Chapter 2 The Secret of Yucca Mountain

There was no sign of disaster coming.For Charmi, director of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada, USA.For Thomson, the day on August 27 still started as usual. As usual, he drove the dilapidated Cadillac to the office building in the yard and parked in the A-level parking area.The building is L-shaped and sits in a horseshoe-shaped valley surrounded by towering peaks. Through the gap in the mountains, you can overlook the Colorado River in the distance.Miss Rachel, the secretary, has arrived and is sitting on her seat wiping her lipstick. When she sees the supervisor come in, she smiles and says hello.Thomson walked into the supervisor's room, Miss Rachel brought a cup of coffee according to the old custom, and gently closed the door.

Now, as usual, he was faced with rows of huge screens and dazzling instruments. Since the end of the last century, the U.S. government has faced a growing problem of nuclear waste—mainly from nuclear power plants, but also from expired nuclear weapons.For a long time, with the tacit approval of the government, this nuclear waste was dumped into the third world or American Indian reservations, which later became the target of public criticism.At the end of the last century, the government made up its mind to build this permanent storage yard.300 meters underground in Yucca Mountain, a solid reinforced concrete warehouse was built in the geologically stable tuff formation. After melting the nuclear waste and glass body, and adding a solid stainless steel shell, they were stacked in various warehouses.This approach is quite safe for the foreseeable future.

The entire project invested 50 billion U.S. dollars, but the huge investment has not been fully returned, and the storage yard has only been used for 20 years before it came to a standstill.First of all, because of the success of the Russ aerospace plane, its transportation costs are extremely low, so it is preferable to dump nuclear waste in outer space.The second impact was due to the decline of society. In the flood caused by the greenhouse effect, the financial resources of the United States became increasingly distressed, and there was no spare energy to consider environmental protection.Now, many of the screens and gauges in front of him are practically useless.The financial resources of the storage yard were so tight that it was impossible to maintain all the monitoring systems, so he had to keep a few items, such as radioactivity measurement, reservoir image system, and sound monitoring system. Others, such as stratum strain monitoring and ground temperature monitoring, had been cancelled.

He pressed the selection button and inspected more than 30 storage areas in turn. 150,000 pieces of nuclear waste still stand quietly in various storage areas, where they will stay until the end of the world.Although it was time for routine inspections, the staff in the various warehouse areas were still lazy and absent-minded. Thomson was even sure that some people were still squinting at the nude photos on the cover of "Playboy" in the drawer.Those administrators who are conducting a 15-minute field inspection wear red anti-radiation suits, walk around the cave area, and then they are done.There is nothing he can do about the situation.The yard workers, whose wages have been cut several times, stayed put because they weren't sure of getting a better job than here during the Great Recession.

Sometimes Mr. Thomson can console himself with the fact that he is in charge of looking after such a mass of civilized shit, nuclear waste that everyone hates.If it was sardine cans, gasoline rations, or even TNT, these guys would have tampered with the surveillance system and dug a hole in the warehouse floor. He turned the screen to the AD area.It's clearly different here. The administrator of the AD area, the gray-haired, taciturn old man, Mr. Mike, is still carrying out the routine inspection procedures meticulously as usual.In the huge cave, the hugeness, orderliness and cleanliness of 2250 pieces of stainless steel columns endow them with a wordless majesty.

Mike is an admittedly weird old man, and he has an incomprehensible enthusiasm for these nuclear waste canisters.Even as a director, Mr Thomson thinks the enthusiasm is a little too much.They are nothing more than a heap of uranium-235 and plutonium-239 waste, the excrement of civilized society.What Thomson remembers most from college general physics is the ubiquitous law of entropy increase.The entire universe is slowly but irreversibly moving towards disorder, only the development of civilization is an orderly process upstream, just like a huge caterpillar eating mulberry leaves, weaving a beautiful cocoon, and leaving behind a lot of of feces—and, in general, certainly more than the former.One day, these feces will drown all the achievements of civilization.

