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Technetium

James Bates

    “Geez, man, what happened to you?” Doctor Emerson asked, “Get hit in the face by a semi-truck?”
    Clay would have smiled if he could, but that was impossible. Not with a split lip and busted teeth. “Naw,” he mumbled, “Some big jerks did it.”
    Ed Franklin was the jailer who accompanied Clay to the emergency room at Hennepin Country General. A muscular black man with a snow-white beard and a shaved head, he had no trouble smiling.
    “I’d say you were the big jerk, Clay.” He grinned. “You and your big mouth.”
    “What happened?” The doctor asked, dabbing at Clay’s facial wounds with some antiseptic solution, making him wince.
    “Ouch! Easy there, doc.”
    “Sorry. Just hold still.” Doctor Emerson looked at Ed and raised his eye brows, “So...”
    The jailer pointed a finger at Clay. “This little man,” he said, grinning at his joke, “doesn’t know when to shut up.”
    So what if he was five feet seven inches tall? If Clay resented the ‘little man’ comment he didn’t show it. Instead, he said, “Those guys back in the cell had it coming.”
    “Yeah, right.”
    “They did!”
    The doctor intervened, “Hold it down, you two.” He looked at them both with steely eyes. “I’m just trying to make conversation. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.”
    Clay immediately spoke up, cracking open his lip and making it bleed again. He didn’t care. He liked to proselytize, especially when it came to the dangers of nuclear energy. “I’ll tell you what happened. A couple of guys in lockup were giving me crap for protesting against the nuclear power plant down the river at Prairie Island and one thing led to another...”
    “And they beat you to a pulp is what they did,” Ed said.
    “Yes, they did. No thanks to you.”
    “If you’d just have kept your mouth shut, you’d have been okay.”
    “I was just telling them the truth!”
    Doctor Emerson followed the exchange with interest while he finished disinfecting the cuts on Clay’s face. “I’m going to give you some stitches on that lip of yours.” He paused and looked at Ed, “You going to the dentist later? He’s missing a tooth and another one is chipped pretty bad.”
    “Yeah. Soon as we’re done here.”
    “Probably a good idea.”
    The doctor was sympathetic to Clay’s resentment against nuclear power. Plus, he kind of felt sorry for the young guy who couldn’t have been more than twenty or twenty-two at the most. He was definitely in over his head in lockup, that was for sure. But he’d stood up for himself in jail, ill-advised as it may have been, and that counted for something as far as he was concerned.
    He called in an assistant to help, and as they got ready for the stitches, he said, “So, tell me, how’d you get so gun-ho against nuclear power?”
    Doctor Emerson was a tall man in his mid-fifties but looked ten years younger. He had a neatly trimmed beard, short cropped salt and pepper hair and the lean body of a long-distance runner. Clay looked at him wondering if he was being serious about wanting know where he was coming from or just yanking his chain. What the hell, he seemed genuine.
    “You really want to know?
    “Sure.”
    “Okay, I’ll tell you.”
    Just then the assistant administered a shot of Novocain. “No talking,” she said. “This needs to take affect.”
    Clay nodded and lay back on the examination table. He closed his eyes and let his mind drift back, back to three years earlier when he’d been in high school.
    In thinking about those times, Clay had to admit he was little focused on anything having to do with school, including his chemistry class. He was in his senior year and looking forward to graduating in a couple of months, then working full-time as a stock boy at the big box store where he’d been employed for the last year. And why not? He didn’t really know what else to do with his life. His parents didn’t care. Clay was the youngest of eight children and his mom and dad were simply too worn-out with raising his brothers and sisters to care much about what he did, which was fine. Great actually. It gave him and his girlfriend Chelsea more time to hang out.
    But then toward the end of the school year, his chemistry teacher started talking about nuclear fission and instead of falling asleep, like he normally did whenever anything complicated came up, Clay didn’t. Instead, something clicked.
    He remembered it like it was yesterday. Mr. Peters was a short, balding man who looked about sixty. He was a passionate teacher and the students in Rosewood High School respected him for it. When the bell sounded at the beginning of sixth hour, the last class of the day before school let out, Mr. Peters stood up from his desk and walked to the front of the room. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses, cleaned them on a handkerchief, put them back on and looked out over the packed classroom of forty-three students and waited for everyone to quit talking. In a few moments they did. Then he asked, “How many of you know what a nuclear reactor is?”
    Clay watched as Molly Anderson raised her hand, “It’s where energy is produced, usually for electricity.”
    God, he thought to himself, what a goodie-two shoes.
    “Correct,” Mr. Peters said. “They use a radioactive substance like uranium to cause the reaction which produces steam which drives huge turbines which produce electricity.”
