“Oh, yeah. We draw power from the National Grid to keep the coolant pumps going. And failing that we have eight diesel generators on site. But the quake was too severe. We lost everything. Even so there are failsafes. When the power failed, the damper rods should have fallen into the reactor cores by gravity.”

“Don’t tell me. They didn’t.”

“The core was distorted. We couldn’t get the rods in. And we had carbon dioxide trapped in the core because the pumps had failed, and the gas got hotter and hotter, until there was an explosion that disrupted the pressure vessel—”

“Hold it. What exploded?”

“Reactor Number One.”

“Oh, Jesus…”

There was a small fire team here, Debbie learned, but only one of them had worked for the Fire Service.

There were two nurses on site. Nobody knew where they were.

The chief was still arguing what to do with the station manager when the one experienced firefighter tapped a couple of buddies on the shoulder, pointed, and ran towards the big central building, which was still burning.

Debbie hesitated for one second, then followed.

The leader took the crew up an appliance ladder to the roof of a building which, Debbie learned, was the turbine hall. Here, a couple of crews were already plying hoses onto the burning building below.

It looked — to Debbie, in her ignorance — like the central reactor hall itself.

The central building was just a shell of metal and glass, pretty much blown apart, a shell that had been wrapped around a massive concrete cube: the reactor block.

She was looking down at the roof of the block, which was littered with equipment and protective clothing, hastily abandoned. There were three big discs of black tiles, set in the block roof. The centremost of these covered a store for spent fuel, and the two others were the two reactors themselves, in their forty-feet-high pressure vessels of concrete and steel, buried inside the block.

There was a huge lime-green crane-like machine which ran on rails along the roof; this was the fuel charging machine, designed to lug seventy-feet-long fuel assemblies to and from the reactor cores. But the charging machine was crippled, its iron frame bent out of skew.

Number Two Reactor, to her right, looked intact. It was Number One which had suffered the explosion.

Its massive lid had been blasted off — black tiles were scattered around the building — and its concrete shell was broken outwards, reinforcing bars flailing upwards wildly. She could actually see into the heart of the reactor, the exposed core, which was a mass of flame and smoke.

The firefighters were hesitating before this, arguing about what to do.

To Debbie it was obvious. The fire in that reactor core had to be put out, before any more radioactive products were vented into the atmosphere.

And there was only herself and the other firefighters to do it, by hand if necessary.