Wrak does not know why he woke up so early today. Today is Saturday, and the automatic coffee maker is off, and father does not have to leave at seven fifteen today after a cereal breakfast and a cup of coffee. Today is another day of summer in Tranquil Hills, and the sun shines in the kitchen window now as it does almost every morning except in June when the coastal fog crawls up the canyon into Bacon Way and Mellowman’s Lane. Wrak does not know why he drifts around the house so early today, but notices his little dog Punkin is not on his cushion. Where is Punkin, wrak thinks.  Wrak walks over to his father’s Pall Mall cigarette pack and steals one and puts it in his shirt’s pocket. He will go outside for a coffee and a smoke after breakfast.  Wrak opens the back door and steps outside, where the garage meets the back door of the house, and a little herb garden sits in front of the trash cans. BG is sitting on the ground playing with Punkin.  Punkin is sitting up and begging with his little paws, making a praying motion.  If a person were not sane, they would think BG and the dog were having a conversation.  Any sane person knows this is not so.  “BG, what are you doing out back with my dog at 6 AM?” Inquires Wrak.   “I had nothing to do, so I am playing with Punkin,” says BG. He ignores wrak and pets the little orange platinum Silky terrier. “Besides, he says, a new south swell should be hitting right now, and I want to see if the Bu is catching it.”  “Get your board and wetsuit and let’s go.”  “Get some food and steal some of your Dad’s cigarettes for the road.”   Wrak does not have a board, or is at least in between boards so he borrows his brother’s lily white seven-foot eleven-inch pipeline gun with winglets shaped by Dean.   “Be sure the board fits in between the seats before we start off,” says BG. “I have my sack of stuff,” says Wrak.  “Light me smoke and let’s have at it,” says BG.  

      The Pacific coast highway remains a beautiful stretch of road on the good side of town and touches in the opulent beach area of Northern Los Angeles called Malibu and Point Dume Estates.    The Army Corps of Engineers built the road wide, and the palisades to the east rise beautifully in the east and the ocean sparkles dazzlingly on the left and west side of the street.  Most of the movie star beach house has been torn down, and the ocean beckons alluringly, sweetly, and innocently as Catalina Island shimmers sixty miles away to the southeast.  Surf Rider Beach has a parking lot, a wall, and a secret house hidden in the moat inside of the creek belonging to the Ringe family. Surf Rider Beach today displays three-foot waves and a slight south wind, which ruins the shape somewhat and makes the lines section raggedly as they turn inward into the first point.  “Let’s go out,” says Wrak.   “There is hardly anyone here!”   “No!” I do not want to get in my suit for three-foot mush and south wind,” asserts BG.

“I am deciding,” insists BG.  “Don’t talk, I am thinking.”  “Probably the swell is too south for the Bu, and the tide changes right for the pipeline.  “What pipeline?” says Wrak.  At Newport Point, there is a secret surf break that only experienced people can surf.  Houses are built on the beach, and no parking exists so there is no way to enter the surf zone without having your car towed.  “I know Juan  says BG.” “We can park at his house on the beach.”  “Light me another smoke.” We are jamming to the pipeline.

   At seventy-plus miles per hour, the Chevrolet econocar propels down highway one.    Highway ten appears, and then Highway five appears, and the huge refinery burns by, and Highway 58 becomes a reality, and then into Newport.  BG’s uncle is Richie Rich.

       “Who is the guy?” says Juan. “BG, you know better than to bring strangers here!”   “He is cool,” says BG “Besides, he is a friend of mine.”  “OK,” says Juan, “Pull it in and close the garage.”  “I just finished the night shift as a security guard.” I am going to have coffee and breakfast and wake up,” says Juan. “You two can go out.”  “It’s pretty good.”  A south swell hit last night. The waves at the point are at least 8 feet.  Wrak learns quickly. He realizes that an extremely south swell blocked out by Catalina Island focuses on the point here.  BG and wrak sit on the beach at the point in the morning, and the water shimmers like glass, and the fishing boats sail out at the pier, and the waves crest at eight to ten feet and bigger, breaking like turning cylinders and spitting in the shallow end of the sand bar.   This is the Newport pipeline, and the wave looks better than Hawaii.  Hawaii is always windy.  The point today shows smooth as molten glass, and green water waves break in perfect form and harmony onto shallow sand reefs.   “Let’s go surfing,” says BG.  “I can’t go backside so good,’ whine Wrak, “They will run me over.”   “Just tell them you know Juan,” says BG.  “They will back off.”    “I will go surf on the right side of the channel. It looks almost as good.”  “Get a few waves and paddle over to the left,” says BG.  “It really is good.” 

