Tales of Henwa Island
Chapter 2
Zuko had recorded where he had traveled in the main complex at Nekoyasha in a set of detailed notes. Azula thought he had grown ill because of radiation exposure from the materials kept on the site. Azula had to conclude she was wrong because she had a payphone sized box – a Geiger counter – that measured ionizing radiation and Zuko had not wandered near a radiation source inside the complex. She had a mouse as backup in case the heavy box was not calibrated and she did blunder into high radioactivity following Zuko's lead. If the mouse twitched and died; she had some idea she had gone around the wrong corner or would return home with a high white blood cell count.
This didn't mean Azula didn't encounter noxious things. The plant had ammonia and boric acid but the tanks seemed intact. She found tanks of nitric acid had started to leak in a part of the plant near the pools that held the used fuel rods under water. The mouse died and she left very quickly. This discovery left her with two questions – why did they keep the used fuel and what possible purpose could something used to make etchings on metal have in a facility like Nekoyasha.
She needed another mouse.
Katara stared out of the yellow foot think windows that allowed a crane operator to view the two huge Olympic sized pools where the Fire Nation had organized the spent or used fuel. Even in the brightly lit room, she could see a blue glow from some of the neatly arranged fuel rods at the bottom of the fifteen meter deep pool. Katara found this oddly unsettling. She found the whole facility – a flat roofed factory like building with the tallest metal stack she had ever seen – oddly unsettling. She found the two meter thick walls unnerving and the huge array of plumbing unsettling. The huge nuclear complex had all sorts of superlatives but one made her shiver – deadliest place on Earth. She wondered how the Fire Nation could build a complicated, ghastly machine for smashing atoms and hope to keep control.
The only thing she found reassuring was the weather outside and the penguins in the huge fresh water reservoirs using their heat to keep themselves warm she had seen outside. The penguins added a touch of the absurd to a barren and evil landscape.
Azula had told Toph definitely not to earth bend anything. Azula assured Toph that any mistake in this strange place would instantly kill – if Toph was lucky – painfully and slowly kill if she were very unlucky. Azula told Toph that she had no idea how long a person would live without skin. Karo kept a wary eye on Toph as they toured the Reactor Hall. This huge room had a flat, thick concrete floor that Toph reckoned was four meters thick with the four huge lab beaker shaped reactors in the floor under their feet. She could 'see' the piping and the complex machinery below her feet and even 'feel' the heat and the pressure. Karo noticed their location as circles with metal squares of red, green and black – some kind of nuclear color code – arranged in a grid. The Reactor Hall had mustard yellow tiles Karo hated covering the rest of the floor. The room stretched as long and as wide as a football field and had a high ceiling filled with pipes and supported by metal trusses painted white with some kind of fire proofing material. Four cranes hung from metal supports over each reactor. Karo could not work out the purpose of those but noticed that the winch hooked into a metal looped attached to the metal painted squares in the grid.
"Something definitely happening here," Toph stood on the huge circle that marked Reactor 3.
Karo fiddled with the piece of film encased in black foil pinned to the shoulder of his black robe. Azula had given these out as a crude means of measuring exposure to the invisible, demon like energies of this place. "Don't do anything!" Karo decided he would not like to meet God after something he didn't understand had blown him to pieces.
"I had no plans to do anything," Toph sounded halfway insulted. "I can feel the steam flowing through this thing under higher pressure than the others."
Azula pushed a large sliding door open and walked into the reactor room, "we have witnessed a first – a Fire Nation technology that actually works and didn't screw up in some new and unanticipated way." Azula raised her fist in a sort of salute, "go team Fire Nation!"
"How comforting!" Toph said sarcastically.
"Aang wants to get rid of this thing," Karo said as he guided Toph around the end of a metal hook that dangled from the crane for reactor two. "Any ideas how to do it?"
"I figure this plant has enough radioactive material to raise the cancer risk of every inhabitant of this planet twenty fold." Azula said in a matter of fact way, "we might as well try to cure the cancer it will cause: it would prove a simpler undertaking than taking this complex apart. I don't mean to be a pessimist but let me explain what we're up against. Even our best scientists barely understand the destructive nature of fission. If the Fire Nation had somehow busted it; then we could walk away from Nekoyasha Island and let the penguins mutate and simply check on it once in a while: the damage having been done would not be our problem. Move the Southern Water Tribe villagers as a precaution so they don't die and go home."
"The Avatar wants to rid the world of this thing," Toph said, "and I don't want to live in a world with this thing."
Azula showed a brief moment of irritation, "this thing still works so shutting it down and taking it apart would take decades. We could dismantle it but some things here don't like being taken handled. We could ship it to some remote site and assuming we avoided a train collision in Omashu or some shipping accident we could bury it in the middle of the Seewong Desert."
Katara walked along a catwalk strung between the cranes for fueling Reactor 3 and 4. "Why not let the Avatar smash it and destroy it completely?"
