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  It would be a month before substantial details of the accident were released, but officials knew early on that radiation had indeed escaped and drifted into the Lost River Desert. In the days immediately following the explosion, the Red Baron made several air-sampling flights and roamed the lonesome countryside surrounding the site, following the route of the south-by-southwest wind that had been blowing the night of the accident. Between the plane's equipment readings and tests conducted on sagebrush, jackrabbits, the occasional sheep, and even on a cowboy and his herd of cows, officials confirmed that, despite what officials initially told the newspaper, a plume of radioactive iodine 131 gas had indeed escaped from vents in the silo and had drifted southward. A meteorological report compiled in May 1962 reasoned that the initial aerial survey failed to pick up significant radiation levels in its flight path because the weather conditions at the time—a slow-moving mass of frigid air—had held the gas close to the ground.

  The news came as no surprise to the experts. As much as the industry wished it weren't so, scientists knew soon after the accident that there had been a nuclear explosion or prompt criticality in the SL-1 reactor rather than a run-of-the mill chemical reaction or equipment failure. Radiochemists had tested a small, sad pile of the crew's personal possessions recovered from the scene—a gold wedding band, a brass screw from a Zippo lighter, and the copper clasp of a watchband. They found that the gold and copper had been activated into radioactive gold 198 and copper 64, isotopes that could be created only by a wild bombardment of neutrons.

  “We hadn't faced anything like this before . . . or since,” says George Voelz, the site's medical director, about the sweeping implications that suddenly confronted atomic workers at the site and the industry itself.

  Almost immediately, the situation at the Testing Station became fodder for a debate then being waged in the US Congress about how close nuclear power plants should be located to metropolitan areas. The AEC feared the accident could sour the public's response to nuclear power, which leading up to the incident had been a sort of befuddled, patriotic acceptance of an esoteric science.

  One day after the explosion, a headline in the New York Times proclaimed: “Fear Safety Question Will Produce Repercussions in Power Program.” The story, noting that fifteen reactors were then in operation around the country, said the fatal incident “brought to the fore today the increasingly troublesome question of safety at future atomic power plants.” Author John Finney wrote that it was the consensus of nuclear experts that plants could be operated safely in metropolitan areas. But, he reported, “Both the [AEC] and the industry have been haunted by the fear of an accident, such as the one at Idaho, that would alarm public opinion and thereby restrict the commission and discourage industry in the construction of atomic plants.”

  Walter Reuther, the powerful head of the United Auto Workers union, deemed it the perfect time to issue a statement saying that the SL-1 incident was one of more than forty reactor accidents that had already occurred in the nuclear industry. He warned that hundreds of civilians could have been killed by the accident if they had lived closer to the reactor. At the time, Reuther's union was before the US Supreme Court, trying to block the construction of the Fermi nuclear plant near Detroit, Michigan.

  Two weeks after the explosion at SL-1, Dr. Albert Heustis, commissioner of the Michigan Department of Health, wrote to the US Public Health Service asking for “official factual data” about the explosion. Heustis complained that his department had been getting numerous inquiries about the safety of nuclear reactors. “The only information available to us so far are the press releases which in some cases have only increased apprehension and confusion,” Heustis wrote. “I believe that the public health agencies, especially in areas such as ours where nuclear reactors are under construction, should receive factual data.”

  And then there was the inevitable tabloid-style reporting. A writer for the Scripps-Howard news service had rushed to the Testing Station and then filed a story that put a more sensational spin on the explosion: “The first authentic mystery story of our nuclear age is in the record books. Now atomic scientists are probing the great Idaho ‘whatdunit' which instantly turned a tame atom into a death-dealing Frankenstein.”

  Industry insiders absolutely dreaded that kind of publicity. To them, the atom was no monster; it was just a building block of nature that could be harnessed and used for humans' benefit—simply another means of boiling water and spinning a generator. By 1961, they were confident in their abilities to corral the atom and keep it under strict control. There were plenty of reactors at the Testing Station—reactors a lot bigger and more complicated than SL-1—which had proven consistently reliable. A stable, safe reactor was just a matter of some complicated slide-rule work, some good engineering, and a lot of beautiful, precise welds. The explosion, though, provoked unsettling images of the atom's other face, the kind of destructive force that had leveled Nagasaki and Hiroshima just sixteen years earlier. In 1961, there was certainly none of the vociferous anti-nuke sentiment that would grow during the 1970s and 1980s. But there were nonetheless critics of nuclear power, and the SL-1 accident gave them ammunition.

  On February 2, an interim report was released by the AEC that stated, “It appears a narrow plume of gaseous fission products traveled SSW from the reactor building. Low-level off-site activity of sagebrush, due to iodine 131, has been observed. Subsequent sampling in the immediate vicinity of the SL-1 facility indicates that low levels of gaseous iodine are still being released . . . Close to the reactor building, soil samples have indicated a low contamination of strontium 90.”

