“Huh? What’s wrong with this?” asked the chief engineer, who was taking a look at the pressurizer and pipes.
Hideo could see the fear in the engineer’s face as he examined the nuclear plant.
“...”
Both of their hands trembled.
“It was 0.3 millisieverts just yesterday...” said the chief engineer.
“Rising this much overnight means...”
Hideo held his head in distress.
Just then, one of the lower engineers ran from the direction of the control room and shouted, “Sir! The pressure of the coolant pipe is strange!”
“The pressure?”
The chief engineer’s eyes glistened.
“How is it?”
“The pressurizer completely broke thirty minutes ago, so we inserted the shim rod to stop the reactor. But that usually doesn’t stop the reactor right away, right?”
“Probably. The nuclear reactor is already at very high temperatures, over two thousand degrees. We need to check the condition of the coolant in the pipes; if it starts to boil, the pressure inside the pipes will rise.”
“It was rising at a tremendous rate, but it just stopped.”
“What?”
“It’s rising steadily now...”
The chief engineer froze like a statue for a few seconds. A simulation was playing out in his head.
“S-Safety rods...” he said, stuttering. “The shim rod isn't enough! Put in the safety rods!”
The reason was simple: the radiation was leaking somewhere. There must have been a faulty valve somewhere in the thirty thousand valves. The coolant began boiling as the pressurizer broke, leading to valve breakage and steam leakage. Radiation most likely leaked out with it, causing the reader to show 0.7 millisieverts.
“Put in the safety rod!” the chief engineer shouted into the walkie-talkie.
And then, from the other side, came an answer that was completely unimaginable, truly a bolt from the blue.
—We already tried it on the manager’s orders before you asked, but...
“What is it?”
—It doesn’t work.
“What?”
—It’s half-way in, but it won’t move any further.
“... Wait, what are you talking about...”
The chief engineer paused again.
The coolant was leaking, and it was being detected here on the handheld meter. As such, the broken pipe valve had to be on the turbine part of the building. If so, shouldn’t they hear a pressure leak somewhere? No matter how loud the turbine was, shouldn't the sound be picked up by an experienced technician?
What if the valve was blown on the reactor containment?
“What’s the pressure inside the reactor containment?” the chief engineer asked.
—Three... Three hundred seventy kilopascals. It’s too high.
—Sir! The hydrogen removal system in the reactor containment has stopped!
Another radio call came in.
“The hydrogen removal system stopped?”
The chief engineer felt cold sweat run down his back. Behind him, Hideo was trembling in fear.
*
Before receiving the news, Masumoto was at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
“N-No! Sir! What are you doing!”
“... Alright.”
Hishijima gulped and sat back in his seat.
“Tell me again about the treatment for the exposed patients you were talking about earlier...” Kento said.
*
Masumoto drove the car like a crazy man. He told the driver to get out, then stepped on the gas himself. He frantically drove to the Tohoku region. The road was clear. There were tons of cars coming out of that direction to Tokyo, but the only car that was driving into the radiation hell was Masumoto’s Mercedes.
“No... No...”
Firetruck sirens rang from all over. The further Masumoto went in, the more he realized it was a disaster zone.
At the end of the road, he could see the reactor ablaze. Starting from the alley five kilometers before the Tohoku reactor, chunks of concrete began to appear. These were pieces of the concrete outer wall that shattered and flew off when the reactor exploded. Some of these fragments had smashed through cars and streetlights, and one of them had destroyed the roof of a particularly small and old house with the debris falling into the master bedroom.
“...”
Masumoto stepped out of his car with an intense feeling of anxiety.
“Uh...”
He staggered like a zombie. Dust from the graphite moderator left a rough feeling in his mouth.
Masumoto went into the house. Inside was his son, Kyohei. He was holding someone—an elderly person whose legs were crushed in the concrete.
“She’s passed away,” Kyohei said.
N... No. No...”
Masumoto fell to his knees.
“No...”
He pulled his mother into his arms and sobbed.
Outside, firefighters were busily running around and transporting casualties, and three of them came this way as well.
“Get out of the way!”
Wearing heat suits and air sets, the firefighters lifted the concrete and recovered the bodies.
“Are you family?” they asked.
“Yes,” Kyohei replied instead of Masumoto, who had almost lost his mind.
“Everyone who was here was exposed to radiation. Please move to the gym,” the firefighter said. “They will be isolating irradiated patients and treating them.”
*
“There’s a bacteria called Deinococcus radiodurans,” Young-Joon said. “‘Radiodurans’ means ‘radiation resistant.’ These bacteria have been ridiculously resistant to radiation since they were first discovered.”
Scientists examining the ecosystem in the Chernobyl disaster area found these outlandish microorganisms thriving there. They were the most radiation-resistant of all life forms on Earth, and they were named accordingly.
Humans exposed to radiation exceeding five sieverts almost always died. However, Deinococcus radiodurans could withstand up to ten thousand sieverts without any issues.
“At first, scientists thought the cell wall of this microorganism contained a substance that blocked radiation, so they tried to study that,” said Young-Joon. “But it turned out that wasn’t the case. Deinococcus radiodurans have the ability to reassemble DNA that’s been shattered by radiation back to its original form.”
The reason organisms died from radiation was that the DNA inside their cells got destroyed. After the vast amount of DNA equivalent to three billion letters were indiscriminately torn apart, there was no way to repair it. It was like randomly removing pieces from a three-billion-piece puzzle and trying to reassemble it.
But what if there were two puzzle boards from the beginning? If one could use the intact parts from each board as the template to fill in the gaps, wouldn’t it be possible to restore both boards to their original state?
That was what radiodurans were capable of. Two pairs of chromosomes that have been irradiated would stochastically break in different places. Then, using the intact parts as a mold, the broken parts of the two chromosomes could be assembled one by one.
“Is that possible in the human body as well?” Hishijima asked.
“It’s impossible. The DNA repair molecules radiodurans produce are too large and induce an immune response, so they won’t work in the bodies of higher organisms,” Young-Joon said. “But the species that A-GenBio and Cellijenner have is different. This one will work.”
“...”
Park Joo-Hyuk interjected after a brief pause in the conversation.
“I’ll warn you in advance, it’s going to be pretty expensive. We’re helping you out a lot, Mr. Ryu even getting arrested in the process. We have to have something to say to our shareholders. You know that, right?”
“It doesn’t matter how much... I’ll take all the responsibility and pay,” Hishijima said.