them wander through, knowing they'd be impressed by the massive size of everything. So was he. He loved these power plants; he'd spent most of his life preparing for this job.
Finally they had seen everything, and he led them back to the visitors' center, where the PR people could take over. Hope I did it right, he thought. They can help us a lot, if they want to. They can hurt us, too …
"One thing still concerns me," Mrs. Gunderson said. "Sabotage. I know you've done all you can to prevent accidents, but suppose somebody deliberately tried to … to make it blow up. After all, you won't have that many guards here, and there are a lot of crazy people in this world."
"Yeah. Well, we've thought of ways people can try," Barry said. He smiled. "You'll excuse me if I don't tell you about them."
They smiled back, uncertainly. Finally Mrs. Gunderson said, "Then you're satisfied that some bunch of nuts can't harm the plant?"
Barry shook his head. "No, ma'am. We're satisfied that they can't harm you by anything they can do to us. But nobody can protect the plant itself. Look at the turbines. They turn thirty-six hundred revolutions a minute. Those blades are spinning so fast that if drops of water got in the steam lines, the turbines would break apart. The switchyard is vulnerable to any idiot with dynamite. No, we can't stop them from wrecking the plant, but then we can't stop them from setting fire to the oil tanks at a fossil plant. What we can do is see that nobody outside the power plant site gets hurt."
"And your own people?"
Barry shrugged. "You know, nobody thinks it's remarkable that police and firemen are dedicated to their work," he said. "They don't hear so much about power workers. They'd think different if they ever saw one of our apprentices standing up to his waist in oil to turn a valve, or a lineman up on a pole in the middle of an electrical storm. We'll be on the job, Mrs. Gunderson. If they'll just let us."
The wind was warm and the skies clear in the Houston suburb of El Lago. The rainy season had ended, and a hundred families had come out into their backyards. The local Safeway was almost sold out of Coors beer.
Busy, hungry, and happy to be home for a whole weekend, Rick Delanty scooped hamburgers off the grill and slid them between buns. His fenced backyard was warm and smoky and noisy with a dozen friends and their wives. From the distance they could hear the children