     The paddle out at the point seems easy compared to the washing machine up north.  Wrak waits outside and paddles into a twelve-foot right peak, bottom turns, and releases the inside edge of the pintail to ride the tube.  A huge blond-haired local takes off in front of Wrak, and Wrak holds the edge of the board in the vortex, then reinserts the inside rail as the wave spits foam and blows by a huge blond-haired kook.  Inside the shore-break, the huge blond-haired local grabs the white pintail from wreck and says “If you take off on another of my waves, I will kill you.”  “Give me back my surfboard, you blond, I am a guest of Juan.  The big blond surf God looks at wrak, looks at wrak, looks at wrak, then grabs his own board and paddles away.  “I had better stay clear of him.” Thinks wrak, Time to surf some lefts.”  The channel at the point means an easy paddle out.  Halfway out, BG enters a ten-foot pipeline peak.  He goes straight off, then turns hard, and the board arcs up into the hook of the wave as the water forms a pipeline tube.  As the wave tubes over him, BG carves back down the face, then turns again up into the hook, and then goes by Wrak as he paddles out.    Outside in the lineup, BG returns.  “How do you like the pipeline?” Asks GB.  “The waves are great but the locals burn aggressively,” says Wrak.  “Just do not snake Juan,” says BG, “Then you will be OK.”  “Let’s surf till our arms drop off,” says BG.  “This is as good as it gets.”   A small six to eight-foot wave peaks at the point, Wrak is on it, and now he is a believer. 

       Juan lets BG and Wrak redress in his garage.  His parents live upstairs in a two-story house converted into a duplex.  “I have someone I want you to meet,” says BG.  “Let’s go meet the Brotherhood.”  “The Brotherhood of eternal love.” 

     We met some friends in Newport town in an apartment in an upscale building with security and potted plants everywhere.  BG tells Wrak that one of his friends is deaf and not to make fun of him.  The deaf person is smaller, with brown hair, a deep chestnut tan in short pants and a Hawaiian shirt.  Another person is larger, skinnier, with brown curly hair and a beard, dressed similarly, and who laughs a lot.   The wrak grabs a piece of paper and writes on the paper what we are discussing so the deaf person can stay tuned.  The deaf person does not talk, but smiles and reads the paper. Smoke passes around and the boys share surf stories and compare the lifestyle of Los Angeles with Newport Beach and Irvine. “Is he cools,” they each ask BG in turn.  “He is cool,” says BG, a friend of mine. Do you have a car for a run they ask.  No, says the Wrak, they think I am not responsible.   After a while, Juan shows up on schedule, and BG and Wrak decide the time is right to leave.  Wrak waves goodbye to the brotherhood and will never see them again.  They provided hospitality and cordiality and all that can be expected of them in a place in time down south.  BG and wrak accelerate onto the freeway and rocket toward Los Angeles.  “Light me another smoke,” says BG.  “I am driving.”   The refinery and the large deep fence hiding the factory from the people appear, then disappear.  We arrive on the ten and then the one and up Sunset to Bacon way.  Wrak pulls his board out of the hatchback, and Punkin jumps out from the fence and greets the pair.  “Hi Punkin,” says BG.  “See you later.”  The green Chevrolet econocar accelerates quickly and smoothly because the car weighs very little.  BG leaves as mysteriously and enigmatically as he arrives when the buoy indicators of big surf herald a new swell.  Wrak goes back to the daily rigmarole of reality, sometimes punctuated by excitement.

