which must go through the wall and into the control room. And Fred sits there thinking, “Why should I drill three holes when one will clearly do?” So he takes out his drill and he drills one hole through the wall and he runs all the wires through it and he positions them just under the Acme Sharp-Edged Shelving System, in a bay where a very small truck is shunting goods around and backing up an awful lot and good heavens, one day all three systems fail at once. That’s a terrible surprise, even to Fred.
We had various Fred-type emergencies when I was working for the industry. For example, it should be impossible, completely impossible, to pour nuclear waste down a lavatory. But no one told Fred. So when, after a job of work, he was cleaning the top of the reactor, he tipped a bucket of, well to him, dirty water down the lavatory; and it just so happened that the health physicists, checking the sump outside shortly afterwards, heard the Geiger counter suddenly go “bing!” And there, lodged in the sump, was a bit of iron like a piece of grit.
Unfortunately, just before they had done this, a big tanker had already taken a lot of the sewage sludge away from the stationsewage to a big holding tank at a local sewage works. That was good. It was going nowhere, at least. But how do you find a few tiny lumps of welding spatter, smaller than a pea and, frankly, not highly radioactive, in eighty thousand gallons of crap? Just feeling around is not an option.
There was a meeting between the sewage workers and the nuclear workers, and it was interesting to see the relative concepts of danger and risk. The nuclear workers were saying “Hey, we know about nuclear material, we can handle it, it’s detectable, it’s no problem, we can deal with this; but that? That’s sewage!” And the sewage workers were saying “This is sewage. We’re used to sewage, we eat and drink sewage, we know about sewage, but that? That’s nuclear!”
And finally they came up with a masterstroke: all the stuff was pumped out into tankers and taken up to a coal-fired power station in the Midlands and burned to ash. The ash was put on a conveyor belt and run under a Geiger counter. It detected three little pieces of weld spatter that were slightly radioactive and that was that. I was impressed. A lot of effort had gone into finding these specks, which were rather less dangerous than our friend’s altimeter, and it seemed to me to be a matter of honour as much as safety. Contrary to popular belief, nuclear engineers are quite keen to keep the ticking stuff on the inside.
I remember speaking to the guy who had actually hauled the stuff in his tanker. And I said, “Were you worried?” And he said, “Well, not really. The last load I had to haul was prawns three months beyond their sell-by date. That did worry me a bit.”
All those involved in the enterprise—including me, because I’d handled the media—got a little informal certificate commemorating our efforts. And since engineers are sophisticated humorists, it was printed on dark brown paper.
And then one day … well, I can’t remember what happened at which power station at this particular point, I think Fred had donesomething. I spent all day answering the phones and I was so hyper when I got home late on Friday night that I opened up the computer and started to work. On Sunday morning, my wife came up quietly, saved the work in progress, and tucked me up in bed. And that was the last third of
Equal Rites
.
I decided I had to get out of the industry as quickly as I possibly could. There was such a never-ending level of media interest it was messing with my head. Besides, the early Discworld books were selling well enough to make turning pro a possibility. I gave them a month’s notice. It was a fairly pleasant farewell, and they gave me a lovely statuette made of a kind of nice dull grey metal which I really treasure and I keep it by my bed because it saves having to switch the
We had various Fred-type emergencies when I was working for the industry. For example, it should be impossible, completely impossible, to pour nuclear waste down a lavatory. But no one told Fred. So when, after a job of work, he was cleaning the top of the reactor, he tipped a bucket of, well to him, dirty water down the lavatory; and it just so happened that the health physicists, checking the sump outside shortly afterwards, heard the Geiger counter suddenly go “bing!” And there, lodged in the sump, was a bit of iron like a piece of grit.
Unfortunately, just before they had done this, a big tanker had already taken a lot of the sewage sludge away from the stationsewage to a big holding tank at a local sewage works. That was good. It was going nowhere, at least. But how do you find a few tiny lumps of welding spatter, smaller than a pea and, frankly, not highly radioactive, in eighty thousand gallons of crap? Just feeling around is not an option.
There was a meeting between the sewage workers and the nuclear workers, and it was interesting to see the relative concepts of danger and risk. The nuclear workers were saying “Hey, we know about nuclear material, we can handle it, it’s detectable, it’s no problem, we can deal with this; but that? That’s sewage!” And the sewage workers were saying “This is sewage. We’re used to sewage, we eat and drink sewage, we know about sewage, but that? That’s nuclear!”
And finally they came up with a masterstroke: all the stuff was pumped out into tankers and taken up to a coal-fired power station in the Midlands and burned to ash. The ash was put on a conveyor belt and run under a Geiger counter. It detected three little pieces of weld spatter that were slightly radioactive and that was that. I was impressed. A lot of effort had gone into finding these specks, which were rather less dangerous than our friend’s altimeter, and it seemed to me to be a matter of honour as much as safety. Contrary to popular belief, nuclear engineers are quite keen to keep the ticking stuff on the inside.
I remember speaking to the guy who had actually hauled the stuff in his tanker. And I said, “Were you worried?” And he said, “Well, not really. The last load I had to haul was prawns three months beyond their sell-by date. That did worry me a bit.”
All those involved in the enterprise—including me, because I’d handled the media—got a little informal certificate commemorating our efforts. And since engineers are sophisticated humorists, it was printed on dark brown paper.
And then one day … well, I can’t remember what happened at which power station at this particular point, I think Fred had donesomething. I spent all day answering the phones and I was so hyper when I got home late on Friday night that I opened up the computer and started to work. On Sunday morning, my wife came up quietly, saved the work in progress, and tucked me up in bed. And that was the last third of
Equal Rites
.
I decided I had to get out of the industry as quickly as I possibly could. There was such a never-ending level of media interest it was messing with my head. Besides, the early Discworld books were selling well enough to make turning pro a possibility. I gave them a month’s notice. It was a fairly pleasant farewell, and they gave me a lovely statuette made of a kind of nice dull grey metal which I really treasure and I keep it by my bed because it saves having to switch the
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