"Oh! I had not considered that!" Azula put her hands to her face in an obviously mocking gesture as she stood on top of Reactor 2. "He could unleash his full powers on this place!" Azula pointed down at the pattern of red, green and black tiles. "Even I don't understand exactly how it works and I sure as hell don't want to screw with it. I get the willies standing on this lid. Assume the Avatar comes riding in on his Sky Bison and unleashes his full fury – all four elements – on these four reactors to blow them to dust. The material under my feet would heat up to the temperature of the Sun when exposed to the air, the graphite would ignite and then everything would explode. The Southern Hemisphere of this planet might become absolutely uninhabitable. Everyone has noticed we have power and heat. We have power and heat because the scientists could never shut this thing down safely in the time they had to evacuate this place after the War. They left it running not to give the penguins a mildly radioactive hot tub but because this whole place needs a constant flow of cool water or it will go up in a series of explosions that would make Sozin's Comet look like lame movie effects."
Toph swallowed hard, "we're sitting on a bomb?"
"The bomb!" Azula said loudly. "The Avatar could blow this place off the map but not fast enough to prevent the reactors from melting down and blowing up. He could cover it in water but then he would poison the ocean. Azula looked up at Katara. "You went to look at the fuel rod ponds or pools? They have much more poison in them than below my feet."
Azula sat with her feet up on the Control Room Counter as she sipped a cup of rehydrated pot noodles. She could view the Reactor Room below her through plate glass windows. She had begun to understand how the entire nuclear system worked and appreciate how stupid the Fire Nation had acted. They had built Nekoyasha with steam age technology and some lucky guesses. Azula knew the plant and its rudimentary safety systems worked on clockwork, hydraulics and electromechanical machinery better suited for steam locomotives and penny arcade flip-book movie viewers. She took comfort that since the control room lay three floors above the reactor room floor and if something went badly wrong, she would never feel it. She sat at the worlds largest steam engine control room and knew that if something did go wrong, the quaint technology of the plant could do nothing in time to save her.
"We can't do anything to stop this?" Katara walked into the control room.
"No," Azula handed a set of yellowed blueprints to Katara noting the irony of handing over plans for a nuclear reactor to a Southern Water Tribe girl. "The Fire Nation had an extensive nuclear program that extended far beyond here."
Azula sighed, "The Drill used a modified ''GPWR-Kitsune' Reactor for power." She did not bother explain the acronym to Katara since she had noticed Katara holding the blueprint upside down. "This plant has four much larger GPWR-Daifun class reactors. I found the plans for the Drill in the Engineering Workshop at the South end of the building. They built the components here but assembled the whole drill in the Earth Kingdom. I had no idea and didn't know - call it willful ignorance."
"What about all the people in Ba Sing Se or the soldiers?" Katara flipped through the book but it did nothing to help her understand the powers the Fire Nation had unleashed.
"I got tired of lugging this machine around," Azula tapped the metal cover of the Geiger Counter sitting on the counter. Katara knew the explanation would be theatrical and long winded. "It measures the amount of radiation in the area. Since no one agrees on how to measure this, let me use the amount of bananas as a measure since bananas are slightly radioactive. In this room, we are getting about as much radiation as eating a half dozen to a dozen bananas a day – I hate bananas by the way. When the Avatar busted The Drill, he caused a leak in the steam pipes of the reactor. We all got exposures at about the level of eating a thousand or so bananas at one go."
Katara imagined Azula had done the sums and her sums were correct. She had no idea what a blast of radiation would do but then again she knew nobody had any clear idea. "What about The Drill now?"
"I wouldn't roam around inside it," Azula watched the pattern of unchanging lights and dials in the dimly lit room as she spoke. "I suppose it can't do much where it sits and the hard steel shell probably kept the worst contamination inside. I should have known; could have known how they built The Drill. It used a command module mounted high above the machine which made me wonder – why have something sticking out on a machine designed to go through walls? I saw the heavy gear worn by the engineers and yet I never thought this kind of power made it work. "Azula pointed down at the reactor floor. "The Fire Nation probably used nuclear power in The Drill did this for a sinister purpose: they hoped if the Earth Kingdom did destroy the Drill, then the reactor core might become exposed and kill them. Solid Fire Nation engineering proved the flaw in that plant."
"Karo wants to continue operating once we understand it," Katara said, "he doesn't see it as dangerous as long as kept under close supervision. The Southern Water Tribe and this islands of the Earth Kingdom don't have power and he told me this might provide cheap power for them."
"Remind me to hit him upside the head," Azula said as she sat in the chair, "I haven't figured out if the scientists hid to avoid the wrath of the world when their handiwork was discovered or died of radiation sickness. No one else understands this place – I am guessing a good deal. I have no convictions this place can be run safely. Fire Lords didn't consider safety a priority and Lord Ozai had prison labor and so who knows how many faulty welds, batches of bad concrete or miscalculations went into building this place. Even if this thing works what do we do with all the used fuel? Hey King Bumi – can we stuff used fuel rods inside your caves?" Azula snorted with contempt. "We can eliminate that option. The Southern Water Tribe can buy a cheap coal powered generator to keep their fridges going."