        Wrak never rode the pipeline again.  Occasionally, when wrak would surf the area, he would park illegally and watch the waves from an aperture on the street that meets the beach.  Once,  a skinny, tall, beach boy with a long head and blond hair would appear and menace him with a Ruger 10/22 varmint rifle.   The tall beach boy shot him once when he was in his wetsuit, but the bullet did not stick in.  The Newport pipeline is real.  The Newport pipeline tubes perfectly.   The Newport pipeline gives a great drop and acceleration.  The Newport pipeline is off limits to commoners.   “The rich are different from you and me,” said The Great Gatsby.  Wrak knows what he means.  The only reason Pipeline is better than the point is that the water is warm, and it gets to twenty feet.  The point is best at six to ten feet, but don’t bother to go surf it; the well-endowed landowners have dredged the reef because they don’t want low-class surfers treading on the mean high tide zone.  The California pipeline does not exist anymore, at least until the sand builds back up again after the Wracks is long gone.  I guess this is the way it is .  They have done it to moonlight too!!  Time rolls on, the morning is soft and beautiful and full of tanned women and waves in the time where only luck and darkness prevail. 

Nuclear reactors are not cheap to make, like automobile engines or computers. They construct of high tensile steel designed to withstand high temperatures. The melting point of steel is around 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, and with tungsten and molybdenum added, this brings it up a bit. The reactor is an enclosed vessel encasing fuel rods that hand in the coolant. Nuclear fission makes fast neutrons, beta particles and others, and the steel slowly increases in mass because of neutron capture, and the vacant orbitals of the transition metal vessel pick up electrons. The result of this constant action produces a vessel that becomes brittle at around one hundred years.
Brittle things crack under stress and all nuclear reactors must be replaced dependent on the size of the pile and the fission intensity.
The coolant of nuclear platforms is continuously under debate. Water works well, but the reactor must place on the coast of a continent because extreme quantities are necessary to cool the reactor to salient values. Due to this physical observation, brilliant scientists postulate a liquid sodium-cooled reactor. Metals conduct heat and radiation better than any mass, and the metal can be reused until it becomes radioactive or changes in mass. In the native state, the metal sodium, sitting at the top left of the periodic table with extreme ionization potential, explodes on contact with water and burns upon contact with air. In a human environment, where “to err is human” this action does not seem prudent and at best dangerous. Using the metal Galium, which is liquid at room temperature and is placed on the left side of the periodic table akin to the transition metals, seems feasible. The result of intense neutron bombardment over time has not been considered to date and volatile gallium at two thousand degrees does not seem innocuous. Digress to steel production and all steel workers complain of “fume fever”. What really is the best coolant element? Time will tell and the talk around town is that arsenic placed in a nuclear reactor neutron port eventually becomes gold????? This author thinks water if the best way to go because of track history. The nuclear plant at San Onofre, California still produces energy and is at least 75 years old. Radioactive water enriched in deuterium and tritium makes hydrogen bombs, but decay means they must be replaced every seven years. A fissile will detonate tritium and this author is sure that top secret scientists continually work on a method or technic that permits fusion temperature ignition at minimum temperatures using a fissile.
What is breaking radiation? Bromstrellung as Al Rombauer used to say, occurs when fast neutrons strike a transition metal in a crystalline lattice and produce gamma and X-radiation in a photoelectric effect. Around each nuclear reaction vessel , there must exist a steel wall to decrease the energy and range of the nascent free neutrons. After the steel wall, concrete, in extreme proportions and thickness, provides the mass to absorb high-intensity light spectrum radiation, all in a solid and massive form. When the concrete second shield starts to develop powdering,, it is time to bail out and decommission the site.
The offices and control systems of the site must station behind these two shields and to all poor biologists trained to handle isotopes, the admonition of distance and shielding are constantly in mind. Electric generators using energy present in the reactor coolant sit alongside the fission kettles and are dealt with the same as the reactor vessel because they too become intensely radioactive with time.
Changing fuel rods remains as the ever-present danger close, and it seems timely to state that breeder reactors need fuel rod changing at a greater time interval than standard reactors. Thus, due to the nature of human beings, it seems safer to have breeder reactors than standard configurations.
All sorts of new designs pop up, created by rich and privileged minds, like uranium mixed with ceramic, making balls that slowly fall out of a hopper at the bottom, kind of like a grain silo in Kansas. Nuclear reactors with fissioning, glowing plutonium at one thousand degrees are not like corn to be sold to an ethanol maker. Their exists no time or training to remedy or fix things and it seems logical to a neophyte without a degree in nuclear physics that fuel rods hanging by a chain, amongst neutron dampeners that limit the rate of fission seems the safest way to go. If a coolant leak exists the dampers, now made of silver, can fall down and lock into place, preventing a nuclear incident.
The most salient feature of high technology, expensive, dangerous energy producers is that these edifices require constant human attention and moderation. Nuclear reactors connected to a grid, away from a city but close enough to impact it, must be designed so the site is idiot proofed, and safe to all so a policeman, if necessary, can enter the control room and shut down the reactor. Every human being has a bad day, their wife is leaving them, their son is in the hospital, they have a hangover from a bad batch of tequila and more. Accidents most certainly will happen, but the controls will be simplified, easy to read and configured so anyone who can read can control. From this author’s understanding, all nuclear incidents are accident-based, not due to an explosion caused by 007, or a disintegrator from Mars. Responsible people will be selected by the government, by Psychologists who study them, and by their dedication to defy the human dilemma. On her day off, she looks out the window after her shower, and she feels cooped up. And so it goes.

