Idaho Falls Page 16
In a cover letter on its final report, committee chairman Curtis Nelson offered just a few tantalizing words about what might have been at the root of the explosion. Rarely have so few words hinted at so much but actually said so little. The sudden pull on the control rod, he wrote, may have been motivated by one of two things:
. . . involuntary performance of the individual manipulating the rod as a result of unusual or unexpected stimulus, or malperformance motivated by emotional stress or instability.
7. Murder-Suicide?
The Atomic Energy Commission must have thought the final investigative report a paper version of the concrete tombs that encased the hot bodies of the SL-1 crew. The report contained page after page of supplements, technical analysis, records of control rod drops, and nuclear jargon; the sheer weight of words formed an impregnable shell around the atomic incident. With the finding that the central control rod was pulled up too far and too fast by a crewman, the investigators closed the case. It was end of story: no names, no motives, no explanations. The media dutifully ran short stories on the committee's cryptic final statement and then moved on to other news. Lawmakers stopped asking questions. The twisted reactor core was trucked from the Hot Shop and buried with the rest of the hazardous waste. Grass grew over the layers of lead and concrete that surrounded the remains of Jack Byrnes, Dick Legg, and Richard McKinley. Their wives had scattered across the country. They were left alone with grief, toddlers, paltry military-widow benefits, and, soon, the knowledge that people were gossiping about them. It was that cryptic phrase in the final report—“involuntary performance . . . as a result of unusual or unexpected stimulus, or malperformance motivated by emotional stress or instability.” To the families and friends of the victims, it was a whispered smear. To others, even cloaked in bureaucratic language, that one line in the final report hinted at dark things. Incredibly, no one at the time asked what the phrase really meant. It would be nine years before a government official would off-handedly provide the closest thing to an answer, and it would be eight more years before the public heard about it.
* * *
In September 1971, Stephan Hanauer settled in behind his desk at AEC headquarters in Washington, DC, to write a short memo to his boss. The professor-turned-bureaucrat knew his superior on the nuclear regulatory staff was looking into the threat sabotage activity posed to the nation's commercial nuclear reactors. Hanauer wanted to remind his boss to look closer afield than European terrorists or Russian spies. As Hanauer remembers it, he was thinking: “It isn't only shaped charges or guys with machine guns you have to worry about wrecking a nuclear plant. It's the people who work on it every day that you ought to be worried about.”
The short message pointing out that danger was forwarded to his boss, who read it and filed it away along with the other official memos he received from the myriad bureaucrats who worked under him. The memo was no big deal, Hanauer says; it didn't raise a single eyebrow when he wrote it.
“I was trying to get people to talk about what really might happen instead of some of this spook stuff,” Hanauer says. “I didn't get any heat for that memo. It was just part of the background.”
Eight years later, in March 1979, the memo, yellowed with age, had been forgotten, just like the SL-1 incident. However, one man who had read the memo years earlier, nuclear regulator Robert Pollard, never forgot its contents. Pollard eventually had a change of mind about the worth of nuclear energy and left the AEC to join the Union of Concerned Scientists. During the height of anti-nuke opposition in the late 1970s, to buttress the group's arguments that nuclear reactors were unsafe, Pollard slipped a copy of Hanauer's memo into the hands of the editorial team at the Brattleboro Reformer, a small Vermont newspaper.
The paper ran the contents of the memo, which were quickly picked up by the major news services and distributed to hundreds of newspapers nationwide. Hanauer's memo was short in both length and detail. But it seemed to answer the question investigators had left hanging almost two decades earlier. And what an answer it was.
The explosion at SL-1 in 1961, Hanauer claimed, was no accident. It was sabotage—and it was committed by one of the three crewmen on duty that January night. Not only that, Hanauer wrote his boss, the first fatal nuclear reactor accident in the world was, in fact, a murder-suicide.
Some newspapers, probably fearing libel lawsuits, chose not to report why Hanauer believed one of the young servicemen would kill himself and take his comrades with him. But other papers did. Hanauer, they reported, believed the three deaths by atom, surely the most novel in the tawdry history of murder-suicide, were the culmination of a love triangle between the crewmen and one of their wives.