The current greenhouse effect is a retribution. Thomson respected the old Mike very much, and somewhat kept him at arm's length.Old Mike was a man of great background. Twenty years ago, when nuclear warheads were everywhere on B-2 strategic bombers, Minuteman missile silos and Trident submarines, Mike was the most authoritative figure in this industry.God of War - someone else had given him such a nickname.In the field of nuclear weapons, he is a complete expert.People say that although the nuclear button is in a foolproof security system, no one else needs to try to decipher it except the person who holds the nuclear key, but this "other"

Does not include God of War.It was he who had been involved in the design of these support systems, and if he wanted to, he could use a portable computer to open a missile silo and launch a multi-warhead missile into the White House in Washington. Of course he will not do this, which is based on an underlying rule of social security: the more powerful people are, the more cautious they are, because they always know the weight of the burden on their shoulders.Mike holds great power - the technical secrets of using nuclear bombs, so he is very cautious.His personality has become inseparable from the nuclear bomb.

Because of this, the UN resolution to destroy the world's nuclear weapons in 2022 broke Mike.Of course he knew it was a good thing for humans, but—think about it!He spent most of his life secretly for this technology, and even his wife and daughter left him; although he did not have a prominent position, he could at least always appreciate the pleasure of holding invisible power. In front of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a huge tree that doesn't move-suddenly he becomes a dispensable little person!Can he bear such a big mental gap? After that, Mike was placed at the Yucca Mountain scrapyard, and Ares became a taciturn old man.He has been working in the AD area of ​​the storage area, and it seems that he has a life and death relationship with the AD area.All of Thomson's predecessors had received messages from high-level officials telling them to be more polite to the old Mike and allow him to act freely at any time.However, after Thomson took office, which was also after the severe economic recession caused by the greenhouse effect, he has not heard such warnings.

I'm afraid the government is in a mess. They have too many problems to solve, and they have long forgotten about the desolate and closed Yucca Mountain dump. He sighed, hastily ended the routine inspection procedure, then sipped his coffee, pulled up the New York Times from the Internet and started browsing.The general impression is that there is not much good news. It seems that the greenhouse effect has opened a Pandora's box—after the mass suicide of the Harlingen cult in the Netherlands, another 39 believers of the Path to Heaven took away Mr. Biette's estate through lawyers.Lawyer Mr. Herman said helplessly: "We know that they will use these funds to create another mass suicide, but before the court issues an injunction, I can only execute the will left by the client."