Katara thought about this for a moment and realized as a group her village didn't need electricity. "What about letting the Avatar blast a huge hole under it – perhaps with the aid of Toph and capping it under thousands of meters of rock?"
"I wish!" Azula put her arms in the position of the 'fan of power' behind her head. "It won't work and the poison will get out in a short time. This island has glaciers that melt in the summer and then the water flows through cracks in the rock. That water would reach this place even deep underground, heat up and surface with dissolved radioactive material. Even if we could find a way to cap this monster, the plant would heat up from inside and probably leech out. We have ideas but no knowledge: we can't act like we're fixing a locomotive or ship."
"Dismantle it?" Katara said meekly.
"I would agree but that might take decades. I looked into that and sites in the Seewong desert would serve well enough." Azula pulled out an old office chair covered in faded blue leather. "Drill a hole, drop radioactive material in it, seal it and bury it. This assumes the Earth Kingdom wants to help – a long shot."
Katara had seen the Seewong desert and it seemed perfect for losing things but the tribes of the Sand Benders called it home. The Seewong desert covered an area the size of America and proved unlikely to attract attention but she had moral reservations. "The tribes of the Sand Benders call it home. They live as nomads so we would have no means of predicting where they would live."
"We could stake out a repository – the needs of the many?" Azula offered, "We could bury it so deep they would never muck with it or simply dislocate them. What we need for this to work is a part of the world where this can work and where the people living on top of it have no political voice. I don't see nomads as a problem. I think taking this place apart would give engineers the most problems. How would they take this place apart without killing them? How do we ship this waste to the Seewong desert and avoid an accident where the radioactive waste meets a passenger train? Even given the good luck to convince the Earth Kingdom or bribe them, keep the Sand Benders off the site and get the waste apart and shipped to the site we may have decades of work – as I mentioned."
Karo and Toph walked along the walls of one of the Sequestering Pools which weren't pools, they were lakes of hot fresh water. The complex had five of them, each with an area of just over a square kilometer and a depth of fifteen meters. Toph lugged a payphone sized Geiger Counter on her back which clicked from time to time – indicating no abnormal radioactivity. Karo spent his time looking through binoculars and pushing the tame penguins out of his way. The penguins didn't swim in the pools – they didn't like hot, fresh water but they hung around them like tourists around a famous hot spring. In Karo's mind, this proved evolution could select for an organism adapted to the harsh, cold climate of the island but that didn't mean they had to enjoy it.
"These birds are almost as tall as you," Toph laughed as she walked bare foot along the rock wall that dammed off the pool.
"One of these foul beasts is pecking my leg," Karo paused to take a reading from the strange gadget on Toph's back. He had no idea what constituted dangerous but the dial that indicated the level had a helpful red 'Danger' reading. The needle of the dial remained in the white and he breathed a sigh of relief.
"How many bananas have we eaten?" Toph said as she pushed a penguin out of her way.
"Six," Karo answered, "and I hate bananas."
"Why does it smell like laundry softener?" Toph felt warm in spite of the winds that blew in from across the island.
"Ask Azula," Karo grumbled.
Aang wore the finely crafted parka of the Northern Water Tribe. Karo could see the dim outline of Appa nervously growling as he obediently waited in the field of rock and snow between the warm pools as Aang approached him.
"I had not expected you," Karo bowed in spite of his abruptness.
Aang raised his hand as if to silence both Karo and Toph, "I came because this requires my immediate attention. I had not realized the kind of evil the Fire Lords had engaged in until now."
"The reactors are rather ingenious," Karo pushed a persistent penguin who had decided to peck at his pants, "and are way ahead of their time."
"I won't allow such abominations of nature to exist in this realm!" Aang walked up to Karo and spoke severely. "I plan to see this thing utterly erased from our world!"
"Damn this stupid..." Karo glowered at a yellow eyed penguin in its trademark tuxedo. "I meant the bird – not you Avatar." Karo hoped that would soften the offense. "Azula doesn't think burying or blowing this place off the face of the Earth will work. She thinks destroying it and burying it will only make matters much worse. We have checked the place out and in spite of the way a nuclear reactor spits in the face of nature; this place appears to still function."
"Does she understand how it works?" Aang asked forcefully.
"The Fire Nation had more than a quarter of a century of trial and error to build this place," Karo reminded Aang, "so they have stolen a march on the rest of us and no one has any idea how it really works. That the Fire Nation did achieve controlled nuclear fission should be considered a testament to their sheer dogged determination. I have mixed feelings about this place. The Nekoyasha Island complex strikes me as a wonder as great as the walls of Ba Sing Se or the temples of the Air Nomads. At the same time, I wonder how many people died to make it a reality."
