Time, displaced

When an atomic clock lags for 1 second –an event that happens once every 30 million years– two characters start hearing strange sounds that no one else hears. Time is displaced and continually disputed for the protagonists, as they pass their days under the influence of a decades-old nuclear reactor, a relic of the Cold War holding nuclear waste with a millenary half-life, and the millions of years required for the formation of mountains, which are studied at the reactor, at the atomic level.