Chapter 37
WE ORDERED PLATES OF FREGOLE with 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, would head 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.
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 the Gilmore’s crew on best practices and running drills, including a particularly horrible one code-named Emergency November, which required everyone on board the Gilmore to 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.