How and where and when does man build a nuclear reactor that is safe and impacts the community in a minimal fashion?
The answer is simple, not simplistic, and derives from common sense and good old Yankee ingenuity.
A reactor must be built in a place where an eventual meltdown will not cause a horrendous calamity. Places that are safe exist. Because the longest-lived reactors in the world sit near a great body of water, water-cooled nuclear reactors must reside. In a meltdown, huge quantities of water cool the core and bring the reaction back to equilibrium. In the United States, safe places are on the seashore of coastal states and abutting the great lakes area where the lakes hold millions of gallons of extremely cold water, benefiting only the Erie Canal and Niagara falls.
A reactor can also be built in a remote area where a meltdown has no direct effect on local populations. In sparsely populated states in the northern forties of longitude. Here, a meltdown has little consequence and the energy produced by reactors can feed into a grid to serve populated cities and heavy industry factories.
The reality of meltdowns is that the core forms a superheated magma and sinks deep into the earth. Intervention by man serves no purpose and the core remnants can be fenced off until radiation follows the logarithmic law of extinction.
Reactor shielding
Most current nuclear reactors are poorly shielded because of man’s inhumanity to man. To shield a nuclear reactor, water serves to moderate small particles like quarks and bosons. The next shielding layer stops the most important aspect of nuclear radiation danger. Bromstrellung is a German word for radiation secondary to the deceleration of basic particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons. Bromstrellung registers in the gamma and x-ray region of ionizing radiation. To create bromstrellung, an alkaline earth crystallite like steel becomes an emitter of bromstrellung when the subatomic particles impact upon the nucleus of an atom and decelerate. Impacting particles generate gamma rays. A secondary shield of high mass number element like lead or other heavy metals, turns the bremsstrahlung into infrared radiation also known as heat by means of the photoelectric effect. In addition, to shield a nuclear reactor emanating fast neutrons, gamma rays, heat and light, three shields become necessary. The first is an ionic shield that can be made from water. The second is a braking radiation shield to be made from steel; the third is a gamma shield that fabricates from use of any of the heavy metals in the periodic table of elements. This coupled with calculation of radiation safe distance by means of a Geiger counter forms the parameters and specifics of shape and size of containing vessel. It is prudent at this point to remember the basics of nuclear physics: distance and shielding. The force of radiation = Gmm/rsquared where G is the acceleration due to gravity or the speed of light.
Breeder reactors
Breeder reactors are thorium breeders or uranium breeders. Thorium breeders are safer because the core does not go critical as fast as a uranium breeder fired by plutonium. The birth of uranium 235 or plutonium 239 by means of thorium or uranium breeders, respectively, occurs at a logarithmic rate. The product must be removed in relation to a logarithmic calculation based on breeding mass and size of the fissioning bed. The math is simple; people are complex and amiss to education and behavior change.
The rate of breeding is directly proportions from the rate of radiation emitted from a core. New material is added as the product is born and the reactor is safe and fashionable. In the event of a meltdown, non-reacted raw material pulls from the core and the reactor comes to rest. All reactors will eventually become breeder designs because the cost, difficulty, and danger of changing reactor core reactants is the same whether conventional or breeders. Conventional reactors need to change fuel rods more often.
Reactor design
A circle of concentric rods seems the safest and most logical picture of a reactor core. The rods are suspended by means of a chain or wire just as a guillotine blade hangs over the head of a criminal. If the core overheats, moderator rods can be inserted or the raw material can drop out of the core into a concrete tomb. The reactor sits safely away from supervising staff and controls occur by action of chains, wires, and levers pulled or guided from a remote location by robots. As in Chornobyl or Three Mile Island, all nuclear accidents result from human error; for this reason, and this reason only, all reactors, cores, and controls must be completely idiot proof.