  Highway 20 is tested for contamination the morning after the incident.

  The report proclaimed that aerial surveys had shown radioactivity on the ground no greater than twice the background level. That statement was never contradicted, but it didn't tell the whole story, either. In an internal memo to the AEC's Special Operations Branch, senior health physicist R.D. Coleman reported on other findings gathered during his flights in the Red Baron.

  First, on January 11, radioactive iodine was detected in a suburb of Pocatello, thirty miles south of SL-1. Second, peak readings of radiation in the sage southeast of SL-1 were not reached until two to three weeks after the explosion. And finally, during the second and third weeks, measurable iodine 131 was found in Idaho Falls, fifty miles west; in Butte City, twenty miles west; and in Howe, twenty miles north by northwest.

  Investigators concluded that if the accident had occurred near a populated area, only those in the immediate vicinity of the plant, perhaps within five hundred feet, would have required evacuation to avoid significant doses of radiation. They conceded that if milk cows were grazing or vegetables were growing near the plant, neither the milk nor any harvest would have been fit for human consumption for several weeks because of the risk of radioiodine in the food getting lodged in the human thyroid. Still, they argued, the amount of radioactive iodine gas released had been relatively small—half the maximum permissible concentration for a 168-hour week. They said the iodine had been diluted by the air and, moreover, it had a short half-life, losing fifty percent of its radioactivity in about fourteen days as it decayed.

  The findings hardly fazed Walter Reuther. He changed the tone of his initial statement, but only slightly. He opined that “thousands of people would have been overexposed to radiation if the SL-1 reactor had been built near populated areas.”

  A study conducted thirty years later by the US Department of Energy seemed to confirm, at least to some degree, Reuther's assertion. Scientists in 1991 reconstructed the probable path of the iodine 131 and reported that a large plume of the radioactive gas twice the background level had indeed swept through a large portion of the desert to the southeast, right to the edges of the towns of Burley and Rupert, about sixty miles away. However, the scientists also reported that the plume of iodine was one hundred times the background level at the edge of hapless Atomic City, already a developer's dying
pipe dream. After coursing through the dusty town, the level dropped to fifty times background over several more miles.

  But in the early days of the accident's aftermath, it was clear to both atomic proponents and critics that danger related to radiation was limited, due to the small amount of uranium used in the reactor, the plant's remote location, and the unexpected strength of the metal silo. Far more important was the explosion's demonstration of the atom's lethal force and the troubling notion that atomic workers didn't have absolute control over it. Even those within the industry were shaken by that implication.

  “Our reaction was, ‘How the hell did they screw it up so badly? How could you do that?'” says Clay Condit, the physicist who worked on the prestigious naval reactor program a dozen miles north of SL-1. “It came out real quickly that these guys were on top of the reactor and it blew up and a guy was pinned to the ceiling. It was kind of grisly, and it was kind of astonishing. The guys were amazed that that could happen.”

  Even before the second body lying in the reactor silo had been submerged in an ice bath, the AEC knew an explanation for the explosion was needed quickly. It would need answers to silence the critics, reassure the public and its own workers, and keep lawmakers firmly behind America's first high-tech industry. Accomplishing all of that would prove a challenging, perhaps impossible, task.

  * * *

  By 4 P.M. on January 4, the day after the SL-1 explosion, members of two commissions hastily appointed by the Atomic Energy Commission had begun flying into Idaho Falls from the East Coast. A technical advisory committee was given the task of trying to determine what had caused the accident and would report to an investigation committee that was supposed to uncover why it had happened. By January 5, members of the investigative panel were set up in a conference room at the Rogers Hotel in Idaho Falls. They began to interview everyone associated with SL-1; a long line of civilian managers, military officers, and young servicemen filed into the room, one by one, to disclose to the committee what they knew about the reactor's operations.

  Some witnesses, especially those in charge of the nuclear power project, testified that there was really nothing wrong with the SL-1 reactor. Sure, they may have run up against a few technical glitches here and there. But they steadfastly maintained that any problems encountered in the day-to-day operations of the reactor were nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that wouldn't be expected in any complex industrial undertaking. They said they just couldn't understand what had happened on the night of the explosion.

  Paul Duckworth, the plant superintendent for Combustion Engineering, was obviously feeling the burden of having a reactor blow up and men die under his charge. But he felt compelled, if in a flustered way, to defend his colleagues—and himself—to the committee. His emotion was evident in his testimony: “We had a good group. Something has happened. I have searched my mind many, many times to try to figure in some manner [how] myself or the group failed. We may have. I still don't know if we have—or if we have, in what way,” he said.

