The Iroquois plant is a nuclear facility owned by Bay State Electric, a project whose prolonged delay and disputed risks make it more than a passing subject in Gardener’s argument with a utility representative. Its promised benefits are set against uncertainties about safety and accountability; later, that debate becomes an unsettling point of comparison for the dangerous devices produced in Haven.

Ownership, delay, and public assurances

At a party hosted by Arberg, Gardener overhears a Bay State Electric representative claim that bringing the Iroquois plant online would provide the equivalent of three dozen full college scholarships. The representative presents the project as a public good, and Arberg listens respectfully, aware that a major utility could benefit a college. Gardener reads the speaker as a relatively minor company official, but the exchange gives the plant a polished public face: investment, education, and technical progress.

Gardener’s private assessment is far less reassuring. Bay State owns the project, which is five years behind schedule, and the financial fate of three interconnected New England bank chains depends on whether it begins operating. In his view, the companies involved are committed to a precarious wager, trading paper while the plant remains unfinished. The courts have recently allowed Bay State to begin loading fuel rods, a development that may ease the company’s anxieties without resolving the risks Gardener sees in the project.

The party dispute and nuclear risk

When the utility representative asserts that three decades of peaceful nuclear-power development in the United States have caused no fatalities, Gardener challenges the claim by invoking Marie Curie’s death from radiation poisoning and the radioactive condition of her notebooks, kept in a lead-lined vault in Paris. He adds that cancer-death figures around nuclear facilities contain anomalies and argues that the public does not know the full record of deaths because government agencies keep information under wraps. The confrontation makes the dispute partly about evidence and partly about who has authority to declare the technology safe.

Gardener widens his argument by recalling the Soviet accident at Kyshtym, before Chernobyl. He describes the possibility that used reactor rods stored in a shallow ditch oxidized into plutonium, with catastrophic consequences, and condemns the assumption that such risks could be treated as acceptable. The episode gives his opposition a particular ethical emphasis: people exposed to technological hazards may have neither chosen them nor been informed about them, while the institutions responsible can make uncertainty sound like reassurance.

A recurring measure of technological danger

The plant’s debate echoes through Gardener’s later effort to understand Bobbi’s inventions. Bobbi acknowledges that the force working through her has produced devices she cannot fully explain; although she has some sense of the clean, nonnuclear principle behind them, she does not understand how the telepathic typewriter works. Gardener’s memory returns to the party and imagines one of Bobbi’s devices demonstrating its power before the same audience. In that imagined scene, the utility representative dismisses a device he does not understand, and the gathered guests deny having seen it. The recollection connects institutional confidence to ordinary habits of denial: an inconvenient technology can be made socially invisible without being understood or made safe.

Haven’s later inventions make that contrast more concrete. Justin Hurd constructs a machine from salvaged stereo components to drive rabbits and woodchucks out of their burrows, unaware that its harmonic waves could potentially trigger an earthquake. Beach Jernigan dismantles it while Justin is away. Such episodes do not show the Iroquois plant causing Haven’s technological crisis; instead, the plant supplies an earlier frame for recognizing its pattern. In both settings, technical power outruns public understanding, while the possible consequences reach beyond the people who build or operate the machinery.