"What?"
"The reactors shut down?!"
"Motherfucker! You... say that again?"
Hearing his subordinate's latest report, Brigadier General Trickle felt as though someone had driven a needle hard into his tailbone.
And that goddamn needle was exceptionally long and thick!
A chill shot from beneath his backside up his spine and straight into his brain, making his entire body shudder.
These were two pressurized water reactors!
Although they were stripped-down nuclear reactors with a rated design output of only a few million kilowatts, their energy output was dozens of times lower than the reactors in large nuclear power plants, which routinely produced tens of millions of kilowatts.
But once anything "nuclear" slipped beyond human control, the consequences would inevitably be devastating.
Of the several famous nuclear leaks in history, such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, which had not brought disastrous consequences?
Although the USS Ronald Reagan was resting at the base and undergoing some superficial, light maintenance, standard procedure meant these two pressurized water reactors could not possibly be shut down.
That was because the operating principle currently used in these shipboard reactors was a chain reaction that ran in only one direction-what was commonly known as nuclear fission.
The process of nuclear fission could be understood simply as firing a bullet from a gun into a pile of bullets.
Once the first bullet left the muzzle, not even a god could make it turn around and stop the next stage of fission.
As for the carbon rods that controlled the reaction's power, they could be seen as a car's accelerator: the harder one pressed it, the more intense the fission reaction became, and the greater the output.
But slam on the brakes, turn the ignition key, and shut the reactor off?
Sorry!
With humanity's current technology, nobody had developed a switch