“Right,” he said. “That falls to Bobby’s team.”
“Why do they need supervision?”
Paul pulled a perfectly clean olive pit from his mouth and placed it on a paper napkin. “Let’s say a sub comes in, and the reactor’s cooling system needed to be flushed. The guys on the sub can shut the reactor down, and the guys in nuclear maintenance know what they need to do. But there are lots of protocols everyone has to follow to make sure no one’s exposed to too much radiation.”
“And that’s where you come in?”
He nodded.
“So your whole job is to make it safe for Bobby’s team to work?”
“Well, it’s not my whole job, but yeah, it’s a big part of it.”
37.
WE ORDERED PLATES OF FREGOLEwith mussels and potato, and while we waited for those to arrive, Paul explained that a sub’s nuclear reactor was no bigger than a pair of fifty-five-gallon drums, but it lived inside a spacious containment room lined in lead. Before any repair, the guys in Paul’s division would go in and tent the worksite, which served as an extra barrier on the off chance that any nuclear particles escaped during the repair. Then they’d conduct a grid survey, which sounded complicated but was pretty simple. One of the technicians would use string to cordon off the containment room, turning it into a giant three-dimensional checkerboard. From each square, he’d hang a radiac, which measured ionizing radiation. The idea was that every guy working on the reactor had a rem number—rem stands for roentgen equivalent man—and those rem numbers were calculated according to the guy’s age and previous radiation exposure. In general, young men were supposed to be exposed to less radiation than older men, and no one was to go over five rem a year. They all wore film badges, which were collected and analyzed monthly, and there was a lot of math, figuring out who could be in the containment room, where, and for how long. The long and short of it was that every repair had to be meticulously worked out in advance.
Radiological Controls was also responsible for ensuring that no one tracked radiation out of the containment room, into the rest of the sub, and potentially onto the submarine tender. Radiation particles can cling to clothing, boots, hair, you name it. And, of course, they’re invisible to the naked eye. Guys conducting repairs would try to get ahead of this by wearing anti-contamination clothing into the containment room, but even after they’d shed their gear, someone would run a Geiger counter over them, testing their hair, skin, and clothes for errant particles.
RADCON had a whole protocol for what to do if one of the technicians inadvertently contaminated the ship. Paul, or maybe Brick, wouldhead for a control station and use the shipboard announcing system to issue the call “All hands stand fast,” which basically means don’t move a muscle and most definitely do not put anything in your mouth. Everyone on the tender was supposed to stay exactly where they were while the guys in Paul’s division made a systematic sweep of the ship—testing surfaces and taking readings as fast as they could to isolate and mitigate the source of the contamination.
I can remember wondering what that meant—to “mitigate” the source of the contamination. RADCON had big drums in which they stored contaminated rags, plastic bags, paper, filters, or ion exchange resin. But imagine some technician went back to his berthing compartment and touched his light switch, his rack, maybe even his storage locker before the call came over the main circuit. You can’t just mop up radioactive particles, so the most likely scenario is that Paul’s division would have to demolish the entire berthing compartment and figure out a way to physically contain every single contaminated item they pulled out of there. Eventually, all that crap would have to be transported back to the U.S. and buried in some very scary disposal site, most likely in Washington State, where the carcasses of about 140 nuclear reactors sit under thousands of feet of dirt.
In a crisis, the guys in RADCON would be busy, but I got the impression that most days the job was pretty dull. They were required to conduct environmental testing in and around the tender on a quarterly basis, which meant collecting and analyzing sediment, water, and marine life, then supplementing that data with shoreline surveys, dosimeter readings, and effluent monitoring, which Paul explained was the testing of their own industrial waste. It was his least favorite part of the job.
RADCON spent the balance of its time training theGilmore’s crew on best practices and running drills, including a particularly horrible one code-named Emergency November, which required everyone on board theGilmoreto pretend the reactor on a nuclear submarine had gone into full meltdown. The whole thing was a bit of a joke because, of course, in the case of a nuclear meltdown, what they did or didn’t do on the tender wouldn’t matter much.
38.
MARY LOU JENKINS HAD LEFTword at the hotel that I was registered for the Intercultural Relations Seminar that began the following Tuesday, so on the appointed morning, I was up early, pleased that I had somewhere to be.
It took me only a couple tries to find the Human Resource Management Office, which was on the ground floor of a commercial building on the Piazza Bambino Gesù.
Inside was a small reception area and a suite of offices, but I didn’t have a chance to do much poking around before I was intercepted by a well-dressed woman in her mid-to-late thirties who spoke with a heavy Italian accent. “Can I help you?”
I explained that I was Eileen Archer and that I was registered for the Intercultural Relations Seminar.
“Oh, good,” she said, and extended a hand. “I’m Angela Bornemann.”
The last name threw me. I couldn’t figure out what an Italian woman was doing with a German last name, but I wasn’t about to ask. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said.
“We sent a car to meet the ferry, so we’ll get started as soon as it’s back.”
She directed me upstairs to a large community room, which was configured to look like a classroom. It had folding tables and chairs, a blackboard, a TV cart, and a bulletin board that readTUTTO IL MUNDO È PAESEin bright blue bubble letters.
Immediately, I spied Laura, who gave me a big wave. She was sitting next to another woman about our age, whom she introduced as Siobhan King. Siobhan lived in an apartment complex called Il Paradiso, and her husband was a tugboat operator, but we didn’t get much further than that before we heard Angela greeting what I could only assume was a whole carload of people down in the lobby.
“Isn’t it fun that we get to do this together?” Laura said as I took the chair next to her.
Soon all the women were trooping up the stairs, and Angela was shepherding everyone into the classroom and telling them to sit wherever they liked.
“What’s that mean?” a woman asked, pointing at the same bulletin board I’d eyed on my way in.
“All the world is a country,” said Angela. “It’s an Italian expression that means wherever you go, we’re all the same.”
“I like that,” said Laura, and we all nodded in agreement.
We did a round of introductions, and I knew I’d never remember everybody, but I gave it a good try. By the time we’d gone around the room, I knew that Betsy McLynn was living all the way out in Santa Teresa and that Maureen Buchanan was so homesick she’d puked every morning for the last week.