  But taken as a whole, the transcripts of all interviews conducted by the panel—interviews not available to the public until years afterward and then only through the Freedom of Information Act—show that the board was beginning to piece together another story. The investigators were finding plenty of fuel to feed criticism of the SL-1 program: technical problems that had been allowed to fester; sloppy procedures for operating the reactor; lax supervision of the trainees. There was rivalry among the three branches of the service, especially between the army and navy and between the military and the civilian contractor, Combustion Engineering, that supervised the plant's operations. Some of the lower-ranked reactor workers told the committee that they suspected promotions and choice job assignments were being handed out based on rank or service affiliation instead of appropriate qualifications, and it was damaging the morale of the military cadre.

  Committee members also learned there was conflict between the military people and the civilian contractor over how much time should be devoted to training. Standard Army Nuke procedures called for eight months of academic and operational training in Virginia, then three months of academic instruction in Idaho on SL-1 operations, equipment, and health physics, followed by three months of training as a crew member under a shift supervisor. It was only after successful completion of this training and acceptable results on rigid written and oral examinations that trainees would be assigned to a shift crew. But Combustion Engineering's Duckworth said that adherence to standard training and procedures wasn't a guarantee at the reactor.

  “We have had some trouble with army people doing the work their own way . . . rather than the way they have been told to do it,” he admitted in his testimony. Still, Duckworth told the committee that he had not been in favor of his company putting civilian supervisors on all shifts to oversee the work of the military men. He said it was difficult to “find competent CE [Combustion Engineering] people” to act as bosses. And although the AEC was supposed to be monitoring the plant's operation and management, the organization rarely got involved in operations issues. And so the problems began compounding, one upon the other. No one group seemed to be fully in charge of the SL-1 project.

  “Well, there was a lot of finger pointing, and it started almost immediately,” says Bills, who had participated in the recovery of the blast victims. “Most of it was aimed at the Army Reactor Branch that allowed the contractor to operate without proper supervision and essentially bypass the AEC operations office out here in terms of calling the shots. I know a branch manager for the AEC who oversaw the contract with Combustion Engineering took a real battering.”

  But indications of casual management and undertrained operators working on a seemingly unsafe reactor design still didn't resolve a crucial question: Exactly what happened on the night of January 3? The Washington bureaucrats, nuclear insiders, and scientists on the investigation panel wanted something specific, an equation that would yield an answer to the enigma surrounding the world's first nuclear reactor deaths.

  Very quickly, the investigation began to focus on the main task the three crewmen were supposed to be doing that night: reconnecting the control rods, which essentially represented the reactor's accelerator pedal. The last entry in the reactor log revealed that the men were working on top of the reactor, preparing it for start-up. And Polaroids of the silo's interior, shot by photographers who were each allowed just thirty seconds on the operating floor in days after the explosion, indicated that the main control rod—the one that could take the reactor critical by itself—was completely withdrawn and lying on the reactor top.

  In the early days of the probe, the committee learned about the well-known problems that had afflicted the rods. Its review of the site's operating logs revealed SL-1's five controls had stuck more than eighty times, and that thirty of those malfunctions occurred in the two months leading up the explosion. The logs also showed the control rods had failed to fall freely forty-six times when the reactor was “scrammed,” or shut down quickly, an operation designed to mimic an emergency. The condition of the rods represented a dangerous operating environment, and it set heads wagging at more prestigious reactors at the Testing Station.

  “The reactor was real tacky,” says naval physicist Condit. “You had this whole miserable history of stuck rods. The naval reactor would have shut this [SL-1] down a year before. There's no way you allow that.”

  Army Sergeant Robert Bishop, a chief operator and head of the reactor's maintenance unit, helped shut down SL-1 on December 23 for what turned out to be the last time. Because of a series of deaths in his family, he had not been on shift work for six weeks. When he returned to work that day, he was shocked at the condition of the rods, the instrumental pieces of equipment that kept the reactor under control.

  “We had had some problems previous to that with sticking rods,” he testified. “But when I started to operate the plant on the twenty-third, I found the situation to be far worse than I had eve
r encountered before. My procedure was to push the rod drop button on a particular rod. The rod would then drop perhaps an inch or more and then stick. Then I would drive the rod in for a few inches and try it again by pushing the rod drop button. Frequently, it would drop a little more, stick again. This process continued until I had driven the rod down to about three inches, at which point most of the rods dropped readily.”

  Logs during that last shutdown before the holidays showed that three of the five control rods stuck and would not fall freely. They had to be driven down with their clutch mechanisms.

  When asked by the committee if he had voiced his concerns, Bishop said, “I gave the opinion to CE people that during the next shutdown we should thoroughly consider whether we should continue trying to operate the plant with the rods sticking as badly as they were. I have been qualified on four reactors and feel that sticking of the control rod is a very serious problem, and something should be done about it or we should not continue to operate the reactor.”