——The average annual temperature rise of the earth has reached 2.2°C within 10 years, and large areas of coniferous forests have died north of 30° north latitude.The high temperature caused the expansion of the high-pressure belt in Central Asia, and Kazakhstan, China's Xinjiang and Gansu experienced the worst dust storms in the past century. ——Rising sea level has caused a large area of ​​salinization in the coastal plain, at an alarming rate. This year, the food gap is expected to continue to increase. It is estimated that at least 70 million people are struggling on the starvation line——The fourth-order organisms on the bottom of the South Pacific Ocean ( Giant tube-shaped worms that rely on hydrogen sulfide for energy) explosively multiplied (the reporter asked at the end of the article, I don’t know if it is black humor, he said: If human civilization cannot be revived, maybe these worms will become the new masters of the earth? )——Tibet is flooded with snow. He moved the mouse to flip through quickly, trying to find a few more refreshing news, but his eyes were fixed on a headline in black: "Redistribution of Earth's Seismic Zones".The article lists earthquakes in northern India, central Brazil and other places, saying that after the Antarctic ice cap melted, a weight equivalent to 3.4 billion tons was redistributed on the crust, and the Antarctic rock formations that were deeply depressed under the weight of the ice cap gradually rose. .These changes altered the activity of existing seismic zones (which tended to intensify for the Circum-Pacific seismic zone and slowed down for the Mediterranean-Himalayan-Indonesian seismic zone) and created new seismic zones around the world.However, there is still a lack of sufficient data on the distribution and changing trends of the new seismic zones. Thomson concluded his morning reading in a state of dismay.Thankfully, the Seattle-Lopingo seismic belt (which is also part of the Circum-Pacific seismic belt) closer to Yucca Mountain has not seen any noteworthy changes.However, who knows, maybe it would be a good thing for an earthquake to overturn this living coffin, at least he wouldn't have to spend his life here anymore. At that time, he never thought that a devil was gnashing his teeth and gathering energy under his feet.At 4:20 p.m., he accidentally looked out the window, and happened to see the blue light flashing across the sky.He wondered, where did this blue light come from?The sky is bright and clear, and it will not be lightning, nor the Northern Lights, nor the light of arc welding, because he knows that there are deep mountains within a hundred miles, and there will never be a busy construction site. Then he saw a huge ball of fire, blue and white, rolling along the horizon, erratic, and suddenly soaring into the sky.Maybe a flying saucer sent aliens with ulterior motives? …then he heard a humming, not loud but audible, a moan of overwhelmed subterranean. By the time the word "earthquake" popped into his mind, the world had completely turned upside down. During those few minutes, he tried in vain to escape, but the violently bumping floor prevented him from moving at all. He was like a bean bouncing back and forth in a frying pan.After a few minutes, the quake stopped and he remained roughly where he was.Looking out the window, he was shocked to find that instead of the green crowns he had seen before, he saw brown trunks.It turned out that the windows were flush with the ground, but his office was on the third floor!He suddenly realized that the strong earthquake caused the instantaneous liquefaction of the soil, and the building sank as a result. The oak door leading to the outside of the office has been broken open, and the door frame is skewed.The petite Miss Rachel jumped in like a ball, screaming in horror: "Mr. Thomson! Mr. Thomson!" Her face was pale, and her eyes were like antelopes under the paws of a cheetah.Thomson walked cautiously across the sloping, cracked floor, and took Miss Rachel in his arms. There was a power outage in the house, and the surveillance system was naturally out of order.Thomson knew that aftershocks were likely after a major earthquake, dozens of workers trapped in the underground reservoir area must be evacuated as soon as possible—if they were still alive. He pulled Rachel to the window and ordered her to jump down quickly.Outside the window were fallen trees and potholed land. The ground was only two meters away from the window, but Rachel screamed and dared not jump down. "It's a mirage! It must be a mirage!" She didn't know that the building had sunk.Thomson didn't have time to pester her, he threw the screaming Rachel out of the window, and he jumped over the window himself. Rachel was still yelling, but this time it was a yell of joy as she felt the solid ground beneath her feet. The mountain in the distance has slipped, and the high-voltage line tower has broken its neck.Fortunately, although the office building sank, it did not collapse, and the staff climbed out of the windows one by one, looking ashamed and demented.Jackson, the deputy supervisor of the storage yard, also came out. He held his right arm with his left hand, his face twisted in pain. A falling wall just broke his right arm.Thomson ordered him to count the number of people and quickly report the disaster to the outside world. He called Jamie, Herman and Carter to the spare car garage. The door of the parking garage has been deformed, and the power supply has also been cut off.Thomson adjusted the control handle to the "human switch" position, and the four of them pushed open the heavy iron door with all their strength.There were two spare Hunter Jeeps parked in the shed, powerful horsepower, powerful flashlights, drinking water, compressed food, fuel tanks