Radioactive waste
Radioactive waste equals strontium ninety and cesium 137, along with radioactive water. Strontium 90 mainly emits alpha particles with a half-life of five thousand years, and cesium 137 emits gamma rays with a half-life of 120 days. In the future, man will collect radioactive waste as a positive byproduct of a nuclear reactor and use the waste as a source of heat or a source of electrons, forming batteries by means of the photoelectric effect, turning gamma into electron movement in a wire. Currently, the best way to store radioactive waste is to drop it into a chasm that empties into the center of the earth. Will radioactive waste become more valuable than gold when humankind uses it to bake long-term batteries?

Fission or Fusion Oh My!
Fission reactors tend to overheat and go critical. Fusion reactors burn at full throttle and can die in an instant. Fission reactors produce large amounts of gamma-generating waste, and fusion reactors generate helium which, when it accumulates, is one of the most toxic elements to biological life forms. The choice will be made by the next generation. The author, for one, chooses fission because fission reactors do not go out, they refuse to die. He excludes fusion because of the generation of huge amounts of helium and a tendency to blow out. This author feels that fusion reactors will only serve as power for military vehicles because they require less shielding. However, other dreamers with their hands in their hair, imagination, and a whim of Yahweh will choose in a scenario of beauty and optimism. We can dream, and in this want, dream even better. Puff on when the beer goes flat.