"What would you suggest?" Aang looked at Karo who shrank back.
Karo gulped and fidgeted with the probe end of the Geiger Counter. "It generates electricity – lots of it. Reactor 3 still powers two turbines to provide the island with power so we could operate it commercially until we have used all the fuel then at some point in the future – we could dismantle it."
Aang scowled.
"We'll go and find Azula." Karo said as he tapped Toph on the shoulder.
Azula had made sense of the controls. Each reactor had a console with levers and dials to make the reactor function in a stable fashion. Each console overlooked its reactor and controlled everything from the speed and heat of the reactor to the overhead cranes that raised or lowered the fuel rods into place. Each reactor needed three operators to man it – two to man the controls and a third to watch the display of lights on the far wall. A panel of lights behind the operator console showed the status of each fuel rod, the status of the control rods and in a primitive fashion; the flow of water to and from the reactor to the heat exchangers. In Reactor 3, as far as Azula could tell, the operators had left it on a dull boil and fully fueled. She didn't know this exactly for several of the small bulbs that lit to indicate the presence of fuel had burned out and she had no idea where to find replacements.
Aang followed Karo and Toph through the meandering halls and long passageways, over the catwalks that led over the ponds that stored spent fuel. Aang looked over the railing and saw a blue glow emanating from beneath the water of the huge ponds. The scale of the facility impressed Aang even if the complexity of it failed to impress upon his Air Nomad mind. Nothing about the reactor building hinted at beauty – concrete, steel and industrial functionality – not a single sign of individual expression.
"You can see the four reactors as outlines in the floor," Karo pointed out uncomfortably as they walked along the catwalk over the huge reactor complex. "That one," Karo pointed to Reactor 3, "still operates."
After the group passed through an open steel doorway which had an injunction to remain closed, the group found Azula staring up at a strange display of lights. Aang took off his parka and folded it under his arm. Karo and Toph sat down on the chairs at the control panel.
"Don't put that on the console," Azula said without looking at Aang.
"What will happen?" Aang asked.
"Nothing of consequence," Azula answered back, "but an alarm of some sorts will ring. Katara hit a button and it took me a half hour to figure out how to shut the damn thing down. I sent her off to fetch some fresh, dehydrated food and turn it into dinner and tea."
Aang held onto his parka. "You don't sound surprised to see me," Aang said as he looked over the landscape of dials and levers. He noticed a white lab mouse running in an exercise wheel in a metal cage but at least a mouse made sense.
"Can't you just shut it down?" Azula tented her fingers, "I had expected you to show up as soon as possible to make sure we hadn't died. We have explored about ten percent of this place and found no hazards just yet. A tank of nitric acid has begun leaking and giving off fumes but that's all. Anyway, the question on your mind – why can't we shut this thing down?"
"I want to destroy it," Aang said sharply. "I don't want to turn it off and walk away."
"The world is not prepared for this kind of thing – am I right?" Azula turned to face Aang, "given that I can't make sense of all the science and engineering behind it I agree. Unfortunately the nature of the beast makes it impossible to shut this thing down and leave it. I could pull a few rods and twist levers which would stop the machinery. Sound good? Let me tell you what we're up against."
Aang watched the mouse in its cage, "okay."
"The scientists left this thing running," Azula shuffled a few concepts around in her mind to make things easier to explain. "They figured out that Uranium could give off energy by shedding particles and if they put enough in close proximity, the particles from one atom would hit the atom of another and make it break apart, give off energy and so on. They called this fission. The reactors gave them a way of controlling this process and making power from it. The problem is that once started, they found out even when things are shut down; they needed to keep everything cool because the reactor core would grow surface of the Sun hot. They left one of the reactors running to keep things humming or atom smashing along – they had to keep water flowing into the reactors to keep them from blowing up. It they walked away and this place had no power, it would probably poison a huge swath of the Earth."
Katara emerged from a stairwell holding a tray of food and a metal pot of tea. She saw Aang and placed the tray on the console so she could give Aang a hug in greeting.
A siren went off and Azula picked up the tray and pressed a series of buttons. "I wish I could train you to stop doing that!" Azula gave Katara a look of grave irritation as the siren wound down and grew silent. "I would pay good money to choke the now dead bastard that wired in the 'test' function for the emergency siren."
Aang looked earnest, "I need a solution. I can't allow this dangerous thing to exist! I won't let Karo turn it into a power plant...and I won't wait half my life to tear it down."
Katara and Suki found many interesting books in their explorations of the various functional buildings that surrounded the main complex and they enlisted the help of Karo to dutifully carry them back to Azula. Most of the documents consisted of nothing more than accounting and materials spreadsheets but Azula found the names of plant personnel, key scientists and administrators attracted to the various pieces of paperwork that flowed through the complex.
