Appleton Laboratory Station Log

[kornon]

Official Appleton Laboratory Station Log
March 13th, 829 A.S.
-Recorded by Dr. Ron Kosher

Things have settled down at the base a bit as we finished the first base core upgrade. US| completed their contract for our next core upgrade. We just have a little bit of work left to finish the upgrade.

Looping back to the destruction of Appleton nearly 7 years ago, it seems so long ago, but yet so vivid in my memory. While Alyssa did have extensive experience handling nomad technology, she nor anyone else had the experience to anticipate the problems that it was able to cause when subjected to the various tests we performed upon it. We performed various chemical processes to extract the superconducting components. We had to add lots of heat during these processes which we found strange as the reactions shouldn't have been endothermic. Over the course of the days we were running these processes we inadvertently added several MJ of energy to the sample we were working on. What we didn't realize was that the nomad materials were absorbing energy and entering a metastable state. When we then tried to test the conducting abilities of the material we forced the material to return to the base state and release a massive amount of energy in a very short period of time.

The explosion caused multiple hull breaches, and damaged our reactor so we only had backup power. The decompressed areas included the docking bays, which we could maintain pressurized with force fields, but we didn't have sufficient time to repair the reactor prior to the exhaustion of backup power. Once we lost backup power, the evacuation of the station would become very difficult, so I decided to order an evacuation and the whole crew evacuated to Freeport 1.

We made several attempts to stabilize the situation on the station, but the damage to the station, and lack of power made repairs very difficult. A fire was raging in one of the areas still pressurized, and the fire suppression systems were offline. The fire reached our oxygen supply and caused another explosion damaging the station even further and damaged our MOX supply spreading toxic uranium and plutonium all over the station. At this point we decided that the cleanup and repair effort would cost more than rebuilding the station, and we had the funds at the time for neither. We sat on Freeport 1 and watched the station slowly decay away until another secondary explosion occurred, from what we are not sure, that finally resulted in the destruction of the remains of the station.

We now know the sequence of events that caused the accident with the nomad neurological material, and if we pursue it in the future as a source of material for our power distribution systems we will work with much smaller quantities to keep everything safe, as well as monitor the total amount of energy it could have possibly absorbed.

Our lab safety protocols and our emergency response plan kept everyone safe, and there were no deaths or critical injuries, just some bumps and bruises from the initial explosion which rocked the station.

-End Log Entry