always full and batteries freshly charged.Thomson asked Herman and Carter to take a car to the south, and he and Jamie took a car to the north to check the casualties in various reservoir areas. The closest to the office building is Area F, but Thomson thought about it and ordered Jamie to drive to Area AD, which is 50 kilometers away. He wanted to rescue the taciturn 70-year-old man first.The road surface in many sections has been damaged. Jamie carefully avoided rocks and cracks, and drove to the AD area after 40 minutes. The damage in the AD area does not seem to be very serious, but the elevator is no longer available. Thomson asked Jamie to park the car, and the two climbed down the safety ladder to the cave. Under the bluish-white light beam of the powerful flashlight, he saw that the building of the safety ladder was not deformed much, so he was somewhat relieved. These 300 meters seem to have gone a century.When they came to the empty underground storage area, there was a dead silence below. Somewhere a water pipe burst, or groundwater seeped in through cracks in the exterior walls, making a continuous line of ticking.The bluish-white light cannot push away the darkness, and once the flashlight is turned off, the hall immediately sinks into absolute claustrophobia. Thomson shouted: "Mr. Mike! Mr. Mike, are you still alive?" no answer.When Thomson was about to despair, he suddenly caught a glimpse of a beam of light not far away, and it was Mike greeting them with a flashlight.The two immediately ran over happily. What they saw shocked them.Mike lay on the ground with a painful expression on his face.The nuclear waste cylinders neatly stacked in the three-dimensional cave were scattered all over the place, and Old Mike's left leg was stuck between the two cylinders.The shells of several of them have cracked, and even the nuclear waste cylinders inside have been damaged... Thomson rubbed his eyes, no, it wasn't broken. Generally speaking, nuclear waste is fused together with the glass body and is a whole.But here, the vitreous is just a shell with cleverly concealed secret doors.At this moment, the secret door has been broken open, revealing the silver-white cylinder inside.It reflected the beam of the flashlight and shone like a thermos bottle.Even though Thomson was not an expert in weapons, he still recognized what it was at a glance. hydrogen bomb. Thomson was very shocked. He stared at the strange old man and forgot to rescue him first.The old man didn't say a word, and looked at them and those hydrogen bombs with burning eyes.In his eyes, there is the affection like a first love lover, and also the vicissitudes of an old man. Thomson felt very humiliated. He had been the supervisor of this storage yard for five years, and he didn't know that a large number of nuclear bombs (probably the entire AD area) were hidden under his nose.And he once naively thought that all nuclear weapons in the world, including the 1,134 nuclear weapons and 8,527 nuclear bombs of the United States, have all been destroyed after the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons takes effect in 2022. He and Jamie pushed the column off Mike's body and lifted him up.Mike's left leg was obviously broken, and the slightest touch of his left foot would cause him to gasp in pain.Thomson held him up and asked in a very cold manner: "Mr. Mike, can you tell me what's going on?" The old man glanced at him and said bluntly: "Mr. Thomson, you really shouldn't stick your nose here. You put me in a difficult position. Ordinarily, I should kill you to silence you, but I can't kill two people." The person who came to save me. However," his eyes flashed a cold light, "for the happiness of the two of you and your family, I advise you to completely forget the secrets you saw here." He stopped talking and motioned to the two to go out.Thomson and the young Jamie looked at each other, supported him vigorously, and climbed up the safety ladder with difficulty.After climbing the 300-meter steps, all three of them were exhausted and paralyzed. Mike took a break, struggled to get up, and got into the Hunter SUV.He pointed to Jamie, who had already sat in the driver's seat, and said to Thomson, "Please get down, sir. I want to use the phone on the car." Jimmy was very dissatisfied with this strange old man who was aggressive. He looked at Thomson, jumped out of the car under the latter's signal, and the two kept away from him.Mike pulled out the phone in the car and dialed a number skillfully. After a while, a female voice on the phone said, "Sorry, this is an empty number. Please check the number and redial." Mike said sharply into the microphone: "My name is Mike. My hotline was damaged in the earthquake. Press this number to connect me immediately!" After seven or eight minutes of silence, an old voice asked, "Hello, are you Mr. Mike?" "Yes, I'm old Mike. There was a strong earthquake here, the underground storage area was severely damaged, and the little boy was exposed. What should we do? Please make a quick decision." After a little thought on the phone, he replied, "Okay. Please leave your new number." little boy.He used the argot used when the first atomic bomb was dropped.Mike jumped out of the car and said to Thomson: "I want to repeat again, if you and Jack don't want to encounter any accidents, such as car accidents, plane crashes, deadly infectious diseases, etc., please keep your mouths shut. In addition," he With a slight smile, he said, "Thank you. Thank you for being the first to think of the old guy in this chaotic time." Mike's voice passed through countless distribution boxes, almost across the entire United States, and came to a small building more than 100 kilometers west of Washington.The building complex is located on a gentle