The trio found Toph at the control console but Azula was absent.
"I tried to stop her," Toph swiveled and then kicked herself toward Katara. "That woman doesn't listen and she went inside the reactor. I can feel her crawling on top of the steel lid. She found out about these doors that led to the spaces above the reactor and so she went inside."
Katara looked at Toph, 'where are these doors?"
Toph stood up and motioned for the others to follow her. Everyone dropped their pile of documents and followed Toph down the stairs to the reactor floor. She pointed to an open domed metal metal hatch which had a painted plaque that read 'For Authorized Personnel Only'. " She's somewhere inside." Toph said.
Katara climbed down the metal rungs into a meter and a half tall concrete crawlway dimly lit by red lights. Suki and Karo followed behind her nervously anticipating an invisible monster to engulf them.
They found Azula sitting on the steel floor eating a pot noodle with a notebook next to her. Between her and the others was a maze of upright shiny steel tubes about the size of a wrist. "What!" She asked as everyone stared at her.
Katara crawled around the tubes and faced Azula, "what is this place?"
"The engineers call it the reactor lid," Azula said calmly, "Two thousand tons of welded Fire Nation tough steel and concrete that seals the reactor from air and protects us – we hope – from harm."
"Can you hurry up!" Karo complained from the far side of the maze of tubes, "its hot as well the top of a nuclear furnace in here."
Azula had enough room to stand up with little fear of bashing her head but she rose carefully because the dim red lighting did little to help her resolve details and she had banged her head on a metal bolt when she had crawled into the cramped space. She held onto her pot noodle and pointed at Katara with the cheap wooden chopsticks that came with the wax paper can of noodles. "I came down here to fix some things in my mind."
Katara felt the heat and frustration and her Water Tribe common sense told her she did not want to walk on top of the very thing that threatened to poison her homeland but she shrugged, "what would happen if this thing exploded?"
"We would die," Azula said, "the penguins would die in a blast of radiation and then a cloud of radioactive dust would rain down on all of the rest of the world. Kind of cool that the Fire Nation figured out how to do this – huh?"
"Can you guys please get moving?" Suki shouted out. "I'm starting to get sticky."
"The steam lines run out to the heat exchangers under that corridor." Azula shouted out, "anyway I'm coming!" She grabbed one of the shiny rods and moved in front of Katara. "The Fire Nation has had steam power for generations – you know that – you've seen our ships. This thing really 'boils down' – nice pun – to a steam engine tipped on its side and shoved into a concrete cup about five meters across and twelve meters deep."
Katara looked at the shiny tubes, "and these things?" She tapped a metal tube.
"The ends of the fuel rods." Azula answered as she continued forward, "under your feet are steam pipes, then another metal lid, then the reactor core where all the heat is made, another thick metal lid and then the pipes that carry cold water into the reactor out the bottom. We're really in no danger at all up here unless you count bashing your brains out on a bridge bolt as dangerous." Azula ducked as she passed a large bolt in the ceiling. "I have learned a good deal by crawling all over the inside of this thing although I still don't know if I can get into the space underneath it. Watch your head."
Katara ducked, "what's the problem then?"
"It lies under out feet where atoms of Uranium get smashed apart," Azula held her pot noodles in her left hand as she slowly walked forward. "The Fire Nation really stole a march on the rest of the world. Most of this place functions using the kind of technology any country with steam powered ships has at hand – plumbing and the ability to boil water. The reactor pile surprised me because to make it work and not kill everyone within ten clicks requires some degree of understanding of how the atom works. I knew of fission – er – atomic power as a concept on the very limits of theories." Azula stood in front of Suki and made an abrupt gesture with her free hand for her to turn around in the cramped space. "The amount of trial and error required to achieve this without proper theoretical backing must have been ghastly."
Suki turned around, "what does all that mean?"
"You might find a few dead welders in the crawlspace," Azula answered back, "and the reason you and Karo are so warm is because you are wearing your parkas."
"No dead welders?" Suki followed Azula down a long tunnel that logically should have led to the base of the reactor where the cold water entered the reactor. Azula had picked Suki to join her in spelunking the bottom of Reactor 3 because Karo complained far too much. Suki had steady nerves which both girls needed in the dimly lit world of the basement of the reactor hall although Azula imagined she wore her Kyoshi Warrior uniform either to annoy or because she wanted to die in them.
Azula jumped onto the floor of the tunnel and found a passageway leading to the base of the reactor. "I suppose they were entombed in the five meter thick walls." Azula felt the smooth concrete wall and walked forward into a room that had a maze of plumbing. She had hoped the room would be dry – leaks in the cold water cycle could mean something far worse wrong inside the reactor running at metal welding temperatures above her head.
