We headed east, back toward Oak Ridge and Knoxville, for about a mile, then Thornton pointed to a sign on the left. “There it is—SPALLATION NEUTRON SOURCE,” he said. “That’s my stop.” The road wound uphill in a series of gentle S-curves; at the top of the ridge sprawled an immense new building, five curving stories of green glass and brushed aluminum.
“Wow,” I said. “Arpad needs to make friends with these guys. They’ve got better digs.” I parked near the entrance in a spot marked VISITOR, though we could have taken our pick of dozens of other convenient spots. “More parking, too.”
“I think they’re still putting the finishing touches on this,” he said. “I don’t believe the neutrons are spallating fully just yet.”
“Remind me what spallation means,” I said, as we walked toward the glass doors.
“Comes from the same root word as spa-lat,” he said, then he laughed. “Nah, kidding again. It’s from spalling—chipping—like concrete does. Spallation’s a subatomic version of concrete chipping. This thing fires zillions of neutrons out a huge linear accelerator—see that long, straight dike of dirt there, running from the main building over to that smaller building way over there? I think the accelerator’s under there. Anyhow, it shoots neutrons at experimental targets or materials, and then people who are a lot smarter than I am figure out all sorts of important things about those materials, based on what happens when the neutrons bash into them.”
“Bash?”
“Bash. Splat. Wham. Take your pick. They’re all scientifically rigorous and precise.”
“Rigorous,” I said.
“And precise.”
“So they make radioisotopes here with some of the bashing?”
“Huh? I don’t think so,” he said. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Well, you have a meeting with an isotopes-production guy,” I said, “and we’re here.”
“Ah,” he said. “A reasonable inference, but wrong. They make the isotopes at a research reactor, the High-Flux Isotope Reactor. But the security’s tighter there, and the digs are better here. And the isotopes guy is apparently better connected than Arpad.”
Thornton’s “isotopes guy”—the program’s director, it turned out, named Barry Vandergriff—met us in the atrium and motioned us toward a cluster of overstuffed armchairs in an alcove of the lobby. I excused myself from their meeting and wandered among a series of displays that showed cutaway drawings of the facility’s accelerator and neutron-beam guides and experimental capabilities. Some of it was over my head, but I did grasp the notion that neutrons—and how they got deflected or scattered as they bounced off materials, or passed through them—could shed a lot of light on the molecular structure of metals, plastics, even the proteins that make up living organisms.
I had just begun to study a large, mercury-filled metal tank—the mercury served as an immense catcher’s mitt, apparently, to stop the neutron beam after it had passed through its experimental target—when Thornton tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m done,” he said. “You ready, or did you want to study up some more?”
“I’m ready,” I said. “I’m up to my eyeballs in neutrons.”
As we walked out of the building, Thornton said, “I wanted to talk to this guy to get more background on the iridium sources for radiographic cameras—who makes those sources, and how, and where.”
“And could he? Did he?”
“He could,” he said. “He did.”
“And?”
“For years, the only U.S. source of iridium-192 was the High-Flux Isotope Reactor, right here in Oak Ridge.”
“But now there are other U.S. sources?”
“No. Now not even HFIR’s making it. Too expensive. Now it’s imported from reactors in Belgium and the Netherlands and South Africa.”
“It’s cheaper to make it overseas and ship it in?”
“I guess so,” he said. “Maybe those governments subsidize the isotope reactors better, or maybe safety standards are lower or labor’s cheaper. Anyhow, that complicates our efforts to pin down where this came from.”
“Damn,” I said. “If this stuff has a half-life of only seventy-four days, how’s there time to ship it halfway around the world?”
He shrugged. “They ship sushi from Tokyo to New York, and sushi has a lot shorter half-life than this stuff. It’s just a matter of figuring out a fast, reliable delivery system. Hell, iridium-192 can be air-expressed on DHL or FedEx if the shipment’s not huge and the container’s approved.”
I almost wished he hadn’t told me that. I wasn’t sure I’d look at those delivery trucks in quite the same way ever again.
CHAPTER 26
WHERE DO YOU WANT TO HAVE DINNER?”
The question caught me by surprise. “Excuse me?” I pulled the cell phone slightly away from my ear and glanced at the display, hoping for quick enlightenment. I didn’t recognize the number, but I did recognize the 482 as an Oak Ridge number. “Oh,” I said, a smile breaking across my face. “I think you should be the one to choose. Since I gather you’ve hit the jackpot. Or found the barn.”
“Maybe,” said Isabella, the librarian. “If I’m wrong, I’ll pay you back. But I don’t think I’m wrong.”
“Then pick a good restaurant,” I said. “The best in Oak Ridge.”