hillside, hidden in the shade of cedar and yellow-leaf pine.Not far to the south is the famous Arlington National Cemetery, with ever-burning lights accompanied by rows of tombstones.These small buildings look very inconspicuous from the outside, maybe they are the buildings left over from the era of Washington and Jefferson.Crawlers crawled all over the building walls, and the long tree-lined road separated the building from the hustle and bustle of the outside world. Only the two cauldron-like satellite dishes on the roof indicated that this was not a farm.There is a low black iron fence around the buildings, almost submerged in tall grass.It is very quiet here, and there are very few vehicles passing by. Occasionally, a passing car breaks into the tree-lined road here, and two security personnel will emerge from the ground immediately, and politely point out that he has strayed into the private land. Then politely sent him to the road.Over time, the nearby residents knew about this place, and they kept quiet when they drove past here, and they would never honk their horns here.This dark and dark building is awe-inspiring with its unassuming power. This is a secret office of Committee C.Several quiet gatherings are held here every year. Guests are generally over 65 years old.The number of people in each meeting is 7-9, and it must be an odd number, because a very strict democracy is implemented in this political oligarch meeting, and all resolutions must be voted through.Their clothes are simple, and the appearance of their cars is not flashy, but in fact, most of them are handmade special McLaren F-1 carbon fiber high-end cars, with a speed of up to 300 kilometers per hour, equipped with a 500-horsepower engine, bulletproof glass, and an armored shell. Now, a strong old man is running on the horse track, with snow-white hair under the rider's cap.He was riding a 3-year-old thoroughbred mare with a shiny black coat, only the forehead and four hooves were white.The rider gently pinched the horse's belly, and the black horse picked up speed, leaped over the railing lightly, and then trotted back to the small building.Someone on the balcony on the second floor was cheering: "Mr. Brown, your riding skills are really good!" Brown smiled and waved to the secretary. Miss Charlie said, "Mr. Brown, I have your call." Brown jumped from his horse and handed the horse to the groom.He is a former Attorney General and was the duty chair of Committee C for the quarter.Before entering the secure telephone room on the second floor, he asked Miss Charlie, "Is there any emergency?" "Twenty minutes ago, a 7.5-magnitude earthquake occurred in the Sierra Nevada mountainous area. Fortunately, the earthquake area was in a remote mountainous area and the epicenter was relatively deep. It was preliminarily determined that the epicenter was 120 kilometers from the ground, and it is estimated that it will not cause major losses." "Whose call is it?" "Yuka Mountain nuclear waste dump, he calls himself Mike, I don't know who he is, but he has your top secret phone number." Brown nodded and picked up the phone.Miss Charlie is a 35-year-old spinster who has worked here for 10 years, but even she doesn't know Mike, a well-known figure in the military and political circles at that time.Indeed, he already belongs to the characters of the old times. In 2022, before the implementation of the treaty on the elimination of nuclear weapons around the world, Mike is a fierce opponent.Frankly speaking, although he is the best expert, in the end he is only an enforcer, and he has no right to make irresponsible remarks on such important issues.But Mike didn't care about that, he lobbied everywhere (secretly, of course) with incomprehensible fanaticism: the United States can't completely destroy its nuclear weapons, and it must hinder those Iron Curtain countries and lunatic countries, and we can rely on these countries for the safety of the United States of trustworthiness and kindness? In the end, Committee C made a secret decision in line with Mike's wishes: a carefully screened nuclear arsenal was secretly kept at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump.This is not due to Mike, but because members of the C committee would have shared the same concerns.What they didn't realize then was that the onslaught of the global warming effect ultimately made that decision a waste of paper.The earth is already too fragile, and the only ark of mankind is riddled with holes. A nuclear war will completely destroy it.Therefore, the nuclear arsenal that they have painstakingly preserved in secret has become a hot potato that is useless. But Mike couldn't see these changes. He was old, his thinking had become rigid, and besides, he was only a technologist, not a politician.He still treats his son like a parent, silently and dutifully guarding the pile of nuclear bombs until he stepped into the grave.This almost pathological love of life and death is both funny and pitiful.He said into the microphone, "Mr. Mike?" Hearing Mike say that the "little boy" had been exposed, he sighed.At this moment, he already had a plan for how to deal with the batch of nuclear bombs.In any case, the world must not let this secret know, otherwise it will be very embarrassing.He kindly said to Mike: "Thank you, I will deal with it soon." He turned around and said to Miss Charlie: "Inform all committee members that it seems that a plenary meeting is required, and the time will be set after Tuesday next week .” "I know that Mr. Cole is abroad, and he will definitely not be able to catch up with this meeting." "Then according to the past practice, use the method of drawing to remove another committee member, and make sure that the number of participants is an odd number." "Okay, I'll do it now."