"You are not a happy person are you?" Suki looked at the oddly geometric tangle of pipes that exited out the wall above her head. The Fire Nation had a philosophy of engineering that made things thick, bulky and heavy. Suki had seen Fire Nation phone booths made so strong they could protect the caller from meteorites and the reactor showed the same level of over-engineering seen in their prisons, ships and forts.
"No." Azula said as she tapped the pipes. "Should I be?"
"Do you regret anything you had to do during the War?" Suki followed Azula as she scribbled notes with a pencil on a metal clipboard.
"Just now I realized Karo would prove less irritating," Azula continued writing. "What did I do to you?"
"You interrogated me, wouldn't let me have proper food and deprived me of sleep; imprisoned me and left me to rot," Suko held onto a water pipe and poked Azula in the chest.
Azula looked down at her chest, "what did I do to you that was especially cruel or beyond the norm for my duties as a princess of pain?" Azula looked at Suki and said rather enigmatically, "you have one of the cutest noses of any girl I have met. Sokka is a lucky man."
Suki made a mental note to ask Karo or Katara about Azula and followed her as she made her inspection. Suki had never made sense of Azula although she had no trouble sensing Azula had all the hallmarks of being a genius. Suki disliked Azula but decided not to pick a fight with her while probing a nuclear reactor.
"Graphite Moderated Pressure Water Reactor," Azula made a few notes as she ducked pipes and walked around the supports that held up the reactor from the thick concrete floor of the concrete vessel.
Suki ducked under the pipes, "I'll take your word for it."
"I noticed a set of pipes that force nitrogen into the core." Azula put her hand on a silver pipe with red characters on a white background with a black arrow beneath it that read 'Inert Gas Pressure Line'. "The plans we read were accurate and every bit of plumbing they show is here. Graphite is the stuff in my pencil and it will burn in open air."
"Why use it?" Suki hesitated to touch anything.
"I haven't quite worked that out," Azula admitted, "but the plans hinted at something about 'moderating' the reaction. The inside of this pile or reactor reaches about seven hundred degrees Celsius and so if air got inside the vessel then it would burn. I can sit down and work it all out when I have time – right now I feel relieved the plans reflect reality."
Azula kept taking notes and largely ignored Suki. Azula had problems beyond Suki's hurt feelings to consider as she focused on her task. The reactor had a concrete outer casing with holes to let people and pipes pass. Inside fit a steel pot or reactor vessel that contained blocks of graphite with holes to allow water pipes and fuel rods to pass. The collection of graphite and pipes the engineers called the pile. Above and below the vessel sat three meter thick steel shields to protect people working near the reactor. The reactor pile boiled water, made steam and drove a turbine to spin a generator. The Fire Nation engineers had taken inspiration from their navy vessels. They burned coal inside a round firebox with water pipes that ran up through it to make high pressure steam used to run turbines. Around the firebox a steel jacket filled with water from the surrounding ocean called a calandria acted as a heat shield and kept the heat even and prevented boiler explosions.
"Dismantle it!" Aang said angrily, "or I will." He made an effort to find Azula and found her taking notes as she crawled along the top of the reactor she had renamed 'Sanji' if for no other reason than it amused her.
"You will need a few tools," Azula held out a screw driver.
"I will make a pit and shove the whole thing into it!"
Azula sat like a Buddha and pondered that, "you hate the Southern Water Tribe and Kyoshi Island that much? You could shove the whole thing in a pit five kilometers deep but then it would sit and contaminate the sea and ground for thousands of years. I assume you can earth bend and make a big wall to escape the blast of radiation you will face when the four reactors blow up and spew their contents into the air as they break open."
Aang sat down next to Azula, "why can't we solve this?"
"We never should have built this," Azula said quietly, "but we did and now we have to face our problems. You can control all four elements so lets think about all the tools at your disposal. You could use air bending and blow the building into the sea and it would sink and the reactors with all that heat would explode like massive bombs when the sea water filled them. Fire bending would prove useless – this would result in a radioactive inferno because the reactor core burns in air. The Fire Nation built in no safeguards against fire and so the fire would rage for months driven by the reactors or they would meltdown with such heat that they would reach the groundwater and explode. Water bending might allow you to raise a huge wave to wash over the place and such it into the sea but that only would spread the poison into the food the people in the Southern Water Tribe rely on. Burying it would probably poison the sea and the groundwater, cause a meltdown and kill you. Rocks have tiny cracks and the plant would sit underground, heat up and drive water from deep underground through cracks to the surface and into the sea at the very best. At the worst, water from the glaciers melting in the highlands of this island and sea water driven deep into the remains of the reactors would turn to steam and explode and drive radioactive steam to the surface."
Aang tapped a pipe and felt the warm and perfectly machined surface, "you doubt my skills?"
"I doubt mine," Azula said, "this reactor lid covers enough poison to kill everyone on the planet if spread evenly. This is one reactor of four all balanced on a razors edge."
Click, Whir!
A metal rod began to move up and stopped a few seconds later.
