Get Into James Shorts - 52. 3771

Sometimes when Murphy comes calling, he can really bring it.

Dmitri Koslov, senior engineer on the night shift of the Kursk Regional Reactor Authority, shared a nip of vodka with the cute nurse in the dispensary before his shift started. February was cold in Russia.

Koslov asked the day-shift leader, "Victor, is there anything we need to know?"

Victor shook his head and said, "The Geology people from the Oblast(1) reported a series of small earthquakes near Belograd this afternoon. The strongest was 3.3."

Dmitri shrugged, "They call whenever there's anything worse than a 3 in the Oblast, but that's more than a hundred kilometers away. It's always nothing, but we log it anyway. Goodnight."

Boris and Pyotr, his fellow night shift workers, brought up their workstations and the three engineers began their careful watch over the cluster of four fifty-year-old R7000 series light-water reactors. In their day, which was the 1970s, the R7000 had been the cutting edge of Soviet technology. It delivered 8.8 at peak output or 4.4 megawatts of reliable power to the industrial heartland of Mother Russia.

Thankfully, there was none of the liquid-sodium cooled madness of the Chernobyl nightmare still festering in Ukraine. Anyone who looked at it could see that it was merely a copy of the Westinghouse design with a few Russian touches thanks to the old KGB and GRU.

As bad as the Soviet era had been, the current era had its downsides, too. Mother Russia had adopted capitalism, or at least its worst aspects like greed and corruption. Now the oligarchs did what they wanted while ruling over the decaying infrastructure of a gigantic country. Every Engineer knows it's not just building Rome that is the true challenge, it must also be maintained for in every way that matters, that infrastructure is the country.

At 20:41, an unfamiliar yellow light began flashing on Boris's panel. He muttered, "What the hell?" as he grabbed the manual with the error code listings. He flipped pages:

3771 - Environmental monitor alert

Dmitri stood with his hand over the big red SCRAM button that would crash the reactors and send them into safe mode. He tried to keep his voice level as Boris fumbled with a manual, "What is it Boris?"

"I don't know..."

Boris put the manual down and changed the screens to the Environmental monitor overview and looked at it. The power station had a ring of radiation detectors at various distances outside the plant as far out as ten kilometers. Any leak of radiation from the plant would be instantly detected. They were displayed by green dots on a map of the area. Some of the dots were yellow instead of green.

Boris finally said, "There's a slight rise in radioactivity but, it's not the plant. The closest is three kilometers away."

If they had known out gassing of Xenon was often a precursor to a massive quake, they might have survived the rare 8.1 intraplate slip-thrust earthquake that flattened old Soviet concrete buildings in a region 1200 kilometers across.

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(1) state