Anthimia 6, 230 AC

Greetings, I'm Kersen Bakor, taking over from Temuera with the next update.

We've edited down the material from the debriefing of Barandigi, one of the nouergists who accompanied Tanheu to the Eridu North nuclear power plant. As the long night ground on, Tanheu remained unconscious, watched by people from the medical team. They said that "his vital signs were stable," but he showed no signs of waking up or even moving.

Eridu has (or had) five main nuclear power plants, which were all managed by Algon collectives. They ran on fusion power, which from the beginning of the Noantri settlement had been a monopoly of the Algon. The plants were surrounded by densely populated villages of Algon, living in their characteristic cylindrical (actually, nine-sided) apartment blocks. Ever since the beginning of Noantri New Earth's technology, energy experts had tried to develop fusion power outside the Algon monopoly, and they had failed every time. There was something that the Algon had, that enabled them to maintain fusion energy. Some people, especially in the nouergic community, speculated that there was a nouergic component to it that only the corporations knew about.

There was one thing that was not well-known except among energy professionals: somehow, these plants were failing, one by one. This first came out more than thirty years ago, during the major eruption of Mount Aitna in 196 AC. The eruption destroyed an experimental geothermal power station, and threatened what later turned out to be an illicit nuclear fission power plant. Fission was more dangerous and more vulnerable to disasters than fusion … but it was something that could be reproduced and built without a village of Algon workers to sustain it. But why were the fusion power plants failing? The energy world looked toward Eridu, a heavily Algon region, whose fusion still burned brightly. At least, until the earthquake.

I'm going on about this because the Eridu North power plant was the last fusion plant to be built, in the late 190s, after the Revolution. It made international news because the revolutionary Eridanian government tried to prevent it from being built. There were protests and demonstrations and demands to shut down all nuclear power. For once, strangely, the revolutionaries and their Aurian neighbors were in agreement. The Aurian religion prohibits the use of nuclear power because it "pollutes Fire." I think they mean radioactivity. But the Algon corporation was too strong, and it owned the contracts for all the power plants in the region. So it was built, started up, and ran without incident, until the earthquake.

There were five plants, as I've said. Right after the earthquake, four of them — the older ones — shut down normally. This fifth one didn't, and was still hot. Before the video monitoring systems quit, the cameras revealed a water leak in the inner containment vessel. Radioactive coolant water was spilling out of a crack that was broken open by the earthquake. It was contained by the outer concrete dome, but if the coolant failed, the overheated system would release plasma and steam, break through the outer container, and cause a radioactive disaster that would contaminate all of Eridu. Not a good situation, and this is what Tanheu and Barandigi dropped into, while the earth was still shaking.

TO BE CONTINUED: Barandigi tells her story.

Posted at 3:18 am | link

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