"What was that?" Aang tensed.
"Control rod," Azula said as she leaned back on the concrete walkway at the edge of the shiny rods that lifted fuel bundles and control rods out of the reactor. She noticed they moved up and down slightly as the reactor operated. A motor drove a worm gear and lifted the rod out or in at a slow rate. This design aspect bothered her since in an emergency she had hoped they would fall in to halt the reaction not lazily lower into it. "They slow down the reactor when they get lowered and speed it up when they are raised. I have no idea why they seem to raise and lower by a few centimeters in that way. Perhaps some kind of automatic system tries to keep the reactor stable."
Aang relaxed partly because Azula the expert seemed to show no signs of anxiety, "why can't we shut this down then?"
"The plant has a standard Fire Nation coal fired steam generator to keep the cooling systems going if the power fails," Azula began to half crawl and half walk around the side of the reactor. "They have enough fuel for a week – maybe. The military probably wanted to walk away from this place and hope it kept going until they had all died or vanished." She gestured as if giving a tour.
Whir! Click! Momentary pause! Clank! A loud dull metallic thud resonated in the space below the floor.
"What was that!" Aang shouted as the emergency sirens kicked in.
Azula grabbed Aang by his orange collar and yanked him along as she ran. "My guess? The control rods fell into the reactor." She had grown accustomed to the dull, quiet roar and grew alarmed as the roar slowly lowered in pitch.
"The Fire Nation was reckless and stupid to build this thing!" Aang yelled out in anger as Azula tossed him through the hatch that led to the surface.
"All of our hallmarks!" Azula let go of Aang who ran up the stairs behind her. She entered the Reactor 3 control room with a look of anger and fear.
Toph was the only person in the room and she looked fearful. "I only did a little earth bending! I tried to make my tea cup jump from the console into my hand."
"Tell God!" Azula turned the siren off: she knew she had a few minutes to keep everyone alive as she played with the dials that managed the control rods. A set of green lights which had flashed rapidly began to flash more slowly as she played with the controls.
Sokka and Suki had gone outside to take a walk and spend some time together but they rushed back in. "The big smokestack is spewing steam!" Sokka gulped for air, "a big cloud straight up!"
"I saw a flash and a flare lit up!" Suki added as she wrapped her parka around her for warmth and psychological comfort. "A big flame came out of the roof next to the big smokestack!"
A loud groan arose from the back of the room in the direction of the turbine hall. Azula noted that nothing lit up so assumed this might not be dangerous.
Sokka ran up to Azula, "anything I can do?"
Azula sat down at one of the chairs, "Toph bumped a control and shut down the reactor. It'll take a few minutes for it to come up to full power and I hope I remembered those settings properly or that nothing broke inside the reactor or the cooling system or turbine or my mind." Azula sat at the the chair and in her demanding way scolded herself for allowing people into the control room without thinking about the inherent carelessness of some members of the group.
The penguins had no knowledge of nuclear power but instinctively ran off in random directions along the banks of the warm water ponds when the plant emitted a low groan. Karo and Katara had taken a walk with a Geiger Counter to take measurements in the endless hunt for ionizing radiation and as the steam rose from the tall metal stack, the needle pegged itself in the red region of the graph, the device chirped like a cricket, and only slowly settled back.
Karo looked at Katara, "we didn't need our hair; did we?"
"I have my eyes on the white flames that just shot into the air." Katara wrapped her arm around Karo as a signal to walk quickly back toward the buildings. "Azula must be cooking again."
A half hour later, Azula tapped the dial that measured the heat in the core. It looked like the same gauge seen on naval ships and it did the same thing – measured heat. In this case, it told Azula that the reactor core had a temperature of 750 degrees Celsius. She hoped the gauge was reading wrong but had no faith in her luck. She tapped the glass but the dial refused to change its reading.
This meant trouble. The others had gone to a room at the farthest point from the reactor hall they could find and gone to sleep. Azula heard a creak and jumped off the seat.
"You need sleep," Sokka said kindly. "I have a knack for machinery so I can take over. I invented the submarine."
Azula sat back down, "well now that you've finished scaring me can you go outside and see if the flares are still lit? Just look, don't loiter!"
Azula had read all the available documentation but that included little theory and she had no idea if the Fire Nation engineers had built on a sound theoretical foundation or by trial and error. As she waited for Sokka, she slowly lowered the control rods into the reactor hoping the temperature would slowly lower. Control rods functioned to slow and stop the chain reaction – how this worked - she didn't fully understand. Azula could not be faulted for this for none of her teachers would have had any clearer idea of how the reactor worked. The Fire Nation had learned some theory but used trial and error to build the reactor so overlooked a serious flaw. The graphite in the pile kept the reaction going by acting to slow down the neutrons and other particles so they would strike more Uranium atoms, split them and thus allow the reactor to react – it moderated the reaction.
"Like torches," Sokka ran back into the control room. "What does that mean?"
