Abyss

FOUR

The box lunches were tuna sandwiches on white bread or ham and cheese on rye, a small bag of potato chips, a pickle, and a bottle of Evian. The same sort of lunches Eve Larsen had been eating as she talked to scientists, energy people, and journalists around the country for the past fourteen months, trying to drum up acceptance if not support for her project. But it had become a tough sell once oil slid below the magic number of $70 per barrel, which is when interest in alternative energy sources began to fade.

It would be no different here today, she could see it in the bored faces of the eight men and one woman — all VIPs of one sort or another with Sunshine State Power & Light, which owned and operated this facility. But at least they’d been willing to listen, in a large measure because she’d promised to supply SSP&L with practically free electricity. An intriguing thought, even though most of them had heard of her and knew something about the experimental work she’d done just offshore last year. Work that had ended in one death and a near drowning, that Eve — though no one else — had claimed was sabotage. And in another measure SSP&L had agreed to let her speak here out of a certain amount of wishing to get to know a potential enemy sooner rather than later. Don had called her “The Queen of the High Seas.” The Fox crew had picked up on it that day aboard the Gordon Gunther , broadcast it as part of the mini-documentary, and it had stuck.

“Queen of the High Seas comes to the daring rescue of a crewman. Brains, beauty, and fearlessness. Who can say no?”

The nine people seated around the table in the spartan second-floor conference room in the Hutchinson Island South Service building that’s who, she thought, as Bob Townsend, the plant manager, got to his feet to introduce her to the eight others. He looked more like a roustabout than the guy in charge of a highly complex and potentially dangerous facility, but he’d been in the business in one way or another all his career, and had a solid reputation.

“Dr. Evelyn Larsen has come here today to tell us a little more about her intriguing project to not only help solve our energy problems, including the dangers of nuclear energy, as well as our continued dependence on foreign oil, but how she plans to modify the weather worldwide.” Townsend smiled. “For the better, we presume.”

Eve smiled faintly, not rising to the same bait that had been thrown at her from the beginning.

“By way of a very brief background, Dr. Larsen comes to us from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — funded Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton where she has been conducting her research into what she calls the World Energy Needs project.

“Her reputation and solid academic credentials of course have preceded her. I don’t think anyone missed the Time magazine article on her two years ago in which it was suggested that she was short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Physics. So it is a distinct honor to have her with us today.”

Everyone was looking at her as if she were a bug under a microscope. In some ways a dangerous, disagreeable bug, and it was the same look she’d gotten practically everywhere she’d given her presentation. She was getting tired of trying to explain herself, and of trying to raise awareness and therefore money.

“You’ve all received background information that Dr. Larsen was kind enough to send us in advance of her visit today, and if you’ve had a chance to look at the material you’ll have a better handle on what she has to say.”

Townsend was a nuclear engineer by training and Eve’s project, which threatened to make nuclear power plants obsolete, ran opposite of everything he’d worked for his entire career, and it showed in the tone of his voice, his demeanor, and his entire attitude, one of barely concealed contempt. And fear?

He continued. “From my left around the table are Sarah Mueller, Sunshine State Power and Light’s nuclear programs manager; Dan Seward, our vice president for environmental affairs; Thomas Differding, SSP and L’s top engineer and chief of operations; David Wren, the company’s assistant chief financial officer; Alan Rank, our vice president; Craig Frey, a member of SSP and L’s board of directors; Eric Utt, vice president in charge of new plant development, and our own Chris Strasser, whose job here at Hutchinson Island is chief engineer.”

Each of them nodded politely as they were introduced, but with no warmth, only a little curiosity that they were meeting the Queen of the High Seas.

“Dr. Larsen,” Townsend said, and he sat down at the opposite end of the mahogany table from her.

She kept a neutral expression on her face, and promised herself that she would not lecture, nor would she let her anger get out of hand like it had done before. “It’s counterproductive,” Don had warned her. “You’re the scientist — one of NOAA’s most respected, so that’s how you need to come across.”

“They don’t listen,” she’d responded, knowing Don was right.

“Hell, even Bob Krantz won’t listen and he’s seen the data, he understands the conclusions, and he knows that the science is sound.”

“It’s all politics,” Eve had said bitterly. Just as it was here in the Hutchinson Island boardroom.

“Damned right,” Don had said. “So you better start acting like a politician if you want funding.”

Eve got to her feet and managed to smile and actually mean it. These people weren’t her last hope, but without SSP&L’s cooperation she would have to move the first stage of her project elsewhere. But Hutchinson Island was ideal, and the experiment last year had proved it.

“Good afternoon,” she said. “And thank you for agreeing to hear me out. If you’ve read the material my lab e-mailed you two weeks ago, I won’t have to go over in any detail the science of my proposal, except to tell you some things that I’m sure you all know. By 2050 the world will need twice the energy we’re producing now. Which is why more than thirty permits will be granted for the construction of new nuclear power plants in the U.S. alone.”

“We’ve applied for several of those permits,” Sarah Mueller said. “And our funding is already coming together.”

“That’s good to know, because the need for new power is acute, and of course it will take two decades before any power from those new stations will hit the Eastern Interconnect. And that’s only one of the problems; there is a larger issue with using nuclear energy to generate electricity.”

“Spare us the dangers of the ten-thousand-year half-life of spent fuel rods,” Townsend said, obviously holding his anger in check. Without doubt he’d been hearing that argument for years, and was sick of it.

But Eve had known it would come up. “Not that at all,” she said. “The problem is the huge amount of cooling water you have to bring in from the sea. Nuclear reactors generate a bunch of heat, and a lot of that energy is lost. It’s the same with coal-fired plants where energy is lost up the stacks and into the atmosphere. Combine that loss, which is as much as fifty to fifty-five percent, with the ten percent loss from transmission lines made of aluminum wire, and more than half the energy you produce here is wasted.”

“You’re quoting Jeff Sachs now,” Seward, the VP for environmental affairs, said. “But he was talking about fossil fuel emissions. His implication was for more nuclear stations, not less.”

Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, who ran Columbia University’s Earth Institute, was an economist who had argued in Scientific American that government-mandated cutbacks in carbon dioxide emissions from burning oil, natural gas, and especially coal, would create an economic blow to an expanding global economy so severe that billions of people would be adversely affected.

“You’re right,” Eve agreed. “But he was also warning that cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions before we develop new, cleaner, renewable energy sources, and technologies is the real culprit that could send us into a worldwide depression and very possibly war.

“Tom Wigley, who’s a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, wrote a paper for Nature a couple of years ago along with a political scientist at the University of Colorado and Chris Green, a McGill economist. Those guys argued that instead of mandating tougher emissions standards, we need to mandate the development of new technologies.”

“Clean technologies, which Fermi did with the first nuclear reactor in 1942 in Chicago,” Mueller, the company’s nuclear programs manager, said. “As a result we got the bomb, but we also got Hutchinson Island and the other hundred and three nuclear-powered generating stations in the country, which I might remind you supply twenty percent of this nation’s energy needs, do just that. Generate electricity cleanly.”

“But not efficiently,” Eve shot back. “And the new generating stations won’t come online until it’s too late. Even you admit that much.”

“We’ve looked over the material your lab sent us,” Utt, SSP&L’s new plant VP, said. “We understand what you’re trying to do, and your project is as intriguing as it is expensive, with no guarantees that it will work in