Idaho Falls Page 12
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The same day the autopsy team returned to New Mexico—January 13, ten days after the accident—AEC, army, and navy officials began making preparations for three very strange burials. It would take them two weeks to pull together the details; meanwhile, the caskets were stored in the decontamination room. The men certainly wouldn't be traveling to their final resting places in a commercial plane flown out of the Idaho Falls airport. The heavy vaults required special transport. And despite the layers of lead, the bodies continued to emit radiation: not much—levels were in the millirem range—but enough that officials didn't want distraught widows clinging to the boxes or priests conducting lengthy masses near them. The residual radiation also meant special precautions needed to be taken and assurances made to antsy cemetery keepers who weren't keen on the idea of nuclear oddities buried among generations of Joneses and McCanns.
By this time, Jack Byrnes's father, John, had flown to Idaho Falls to help Arlene pack up the couple's belongings. She was going back to New York with her son, and she wanted Jack buried in a family plot in a Utica cemetery. Judy Legg, eight months pregnant and devastated by the evaporation of her sense of security, was going to stay with her family in Idaho Falls. But her husband would be returning to his family in Kingston, Michigan. Caroline McKinley was planning to take her two children back home to Ohio, but she wanted her husband buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia; he had served in Korea, and he had given his life while on duty. She thought him a hero and felt a burial there was justified.
On January 22, a US Air Force C-54 took off from the Idaho Falls airport with the vaults of Byrnes and McKinley tied down in its voluminous cargo hold. On board, but as far from the bodies as possible, were two army officers and an AEC official. The plane landed late that evening at Griffis Air Force Base in Rome, NY, Arlene's hometown. The vault containing Byrnes's body was removed from the plane by a forklift and put onto the back of an air force truck, which then drove to an armory garage in Utica. The next morning, the AEC official took the vault's radiation measurements. Radioactivity was detectable, especially on the bottom of the vault, but was deemed low enough for public burial. The following day, cemetery workers opened a grave with a backhoe, and a cement truck pulled up to the site. It poured concrete fourteen inches deep into the larger-than-average hole in the earth.
On the morning of January 25, the military truck bearing the vault arrived at the cemetery. The heavy box was off-loaded with a mobile crane and put on a vault hoist over the open ground. Jack's parents, brothers, sister, Arlene, Jackie, and a small group of friends gathered—at a distance—for a short Catholic burial service. After the mourners left, the vault was lowered to the concrete base poured the day before. The cement truck then revisited the grave, pouring an additional foot of concrete around each side of the vault and over its top. The next day, as soon as the concrete had set, dirt was scraped over the grave. Jack Byrnes was encased like a fly in amber. On the ground above the once-restless soldier, an AEC official stood with his detector, picking up only background radiation.
The same bizarre funeral rite awaited Richard McKinley, but since he was being buried at Arlington, it unfolded with a precision peculiar to the military. When the C-54 flew into Bolling Air Force Base near Washington, DC, at 3:30 A.M. on January 23, the aircraft taxied to a remote section of the airfield and was placed under guard. The next morning, a team of soldiers and an AEC official removed McKinley's vault with a forklift and transferred it to a flatbed truck. The vault was driven to Arlington National Cemetery—millirem radiation was detected in the cab of the truck during the thirty-minute drive—and was rolled into an unused chapel. The chapel was divided in two by a large sliding door. No one was allowed on the side with the vault, and only a guard or health physicist was permitted on the other side. During the next two nights, guards made periodic checks on the locked chapel and the AEC representative conducted radiation surveys. On January 25, the vault was driven to the grave site and positioned on a hoist above yet another hole with a concrete base. McKinley's service lasted just eight minutes, and the family was kept more than twenty feet from the vault. When the mourners departed, a cement truck rumbled through the peaceful fields of Arlington and surrounded the body of the trainee in twelve-inch-thick concrete.
Six days later, the headquarters of the military district of Washington ordered the superintendent of Arlington National Cemetery to include on the permanent record of interment DA Form 2122 the following remark: “Victim of nuclear accident. Body is contaminated with long-life radio-active isotopes. Under no circumstances will the body be moved from this location without prior approval of the Atomic Energy Commission in consultation with this headquarters.”
On the same day that the two soldiers made their journey east, a navy R5D cargo plane left Pocatello, ID, southeast of the Testing Station, with the much-diminished body of Dick Legg. After being ferried to the Tri-City Airport in Saginaw, Michigan, the lead box was trucked to a local vault company, where it was stored under lock for the night. The next morning, on January 23, the vault was driven to the Kingston Cemetery, sixty miles away. A few hours before the service, Legg's family made an unexpected request of the navy officers who had accompanied the body. They wanted to see the casket during the service. The steel coffin was lifted from its lead vault and displayed next to the open grave. Eighteen inches of concrete had already been poured into the open pit. Readings from a Juno detector showed that radiation levels doubled when the casket was lifted out of the lead. The Leggs got to see the casket. The tradeoff: The service could last only five minutes, and the family was kept at a safe distance.