Azula never had much trust in Fire Nation engineering – she swore under her breath and wished she had thirty more other physicists (preferably those who built this thing) and another thousand on call. "Sokka, we have a problem," Azula said with a cold calm betrayed by a tremor in her voice that made Sokka grow cold. "Get everyone up here." Azula returned to the controls as Sokka ran downstairs.
The group walked in yawning and looking deprived of sleep.
Azula wasted no time, "Toph go downstairs and walk across the reactor and tell me what you -uh – see." Azula pointed to Karo who scratched pimple on his face, "you help her."
"Whats going on?" Katara asked between yawns.
"Unless we get lucky, Reactor 3 will commit suicide in a few hours and take us with it." Azula replied as she watched Karo and Toph walk out onto the brightly lit reactor floor. "I hope you guys have nothing planned."
Aang tapped his glider as an extremely unnerved look crossed Azula's face, "I wanted this place destroyed!" He swept his hands in a grand commanding gesture. "While I was riding with Appa I saw the flash of steam this afternoon and I knew something had happened."
"You got your wish!" Azula said as she watched the temperature dial which had risen ever so slightly. She heard Toph and Karo stomping up the stairs as she wondered what she could do. "What did you see Toph?"
"I don't know," Toph said reluctantly as she felt some guilt for what seemed to be a very serious matter, "I don't know what I'm looking at but I saw dragon carvings at the bottom of those tubes that you were fiddling with."
"Damn Fire Nation idiots!" Azula yelled and clenched her fists to stem her anger as the full scale of the danger now struck her. The diagrams had indicated the control rods had graphite tips and in Azula's mind this had made some sense since graphite acted to lubricate the rods and prevent jamming of the mechanism. The tips had been carved into the shape of dragons for some odd reason with nothing to do with scientific or safety concerns - someone decided it looked appropriately Fire Nation although no one would ever see them. The shape didn't make for problems but the fact the tips had fallen into the reactor made for huge complications.
Katara coughed, "what's the bad news?"
"I worried about a massive radiation leak if the Avatar destroyed this place. Like a flu virus in an old age home, radiation gets into everything and everyone." Azula said with her trademark gallows humor. "We can't control the reactor because the system that does that busted so the reactor is overheating. We have a massive radiation leak because the reactor is spewing its radioactive steam in a desperate attempt to ward off self destruction." Azula looked at Aang half expecting a reprimand, "I think we're safe enough inside this building but I would imagine we will see lots of dead penguins outside."
"What about Appa!" Aang screamed in Azula's face. "I left him in one of the buildings outside."
Azula said nothing and looked blank: she hadn't thought of that. "Bigger animals should tolerate such poisoning much better than small ones. We have to leave – now! The Southern Water Tribe must be warned quickly. If they are lucky then the winds will blow out to sea, but nothing about this place makes me confident in my predictions." Azula looked down at the ground for a moment.
A loud growl followed by a series of bangs like the thuds of a war drum deafened everyone in the room. A flaw in the reactor design became quite clear as Azula watched the temperature indicator rise a notch. The sealed reactor could not expand as it heated up so it would explode suddenly and then they would all die.
"Run!" Azula pushed Aang almost on his hindquarters. "If we don't go now we won't ever leave – we will be manning this place forever!"
Azula rushed out behind her friends not because she lacked some enlightened self interest but because she noticed the temperature gauge move a tiny amount upward.
"Stay together and follow me!" Aang shouted as they hit the base of the stairs.
Katara kept her eye on Toph as they rushed down the hallway. The lights remained on and Katara thought that somehow thermonuclear destruction would have more flickering lights, pyrotechnics with loud sound effects. Aang blasted the door out right off its hinges.
Azula felt a shock like that of an earthquake and knew they had no chance.
She could imagine the events unfolding in her mind's eye. The reactor ruptured in a huge steam explosion. The huge reactor lid she had stood on the day before flew into the air tearing a gash in the ceiling and then falling into the reactor vessel. This lid weighed more than some ships and when it hit the reactor then the reactor would collapse through the bottom of the vessel and the air would reach the fuel and graphite.
"We're dead!" Azula gasped as she heard the hissing thumps of hot graphite and fuel hitting the ground.
I hope no one takes this seriously but I while wiring this I did research much about nuclear technology The kind of reactor I imaged was the simplest a steam aged nation could engineer. That they made this reality was not Azula's fault.
I think a civilization that had Victorian technologies could figure out nuclear fission. A nation at at war can achieve many things if they are deluded into believing that the ne discovery would aid them in the War. The kind of reactor and the kind of safety systems would also reflect this. Azula couyld not have expected to have understood this because she lacked the theoretical understanding.
In the Avatar world no one had been stupid enough to make a nuclear reactor.
The GPWR or Graphite High Pressure Water Reactor came out of decades of trial and error and even then they had flaws.