Drone Command

Yamada’s research boat was owned by Pearce Systems, but he leased the vessel for a dollar a year from Troy under a special arrangement. Yamada and his lab was Pearce Systems’ primary UUV development team, building and testing new underwater drones for use in oceanographic research, especially whale migration. Drones that Pearce Systems later sold or deployed in both civilian and military applications.

Yamada hadn’t spoken to Pearce in months. Their friendship was strong enough to weather any storm, but watching Pearce kill Jasmine Bath with one of his own turtle-shaped UUVs had wounded Yamada deeply. Yamada accepted the use of his vehicles for security purposes, though he was a pacifist. But murder for revenge was something else. He knew Pearce was a violent man, but he had never seen it up close. Bath deserved her fate, no doubt, but Yamada still couldn’t condone it. He feared it was bad karma for his old friend.

Earlier that day, the vegan researcher had threatened to blow chunks all over him if he didn’t break down the whale fin sample for her to do an assay, so he did. There was no question now. The whale meat was laced with cesium-137 and the fin bones contained strontium-90, notorious for mimicking calcium. These were just two of several known radioactive isotopes dumped into the air, ground, and waters around the Fukushima nuclear facility that were turning up in fish, plant, and even human subjects all over the Pacific, even as far as the west coast of the United States. Cesium had been found as far as two thousand kilometers away and more than five thousand meters deep just thirty days after the accident. How much more, how far, and how pervasive the subsequent nuclear contamination had been hotly debated. His contracted research mission was to try to answer those questions more definitively.

It would take her some time, but the vegan physicist would be able to determine if the nuclear contaminants came from Fukushima once they got back to the university. Before coming to the University of Hawaii, she had worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the technical nuclear forensics (TNF) department, but since the surfing was better in Hawaii than in New Mexico, she decided to move. She had her priorities.

When the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and resulting forty-six-foot-tall tsunami struck the six reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility on March 11, 2011, all hell broke loose. By any measure, the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe was the worst peacetime nuclear event in history, surpassing Three Mile Island and even Chernobyl. The magnitude of the damage was such that Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, a Ph.D. in quantum chemistry, ordered all of Germany’s nuclear plants to be shut down and deconstructed as soon as feasible.

Within just a few days of the catastrophe, celebrity physicists and antinuclear activists called Fukushima a planet-killing event. Three of the six nuclear cores had melted down — down into the Earth’s crust, some speculated. Of course, no one knew for sure. It was too dangerous and too difficult to get inside any of these wrecked facilities, even with robotics systems. But all three cores contained plutonium-239, one of the most toxic substances on the planet, a radioisotope with a half-life of twenty-four thousand years. More than fourteen hundred fuel rods, also loaded with plutonium, were at risk of fire and explosion. The fuel rods alone could pump fourteen thousand times more radiation into the atmosphere than was released by the Hiroshima bomb.

The dire warnings gained credence as the incompetence and deceit of both TEPCO (the utility company managing Fukushima Daiichi) and the Japanese government became apparent. Revelation after revelation proved at least some of the fears. Three hundred tons of groundwater passed through the contaminated facility every day straight into the Pacific Ocean, and the level of radiation of the groundwater was exploding exponentially. More than eighty thousand gallons of highly contaminated water from within the facility had been pouring into the Pacific every day since the earthquake. A dime-size bit of cesium-137 evenly distributed over a metropolis like New York City would render it uninhabitable.

Yamada devoured everything he could about the catastrophe when it first occurred, especially the Japanese sources, but also the scientific articles as they began to emerge. It was a very mixed picture. Even environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace said that concerns over Fukushima were grossly exaggerated, and other sources he trusted said that the massive amounts of radiation released into the Pacific were being safely diffused and that little environmental damage had or would ever occur.