Elwyn Legg, Dick's cousin and good friend, remembers that there was a bit of controversy in the small town of Kingston about the burial. The town leaders worried that Legg's body could eventually contaminate the groundwater. Some of the old-timers at the Testing Station remembered hearing that the AEC health physicists who came out of the Chicago office to help with the burial ended up gathering around the vault to convince the town it was safe to bury the remains of Dick Legg in the Kingston Cemetery.
Elwyn recalls that Dick's father, who had already lost one son, was bewildered by the death and burial of his youngest. He had been told only scant details about the explosion, and he couldn't grasp that his son and two others had been savagely killed in a novel death by a force he didn't understand. “His father told me Dick wouldn't talk about what they were doing [in Idaho], that it was a big secret,” Elwyn says. “And he really didn't know much about it outside of that things could blow all to hell if something went wrong.”
After the Legg family left the burial site, the sailor would suffer one final insult, cruelly subjected to the forces of physics one last time. When the cement truck arrived to pour the protective casing around the lead vault that held the casket, the operator pumped seven yards of concrete into the grave, enough to form a two-foot thick shell around Legg. But the cement had not been mixed and poured correctly; it floated the heavy vault right out of its hole.
That mishap was fodder for yet another juicy story, many of which had begun circulating back in the Lost River Desert. By the end of January, the initial shock of the SL-1 explosion had faded slightly among the Testing Station workers, giving way to incessant chatter that focused on the circumstances, causes, and aftermath of the disaster. Human nature was running its course, and consternation was beginning to give way to curiosity. This was understandable: employees worked at isolated reactors, on three shifts, for different companies and branches of the military. Few workers knew the dead; they felt no compulsion to revere their memory by quelling the gossip. For some, the technical mystery posed by the explosion was fascinating; the desert was awash with science geeks and brainiacs—how could they have been caught off guard by an event so extreme? For others, including the civilians in Idaho Falls, the salacious details that were starting to slip past the official wall of silence were intriguing. The image of the “guy pinned to t
he ceiling” was arresting. The initial rescue into high radiation was scary stuff, whether it was thought heroic or foolhardy. The horrific condition of the bodies, the brutal autopsies, the weird burials—it was all too provocative not to discuss.
Talk was even beginning to touch on the men's personal lives and how their private dramas may have contributed to the first nuclear disaster in American history. Only a small circle of managers knew many details about the disaster, and one former site worker says it “got awfully quiet” in the executive offices after the explosion. But that didn't stop folks from talking, from building stories and theories based solely on rumors, on the snippets of details that got bandied about as uncontrollably as the escaped atoms themselves. As Testing Station workers fanned out across the world to build a nuclear industry in the decade that followed the night of January 3, 1961, they carried the stories of the SL-1 reactor with them. Unfinished works even in life, the three young servicemen would become cardboard figures in lunchroom reenactments. Wild tales—some true and some not—would fix the crewmen in history as surely as the concrete around their bodies did in death.
In the days following the recovery of the bodies, chemical plant workers had been ordered to keep the stainless steel sinks containing the remains full of crushed ice. After numerous trips to add ice to the sinks, the workers grew accustomed to the dangerous deposits in the decontamination room. Vernon Barnes, now retired, was working in the chemical plant at the time. The story he heard was that one of the guys on the night shift slipped into the autopsy bay moments before fellow workers were scheduled to replenish ice in the tubs. Climbing into one of the sinks, the worker stretched out on the ice, lying prone just above a radioactive body. “When the guys came in, this fellow sat up real quick and straight and scared the hell out of them,” Barnes says.
Barnes isn't sure if he believes the story, though he had plenty of coworkers who swore it was true. And the stories got even more graphic. According to one urban legend, Barnes says, after the autopsies were completed, a few of the employees decided to keep a souvenir: “I heard some of the guys had one of the soldier's thumbs and they were showing it around.”
Disrespectful? Undoubtedly. Expected? Probably. The final bizarre twist to the SL-1 story? No.
6. Accident Aftermath
As a weak sun struggled over the Teton mountain range on the morning of January 4, the Lost River Desert looked even bleaker than usual to the nuclear workers clustered a half-mile from the SL-1 site. They knew the raft of troubles they faced were mostly beyond the ken of their collective experience. The silver silo that broke the horizon's line to the northeast was swarming with unleashed radioactive material; it would be foolish to think that none had been released into the air. They needed to know—and quickly—how much radiation had been released from the unshielded reactor; whether it was in the form of long-life microscopic particles, short-life gas, or both; and where the winds had blown the dangerous material. There was a lot of empty country surrounding the reactor, but Idaho Falls was only fifty miles to the east, Arco sixteen miles to the west, and the small hamlet of Atomic City just five miles to the southwest. Would that boosterish name hung on the dusty collection of barracks and cabins prove to be chillingly prophetic?
