longest streak, not counting the lead-up to Christmas.
That was back in the days when religion was easier, when a person was a good Catholic simply if he or she went to mass. Now going to mass made him feel just the opposite.
Ferguson stared at the statue. He could hear some of the tourists whispering nearby; undoubtedly that was what he had heard when he was a kid, but he winked at her anyway, preferring to keep the fantasy alive.
4
Roughly forty-eight hours after Bob Ferguson took her into his arms in Sicily, Thera Majed stepped out of a white SUV at the Blessed Peak South Korean Nuclear Waste Disposal and Holding Station thirty miles northwest of Daejeon. A gust of wind caught her by surprise and sent a cold shiver through her body. It was unusually cold for early November, but as Thera zipped her heavy parka closed, she thought of how much colder it would be when she reached North Korea.
Cold and alone, though surrounded by people.
Most of whom would hate her.
Thera glanced at one of the security guards, then pushed herself forward, joining the others queuing to go into the administration building near the front gate. Their guides waited in front of the main door in their shirtsleeves, smiling stoically.
“Thera? Where are you?”
Though he had been born in Kenya, Dr. Jamari Norkelus spoke with a very proper English accent, direct from Cambridge, his alma mater. He also tended to be more than a little brusque and came off like everyone’s most annoying spinster aunt. Norkelus ran the inspection team as if it were a church group, with curfews and daily reminders to wear proper attire. He even checked on the junior staff people to make sure they were in their rooms at night. He claimed it was because the UN had issued a directive against bad publicity, but Thera suspected he was simply an uptight voyeur.
“You will need to record the director’s remarks,” Norkelus told her. “Please take notes.”
Thera reached into her bag for her pad as she made her way to Norkelus’s side.
“Just the gist,” added Norkelus in a stage whisper when she reached him. “To show we think he’s important.”
“OK.”
Thera had been surprised to see in Libya how much of the inspection visits were devoted to diplomacy and protocol. Much of this morning’s tour, for example, was completely unnecessary. Not only had the team members already studied the waste plant’s layout, but several had been consultants during its design. The scientists and engineers on the team knew the function of most of the machinery and instruments better than the people handling them, but simply rolling up their sleeves and going to work was considered rude. And besides, the inspections had to be carried out according to an elaborate and lengthy set of protocols hashed out over months by negotiators after the basic Korean nonproliferation treaty was signed.
The agreement called for reciprocal inspections of nuclear facilities on both sides of the Korean border and in Japan. For every North Korean facility inspected, a South Korean facility would be checked; inspections in Japan, which had considerably more sites, were to be conducted on a more complicated schedule, though roughly in proportion with those in Korea. Different teams of inspectors would look at everything from nuclear-energy plants to waste facilities; Thera’s team was concerned with the latter. The inspections in Japan and South Korea were formalities added to the treaty as a face-saving gesture for the North Koreans, but the team members would strictly observe all of the protocols nonetheless.
In this case, the inspection of the waste facilities was truly reciprocal: The Blessed Peak Waste Disposal and Holding Station happened to be an almost exact twin of the facility in North Korea’s P’yongan-puko, or northern P’yonpan Province, where the team would go next. Both had been designed and built by a French firm within the last two years; the funding for the North Korean plant had come from the earlier framework agreement that had set the stage for the final disarmament pact.
High-tech monitors and robot train cars played prominent roles at the facilities. All of the waste that arrived at the South Korean facility was sealed in an appropriate containment vessel; even so, no human came within fifty yards of it, at least not under normal circumstances.
Things in North Korea were not quite as automated nor as strict — the containment “vessels” in some cases amounted to simple metal barrels, moved from trucks by forklift to the train cars — but they were nonetheless a significant improvement over the procedures followed just a few years before, when waste was dumped into open pits by workers using shovels, rakes, and in some cases their bare hands.
Most of the waste that came to both plants was low-grade radioactive substances left from medical testing and industrial testing, or the byproducts of their production. But the plants also contained temporary storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel. These were the areas that the IAEA had come to look at. For only the fuel from nuclear reactors could be processed into weapons.
A typical nuclear reactor was fueled by uranium or plutonium pellets no larger than the average man’s thumb. The pellets were loaded and sealed into long metal tubes called rods, which were then inserted into the reactor. The controlled nuclear reaction that resulted generated electricity for a number of years, depending on the plant’s design.
As the reaction proceeded, the fuel became “spent,” changed by the reaction into material that could no longer fuel the reactor. But the spent fuel represented only about three percent of the pellet. Once removed through “reprocessing,” the unused material could be used in another reactor.
Reprocessing was not, however, an easy task. The rods were very hot and highly radioactive when first removed from the reactor. To prepare them for reprocessing, they had to be cooled, which in some circumstances could take as long as ten years. They were then encased in lead and steel-lined cement canisters that looked like large barbells. The containment vessels allowed the fuel to be safely transported without danger of leakage.
Like much else connected with the nuclear industry, the shipping and reprocessing of fuel was an expensive operation, performed only by special plants. It was also highly regulated, for it was relatively easy to extract weapons’-grade material during the process. This was especially true for rods from plutonium-fueled plants such as those built by North Korea.
At Blessed Peak, spent nuclear fuel was collected from two research reactors in the western part of the country and stored until it could be shipped with waste from other Korean and Japanese plants for reprocessing in Great Britain, something which generally happened every one or two years. In North Korea, the waste was collected from the country’s sole operating nuclear power plant for shipment to Russia for reprocessing every eighteen months.
Blessed Peak’s
Thera took notes during the director’s presentation, but her mind was on her
Less than a half-inch square, the detectors were hidden inside fake radiation buttons, the warning indicators worn by the inspection team to detect accidental exposures to radiation. Thera had memorized a list of twenty-five possible spots to plant the devices; she was aiming to plant between six and eight at each site.
The tags were designed to detect radiation from plutonium-239. Exploiting recently developed nanotechnology, the tags were extremely sensitive gamma-ray spectrometers, or, in layman’s terms, they were “tuned” to detect radiation produced by the bomb material. Tests had shown they could reliably detect about.03