    Jason Johnson raised his hand. “Like powerplants that use coal?”
    Clay felt his eyes grow heavy. A nap would feel real good right now. He and Chelsea had stayed out late last night, necking in his car down by the Orchard Lake boat landing. Real late.
    “Exactly, Jason.” Mr. Peters looked around the classroom. “Now think about it. For nuclear reactors, the fuel they use is radioactive. By-products like technetium are given off in the process. Anybody see a problem with that?”
    Lots of hands went up, except Clay’s. He was thinking about Chelsea and...
    “I heard that the waste can cause radiation poisoning,” Kia Nichols said. “That can’t be good, can it?”
    A wave of concern swept through the class. Poisoning? No way. But what if she was right? Students started murmuring to each other. Clay opened his eyes. What was going on? Poisoning? Did someone mention poisoning?
    “I’m glad I’ve got your attention,” Mr. Peters said, putting his hands out to placate the students. Including Clay. He was definitely paying attention; all thoughts of Chelsea having vanished under the specter of eminent death by radiation poisoning.
    He suddenly remembered his mom talking about an uncle and a place called Three Mile Island, and he did something he’d never done before in school, let alone chemistry class. He raised his hand. “I heard something about a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island that almost exploded or something.”
    Mr. Peters smiled at Clay and nodded, joking, “Hi Clay. Glad to have you with us today.”
    Clay felt his ears turn red, then shrugged his shoulders good naturedly. What the heck, he kind of deserved it.
    “Three Mile Island is a nuclear reactor near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. What happened there in March of 1979 was a valve malfunctioned that caused the reactor to overheat. A small amount of radioactive material escaped but not enough to do any harm.” More murmurs came from the class, and Mr. Peters again held up his hands. “Don’t worry. The good news is that after the Three Mile Island accident better legislation was passed to ensure tighter monitoring of nuclear facilities.” He paused and looked around the room, noting a collective sigh of relief. He smiled, but only for a moment before turning serious. “However, there is one thing that’s very worrying, and that’s disposal of the nuclear waste. That’s something to be very concerned about.”
    He went on to tell the class about the different types of radioactive by-products and how the current thinking was that deep underground was the best solution. He wrapped up his lecture by saying, “The main problem is that if the storage containers somehow begin leaking, the radioactive material could get into the ground water and potentially affect hundreds of thousands if not millions of people.”
    He looked out over the class, all of whom were deathly silent. Clay raised his hand. “What can be done about it?”
    Mr. Peters smiled at him, happy to see that his usually quiet and uninterested student was engaged and paying attention. “Well, Clay, the best thing to do is to quit using nuclear energy.”
    The more Clay thought about it, the more that statement made perfect sense to him.
    Mr. Peters and the class spent the remaining two months until school let out talking about alternative forms of energy. By the time he graduated from Rosewood High School, Clay was hooked. He had become an activist.
    Two hours later, Clay was back in a different holding cell in the county jail. In addition to his stitched lip, he had some bruised ribs, wrapped tightly with an elastic bandage, and numerous cuts and abrasions. He also was short two teeth because the dentist decided the cheapest thing to do was to pull the chipped one.
    Ed the jailor shut the door to the cell. “Just to let you know, I guess your girlfriend paid your bail. She’s on her way.”
    Clay grimaced through his stitches. Chelsea was not a huge fan of his activism by any stretch of the imagination and was sure to give him a hard time. But that was okay. He wasn’t a fan of her being an exotic dancer at the Slippery Rail either.
    All things evened out in the end.
    After Ed left, a voice behind him caught his attention. Clay turned and faced a large tattooed guy with a grizzled beard who stunk of urine and vomit, “Hey, man, what you in for?”
    Clay didn’t have to think. “Protesting down at the nuclear plant. Got a problem with that?”
    The guy put up his hands, “Easy there, fella. I’m just tryin’ to be friendly. It’s all cool.” Maybe Clay’s stitched up face scared him off. Who knew?
    “Good,” Clay stared at him. After a minute, the guy stepped back, having decided it was best to leave him alone. So did the other prisoners. He smiled and muttered under his breath, “That’s real good,”
    He turned away and looked through the bars, gently touching his face and his stitches. Anyway, this jail thing wasn’t so bad. He could handle it just fine. Besides, being in jail looked like something that was going to happen on a regular basis so he might as well get used to it. Especially since there was a protest next week in Wisconsin. He smiled in anticipation. Jail or no jail. He couldn’t wait to go.

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