When it was cool enough, the door was opened from the inside. The workers there threw out singed sandbags, which they’d evidently been using to seal the door, and made a run for it.

By the time they were gone, Debbie was vomiting. But still she held onto the hose.

The ground shuddered.

Earth tremor?

She wondered if that was what had triggered the explosion. She knew the two reactors here were cooled by pumped carbon dioxide gas. What would happen if a tremor knocked out the coolant pumps, or broke a feed line, or…?

Really, she knew nothing about nuclear plants. Nothing, except that you shouldn’t go near one at the best of times. And this was not the best of times.

When the maintenance guys were out, under the leader’s gestured command, the fire crew dropped the hose and ran towards the centre of the blaze. Debbie followed.

Her vomiting was over, but she was still dry-retching even as she ran.

There were fires everywhere. It looked to Debbie as if the stuff raining down from the central explosion — the reactor? — had ignited whatever it could find, like the tar on the roofs. She had some breathing apparatus now, dropped by an injured firefighter, but as they worked to the centre of the complex she found it progressively more difficult to battle through the intense heat, the acrid air, the molten tar which stuck to her boots, a black graphite dust which seemed to be everywhere.

She felt hot, inside and outside, a feeling she’d never known before.

They were met by a man in shirtsleeves and a Scottish Nuclear tie. He was the deputy station manager; he was wearing a badge that turned out to be a radiation dosimeter. His boss, the station manager, wasn’t here; she was crowning the Gala Queen in Dunbar five miles away. Local-friendly PR for the area’s biggest employer.

Gradually, as the deputy manager and the fire chief argued about what to do, Debbie figured out what had happened here.

“We’re protected from quakes here. The founds go down to bedrock. But we’re designed to withstand only up to a certain Richter. When the big tremor hit, the sea water conduits cracked…”

“What does that mean?”

The manager struggled to explain. “The reactors are cooled by carbon dioxide gas. The hot gas is passed through a boiler that turns water to steam, and the steam runs the turbine. The steam is in a closed loop. It passes through a condenser, where it’s cooled by sea water.”

“What happens to the sea water?”

“It’s dumped back in the ocean. The radiation levels are low, and we monitor—”

“Never mind that. So without the sea water flow there’s no way for heat to get out of the system?”

“And on top of that we had a total loss of power. The cee-oh-two pumps failed—”

“Shit, man, you must have backups.”