Just as worrisome was the question, Would the reactor provide another nasty surprise? The men coping with the aftermath of the initial explosion weren't sure that there wouldn't be a second. If any water was left in the core, it was possible it could slow the swarm of neutrons enough to cause another uncontrolled fission of whatever uranium 235 remained in the damaged reactor. How much water was belched out in the explosion? How much remained? How much would it take to excite uranium atoms? All the systems used to control the reactor were demolished. If fission began, how could it be stanched? Finding those answers depended on discovering a way to peer deep into the core without inflicting a fatal dose of radiation on another atomic worker. It was a thorny technical challenge with high stakes, for which there were no manuals and no comfortable procedures.
And, of course, the sharks were circling. The men standing in the pearly dawn were smart, and they knew anyone associated with the world's first reactor fatalities stood a good chance of being drawn and quartered professionally, either in the press, within the industry itself, or by the politicians in Washington. There was sure to be an investigation into what had caused the explosion and the deaths. Uncomfortable questions were going to be asked. Blame was going to be apportioned.
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A red Cessna delivered a bit of sunshine that first bitter morning after the explosion. The single-engine plane, dubbed the “Red Baron” by some at the site and housed at the Idaho Falls airport, occasionally performed aerial surveys over the Testing Station, including low-level runs to track radiation releases. Site managers had initially considered sending it up into the black skies shortly after the accident but decided that flight would be too dangerous. At dawn, though, the Cessna was flying grid patterns five hundred feet over the reactor, its radiation equipment sampling the air and its pilot looking for physical damage to the thin metal shell that enclosed the reactor. Almost unbelievably, the news was good on both fronts. The air-sampling gear found radiation activity no more than twice the natural background level, and the radiation appeared to be in the form of short-lived gas released through vents in the silo's roof. And the reactor's metal enclosure was intact, which meant that most of the fission materials released by the explosion were contained inside the reactor. It was amazing—and sheer dumb luck, the experts agreed. The crude cylinder, really no more than a corrugated container, was never meant to be what is called a containment vessel, the thick concrete shell that housed the larger reactors on the site and that would become a standard design feature of modern-day reactors.
C. Wayne Bills, the Testing Station's deputy director of health, had been running on adrenaline throughout the night and was exhausted by the time the sun climbed over the reactor compound. But he was buoyed by the short walk he took on the morning of January 4. Armed with a detector and protected with shoe coverings, he tramped the perimeter of the reactor silo. He picked up radiation field readings near the corrugated steel walls—high, but not excessively so—and came back from his survey with “just one little hot rock” inside the cuff of his pants. Bills concluded that the only radioactive particles to come out of the silo were those tracked out by the rescue teams. There were also some hot spots along Fillmore Avenue, small patches of radiation that had been spread by the vehicles rushing into and away from the SL-1 compound the previous night. Workers clad in anticontamination coveralls fanned out in Dodge pickups and either washed the particles into the ditches that lined the road, using high-pressure water hoses, or sealed them in resin—both crude methods by modern cleanup standards. Tests revealed that most of the particulate radiation in the compound and on the road came from strontium 90, a byproduct of the fission process.
The contamination may have been limited, but radiation was released in the explosion nonetheless. Residents of Idaho Falls, though, didn't get much in the way of facts. The morning after the incident, the Idaho Falls Post-Register reported that “the AEC said the radiation was confined to the immediate area of the blast.” But the story also contained a seemingly contradictory paragraph, one that was used unchanged in another report that ran on January 5: “Measurement of radioactivity in sagebrush samples together with highway monitoring and complex aerial surveys disclosed no contamination anywhere downwind from the SL-1 reactor.”
J. Robb Brady, then editor and later publisher of the family-owned newspaper, recalls years later, “The AEC was very secretive. They wouldn't let anyone into the area to see the reactor. They just froze up about the whole thing after the first day.”
Still, Brady's paper reported that the town's residents were fairly calm immediately following the accident: “There appeared to be no great concern here, 40 miles from the scene, although the Post-Register and local radio stations received some
calls from residents for details of the accident.”
Radiation readings are taken around the perimeter of the reactor silo.
The town's almost nonchalant reaction to the accident reflected a growing ease among residents about the site's proximity and their own safety. That wasn't always the case in the early days of the Testing Station. One resident recalls that some locals were alarmed when the atomic workers started gathering at odd hours on street corners, carrying ominous black containers. Lordy, they thought, were those black boxes radiation detectors? Was the town's air being tested secretly? It took a while, says Julie Braun, then a young girl and later a historian of the site, before residents realized the young engineers and servicemen were queuing for AEC buses—with metal lunch pails in hand.
By the time SL-1 exploded, the residents of Idaho Falls and other nearby communities were considerably more blasé about nuclear energy. Many of the locals had taken nonprofessional jobs at the Testing Station or had friends and relatives who worked there. They'd chatted with the engineers, physicists, and site managers who had moved into their neighborhoods. They seemed like decent, conservative people, and they certainly didn't have any qualms about the atom; there was no reason to believe the site was anything but a good neighbor. If the site managers now said there wasn't anything to worry about, that was good enough for most. Besides, the atomic work brought money and work and prestige into the community. The accident was going to give the Testing Station a black eye anyway; a panic attack instigated by the locals wouldn't help matters.