The Shaking

Chapter Sixteen

Dungeness Power Station.

"I'm all right!" said Alan Carter as he brushed away the proffered hand of a concerned technician. In truth he didn't feel OK, having struck the side of his head against the side of the console when the massive jolt threw him sprawling to the floor along with many others, but his giddiness and blurred vision were problems which could be ignored for the moment. What the hell could have happened?

"Turn that bloody klaxon off and give me a sitrep!" he ordered. But none of the staff had any coherent reply to offer, they were all trying to make sense of their radically altered world or pulling themselves back into their chairs as the back-up lights flickered into action."Come on people! Get a grip on it!"

This must be the mother of all incidents he thought as he looked at the display screens; many of them were blank. That shouldn't have happened; nor should the power have gone out completely leaving just the subdued emergency lighting remaining. The complex's contingency generators - eight large diesel engines - should have started automatically by now, yet they had failed to do so.

At last there was relief from the earsplitting noise as the master alarm was silenced. It was patently obvious to everyone there had been a major event, but of what type? The staff had run simulations of course; preparing for the outside chance that extremists might deliberately crash an airliner against the reinforced concrete reactor vessel, or the detonation a nuclear weapon in the area; be it a small terrorist bomb or a deliberately targeted warhead which had been intercepted or missed its aiming point due to a guidance malfunction: The reactor had been designed to survive such eventualities.

For now until the computerised systems restarted the control room operators were operating blind; reliant on the scant information their analogue instruments provided to monitor the condition of the reactors. Alan reached down to pick up a notepad and biro which had been knocked off a desk and onto the floor; he needed to begin a log, writing down the actions they'd taken along with any measurements they recorded so they'd have a baseline of data to work from. He examined the critical systems first: The control rod status matrix remained unlit so there was no way of knowing for certain that the automatic failsafe mechanism had tripped and dropped the rods back into the pile, so damping the reaction. But if the gauges were to be believed at least some activity - more than there ought to be - was continuing, though given the juddering the station had just endured who knew what readings could be relied upon? The first rule in situations such as this was never to take anything for granted; find the truth of the matter out for yourself.

"Where's the bloody power?" he demanded, reaching for one of the walkie-talkies which had been dislodged from their recharging base; maybe someone elsewhere in the complex had an idea what was happening. As if in answer the lights came back on and the computer systems began to reboot. As they did so more of the consoles came back online, but not all of them.

The operators had run through nearly every conceivable emergency scenario in an on-site simulator suite: It was such a routine part of their training they took it for granted and were confident of dealing with any problem in their stride. But nothing in the most outlandish worst-case imaginings had ever resembled the state of the control room readouts at the moment.

With the emergency power restored the displays were flickering wildly and the indicator lights resembled those of a twinkling Christmas tree, the majority of them were warning reds and ambers rather than safe greens. It appeared to Carter only around a half of the control rods had failsafed; the rest were indicated as still being withdrawn to some degree. But all of them should have dropped fully home under gravity to their shutdown positions in the event of power being cut to the electromagnets coupling the rods to their retractor mechanisms, so why hadn't they?