“It’s like a meat processing factory,” said Rogers, grinning. “We use everything but the oink.”

Garza laughed, and Jake began to understand what Rogers had designed: a power-generating plant in which an MHD generator produces electricity, then feeds its still-hot exhaust gas to more conventional turbine systems that generate additional electrical power.

Pretty neat, Jake thought.

“How big can you make this system?” Garza asked, looking up from the blueprint.

Rogers waggled a hand. “Big as you want. The MHD generator gets more efficient with size.”

“A thousand megawatts, total?”

Nodding, Rogers said, “The MHD generator could produce half, and the turbines the rest of it.”

“Good. Fine.” Garza broke into a satisfied smile. “I think you’ve really got something here.”

Bending over the desk again, Rogers tapped the blueprint once more. “The heat exchanger is the trickiest part.”

“We could talk to our people who’ve done exchangers for nuclear plants,” said Garza.

“You’ll have to deal with higher temperatures than the nukes use.”

“Maybe NASA can give us some advice.”

“Yeah. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I know a couple of guys at the NASA center near Cleveland…”

Jake left the two of them huddled over the blueprint and almost tiptoed out of Rogers’s office. Topping plant, he thought. I’ll have to borrow Bob’s blueprint and work it into a news release. Keep the MHD issue in the news, keep Tomlinson ahead.

The Big Rig

THE BIG RIG

Younger actually looked happy.

Jake drove up to Lignite a few days after his meeting with Rogers and asked the engineer’s opinion about the topping plant idea.

“Makes a lot of sense,” Younger said, as he kept a careful eye on a trio of technicians who were removing worn electrodes from the innards of the big rig’s central channel.

“You think?”

“Sure. There’s a lot of heat energy in the plasma after it leaves the generator’s channel. Why let it go up the smokestack? Instead of adding to global warming we can use the frigging heat to generate more electrical power.”

“And the heat exchanger? Can you develop one to work at such high temperatures?”

Younger shrugged nonchalantly. “You find the right engineers and pay them enough, they’ll design your heat exchanger for you.”

Jake thought that it couldn’t be that simple, but Younger seemed totally unworried about the problem.

Then Jake realized why Younger was so optimistic. Glynis came into the shed, pulling off a long fur-trimmed coat, smiling at Younger.

He broke into a positively boyish grin and rushed across the concrete floor to her.