A long time ago, when Wracks washed out of his residency, he ended up back at home. His parents have him see a doctor. He sits in the green chair and reads and goes out to walk his little silky terrier, which is old now. They walk to the lookout and watch the ocean, the water a greyish blue with white caps demonstrating the ever-present onshore west wind that begins at twelve o’clock noon and sometimes abates at 5 PM for a glass off. The little dog sits next to him attentively, and they watch, and the sun slowly descends and eventually kisses the ocean until sunset. Because his dog is old, he carries him back in his arms like a father carries a baby child. Then at home, Punkie dances and goes to sleep in his little box underneath the barbecue fireplace in the living room.
Grandma is gone now. The Wracks sleep in her bedroom, and he can still smell the perfume she liked so much, “white linen”. The cotton sheets with French etching cover the maple trellised bed, and now it is his. Nobody is here, his mother has a job at the V.A., and she says she is a notary, and his father still holds two erratic jobs, one that lays him off periodically and the other part-time affair, a teaching post at the college downtown. He looks out the window as he always does, and the white rose in the planter box is blooming, a single flower on a barren plant, and the Wracks looks at it and remembers. Mother is home now and she suggests that Wracks go to the library in the next city and meet a reading group there. “Maybe you can make friends,” she says. The next day, the Wracks take the blue bus to Monica, get off, and walk to the public library there. The library there is a newly constructed affair for the literate, and the Wracks climbs the trellised stairs to the second-floor reading room. In the room, in the center, are approximately four people sitting at a table, all wearing off-work clothes, jeans and sweat shirts and adidas tennis shoes. They all have short hair, are tall and lanky, and giggle when the Wracks approaches so he sits at the table across from them, alone, and he pulls out a textbook and starts to read. From out of sight approaches a middle-aged man in a leisure suit who looks around, then sits across from him in the corner his back to the wall. Then a mid-sized gentleman. A little on the small side, dressed in a worsted grey suit with tie and matching belt and shoes, approaches and looks at him. His eyes are grey, and a little on the bluish side, his nose and chin are aquiline and penetrating, and is hair is not grey, it is not white, it has no color but silver. Silver. It is longish and swept back as if he had just had it coiffured. He asks, “May I sit here?”. The Wracks says yes, and the man pulls the chair from the table and sits down.
My name is Montgomery he says, perhaps you have heard of me. The Wracks says, “No, I haven’t, but continue”, and the man smiles with a full set of teeth in a knowing way. I would like to tell you about my life, which I spent in the military.
“When you interrogate prisoners, interview them one at a time, ask them a question, and if you do not like the answer, shoot them in the head. Throw the corpse outside. Ask the next hostage a question about the information you want to know, and if they do not answer or expunge erroneous information, you shoot them in the head and add them to the pile. Eventually, the hostages betray their own kind and when they do, put the man in jail until the information validates, and then let them free. Their own kind will deal with them.”
And he smiles.
“When you invade a town, surround it with tanks and then blow the central bank apart. Blow open the safe with a cannon shot. Divide all the loot among the men so they can send it home to their families. Save the best of the spoils for yourself. Tell the men that they can have any fortune they can steal if they include you in the plunder and kill any of the citizens if they complain or resist.”
And he smiles
And his bluish grey eyes seem to glow, or is the Wracks hallucinating
Be sure to get up every morning at six AM and take in the morning air. This is imperative. Every morning until you are home, do the same thing. In the morning. The opposition uses carrier pigeons to relay messages because radio waves can be jammed, and other forms of communication can be seen. If you see a bird in flight in the morning, they are near. Sound the horns of battle and muster all the men. They are close.
And he smiles.
“ Be sure to wear high boots because the wogs throw cobras at you and then run away.”
And he smiles.
His teeth are long and white
He said more, but the Wracks was a neuro patient, and his head started spinning, and he could not believe what was just conveyed to him.
It is nice to meet you, Dr. Wracks. Perhaps we can meet again. He stands up, dusts off a dress hat, moves away without a cane, and disappears. The valet looks around, stands up, and follows him out the rear exit.
The Wracks never went back to the library, and he told his mom it was too far away to take a bus ride. Young people are so naive and stupid that they do not realize the goose with the golden egg is sitting in front of them. To his disadvantage, he never went back, and now he realizes his immaturity and stupidity, but to no avail. It seems that in times of war and strife, Yahweh sends special people to lead the multitude to safety or to victory. Their methods might be unusual or even evil, but these are the ones sent by the maker to impart salvation and justice and peace. Pacifists call them vicious animals. Effeminate call them crude and crass. The bottom line is that these intrepid warriors ensure the multitude another generation of peace. These are one-of-a-kind people, and the rulers keep them close, often under wraps for their lifetime, and for their own safety.
Wracks sits at the lookout with his old dog, who still has a beautiful coat because his owner feeds him spaghetti and meatballs or ballpark franks and rice. His dog looks up at him and yips. The sun is setting, and the clouds are orange, slowly becoming pink and then purple. The yellow orb descends into the ocean, slowly, and then melts away, and night begins. Wracks carries his little dog home in a backpack, in front, and sets him on his bed. Punkie wags his tail and moves his feet.
When you see the old fool on the hill, wave, and say thank you. They bestow the people with another day to raise their children and watch the sun go down. And the eyes in his head see the world spinning round, pip pip, cheerio, and carry on.