Voyage of the Devilfish

Chief Engineer Delaney wasted no time giving the order to restart the nuclear reactor. The procedures he was about to execute would have made a civilian nuclear operator faint dead away… the emergency reactor startup procedure was so dangerous that it was not even practiced unless the ship was beyond fifty miles from land, and even then only with rigorous controls and supervision. This day Man Delaney would see how sharp the pencils of naval reactors’ design-engineers were. This startup would stress the reactor like it had never been stressed, including the shock from the Magnum hit. Delaney started with a reactor plant in poor condition. With less than minutes left on the battery in this reducedload status, the running of the reactor main coolant pumps to get flow through the core would exhaust the battery in three minutes or less. The coolant inventory in the core was dangerously low from the previous fast leak from the starboard loop. It would be like trying to start up the Three Mile Island plant in the middle of the accident. Delaney scanned the instruments. The primary coolant, without the heat input from the nuclear fissions, had cooled to 350 degrees. To warm it to 500 Delaney would be using an emergency heat-up rate. Usually the core was warmed gently at a degree per minute to avoid stressing the thick steel reactor vessel already made brittle by radiation. The emergency heat-up rate had never been done before, on any reactor. It might put enough stress on the plant to blow the head off the reactor vessel, or fracture the six-inch-thick steel. Even if the warm-up went well the plant was only partly operational. The leak had dumped one coolant loop of highly radioactive water to the reactor compartment bilges. The port steam system was useless with the condenser isolated from the seawater flooding, which left one coolant loop and one steam generator to power one electrical turbine and one main engine. Assuming he could get the reactor critical fast enough. Conventional wisdom held that nuclear reactors couldn’t explode like nuclear weapons. Natural uranium, melted together with the zirconium fuel metal and control-rod hafnium, ordinarily would not sustain a critical mass to explode like a bomb. Of course, the key was the natural uranium fuel. The reactor of the Devilfish was not a natural uranium low-power density core like a civilian land-based unit. The Devilfish’s fuel modules were packed with uranium-238, highly enriched uranium. The core had the power of a reactor thirty times its size. If the fuel modules ever did melt down there was a slight chance that the core could form a critical mass and go critical. The result would be a “prompt critical rapid disassembly”—jargon for a detonation. Well, if they melted down and went prompt critical, he wouldn’t be around long enough to worry about it. He began his string of orders, each vital to waking the beast in the reactor compartment: “Check battleshort switch. Secure emergency cooling— shut XC-9. Pass the word to the Engineering Watch Supervisor, shut all scram breakers and equalize around and open Main Steam Two. Manderson, take the operational-mode selector-switch to cutback override, low-pressure cutout switch to low-pressure cutout, source range channel selector switch to star-up rate scram cutout. Ready? Start number-two main coolant pump in slow speed.” Petty Officer Manderson, the reactor operator, stood and pulled up on pump two’s T-handle. With a thump of check valves, the pump started. The battery amp-hour digital meter on the electrical panel immediately began clicking.

“Battery discharge rate is 800 amps, Eng,” the electrical operator said. Delaney frowned. They were sucking a tremendous current from an almost dead battery. This would be a helluva race against time.

“Apply latch voltage to inverter alpha.”

Manderson grabbed the pistol grip in the center of the panel and rotated it to the RODS IN position as he pulled it out from the panel face. The chronometer in the maneuvering room over the door clicked off the seconds. The digital amp-hour meter of the plant-control panel clicked three times a second, each click bringing the ship closer to total loss of power.

“Group one rods latched,” Manderson said, releasing the pistol grip.

“TO, pull rod group one to criticality. Nine decades per minute startup rate. Give me heatup of the reactor to 500 degrees.”