Phoenix Sub Zero

Lieutenant Commander Thomas Schramford had been Phoenix’s chief engineer for almost three years. Before that he had served as an engineering-division officer on the Hartford in each of the aft divisions — electrical, reactor and mechanical — then rotating to the new construction submarine Tampa while she was built at Dynacorp’s Electric Boat’s Groton yards. While spending his two years watching Tampa progress from a single hoop of structural HY-80 to a fully fitted-out combat submarine he learned the 688class in such detail that every cable, valve, microelectronic processor, pipe and panel were engraved in his memory. On the wall above the engineering officer of the watch’s desk was a large print of the piping and instrumentation systems of the plant, from the core’s main coolant piping to the last condensate pump pressure control valve. As part of studying for the engineer exam, Schramford had to be able to reproduce it from memory, and he still could. If need be he could have started up the reactor from memory — in spite of the fact that Operating Instruction 27, Normal Reactor Startup, was over 120 pages long, not including the steam plant startup procedures.

Of all the men aboard, Schramford was one of few in the aft compartment who had escaped serious injury or loss of consciousness from the collision with the bottom — the others who remained conscious were dazed or trapped under bodies or equipment. He was conscious but his mind was dulled with pain from striking his groin on something, the terrible ache ballooning up through his abdomen. He clamped his eyelids shut and bit his lip, trying to fight the pain, but for some time the pain won, and after seconds or minutes or hours the ache eased but continued throbbing, sapping his strength.

The ship was quiet, the roar of the turbines gone, the air handlers shut down, the reactor inert. There on the deck of the maneuvering room, Schramford found his thoughts turning to the reactor core. The ship had been steaming full out just before the loss of all electrical, and the reactor went from over 150 percent power to zero. But nuclear reactors never just turned off. The radioactivity of the core remained after the bulk of the reactions were stopped, adding tremendous heat to the coolant loop, in this case heat equivalent to running the core at fifteen percent power without cooling.

Uncooled, that power would soon melt the reactor, possibly find its way out the bottom of the pressure vessel and then eat through the hull itself.

The ship’s designers had planned for such an emergency; the emergency cooling system, XC as it was abbreviated, was a brilliant set of pipes, valves and a seawater tank that could cool the core using the trick that hot water rises and cold sinks—natural circulation. No moving parts. Had it been lined up, Schramford would have had no worries, but it had been locked out in its configuration for at-sea operation, the procedure designed to prevent an inadvertent XC initiation when at power, since an unintended cold-water injection into a critical reactor could cause a core runaway.

But now, with no flow and no XC, the reactor vessel would be stewing, its temperature rising, certainly boiling the coolant. Once the water was driven from the core and replaced with steam, the fuel would melt and the ship would die.

Schramford’s mind, groggy and full of pain, filled with three words—Three Mile Island.

Schramford slowly climbed to his feet and searched the darkened space for an emergency air-breathing mask, finally retrieving one from an overhead cubbyhole. He strapped it on, the black rubber straps a spider across his face until his chubby features poked into the Plexiglas face mask. He reached up to plug in the hose, clipped the regulator to his belt and breathed in. Almost immediately his head cleared, and his first thought was that this was a bad sign. The atmosphere was contaminated, the scrubbers and burners and oxygen bleed gone since they had hit bottom. It could be worse … the battery might be dumping toxic clouds of chlorine gas into the ship or one of the weapons might be leaking fuel. A Javelin cruise missile rocket motor burning would fill the boat with hydrogen cyanide, in which case Schramford and the crew would already be dead.