The revelation was shocking, with its suggestion that the most powerful force in nature could be wielded like a Saturday night special. But it hardly made a blip on the nation's radar screen. The press and public didn't seem to care; the story was passé by the next day. The Atomic Energy Commission made no formal statement. The SL-1 explosion, after all, was old news. By 1979, Americans found themselves desensitized to the horrors of senseless death and destruction—and government whitewashes. In the nearly two decades since the atomic disaster, they had lived through the dramatic cultural, social, and political upheavals of the 1960s and '70s. They had watched on television the assassinations of John F. and Bobby Kennedy and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.; the aftermath of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam; the chaos and repercussions of the race riots; the shooting of students at Kent University; the heinous rampages of serial killers; and the disgrace of Richard M. Nixon.
Hanauer's memo didn't go completely unnoticed, however. The families of the dead men had sought anonymity after the explosion, and they didn't call any press conferences to counter the allegations. But privately, they were disgusted. They told friends that there was no truth nor proof to Hanauer's allegations. They said it was all a lie, just another insult, like the invasive autopsies, the strange burial rites, and the spineless final report by SL-1 investigators. Former cadre members in the Army Nuke program—whether they had known the three SL-1 victims or not—cursed Hanauer for sullying their colleagues, young men whom they believed had given their lives in the line of duty. Even those who had been part of the initial rescue mission were irked by the suggestion of scandal, perhaps feeling that it somehow made the extreme risk they had faced seem unnecessary, even foolish in retrospect. One worker publicly expressed how disappointed he was with Hanauer, feeling the AEC official had exercised poor judgment in writing the memo. He said that Hanauer, who hadn't been anywhere near the SL-1 site and hadn't known the men personally, should have used more discretion.
If the memo went over the heads of Americans, its contents would become an urban legend in the closed world of the nuclear industry. The love-triangle story would pass from old hand to new, embellished here, spiced up there. Facts had always been scarce, and names could never be attached definitively to the alleged sins and crimes. Nonetheless, retelling the strange story of SL-1 became salacious amusement, a lunch-hour whodunit, even a cautionary tale to new nuclear workers.
After the memo was published and the love-triangle story was circulated, embellished, and then hardened into legend in the nuclear world, Hanauer's name would be cited as the informed source. Now in his mid-seventies and working with the Department of Energy, Hanauer wishes it weren't so. It's not that he doesn't think sabotage couldn't happen at an American nuclear reactor, or that his instincts aren't telling him something strange happened at SL-1 that night in 1961. It's simply because today, as on that day in 1971 when he wrote the memo, he has no proof. He didn't talk to investigators. He didn't talk to family members. He didn't hear a remorseful wife confess to an affair. He found no angry suicide note. In fact, Hanauer now admits his memo was really not much more than the written version of someone leaning toward the person beside them and saying, “Hey, did you hear about . . . ?” The memo was important, though, because it was the first time a nuclear official reported, i
n writing, the kind of talk that had been circulating among a small group of insiders since 1961. And if the memo was based on rumor, at least it came from sources close to the men involved.
“I know exactly when I first heard it. I lecture at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] every summer in their nuclear power safety course,” Hanauer says. The first time I did it was in 1966, and some people from the army reactors program were in the course. They told me about this love triangle in such a way that I believed it. They convinced me at the time that they knew what they were talking about. They were convincing.
“But, of course, I didn't cross-examine them. I listened. I don't remember any details, and I was less critical then than I am now. I don't know who they were, and I don't have any evidence.”
And as it turns out, Hanauer's take on the events of January 3, 1961, may not have been entirely ungrounded. An investigator would later learn that passions—maybe petty, maybe deep—were in the silo that night. But could anger, sorrow, spite, or jealousy really have prompted Byrnes to abandon his training, his common sense, his conscience? Who knows? Whatever emotion was running wild at 9 p.m. was extinguished by 9:01. It left investigators to divine by clues, elliptical comments, and recollection what role passion might have played in America's first reactor deaths.
* * *
Arlene Byrnes opened her door in the early hours of January 4 to find a group of grim-faced people congregated on her doorstep. Given the odd hour and the somber faces in front of her, Arlene knew they were not bearing good news. Her first thought was that Jack had been hurt in an automobile crash. That was understandable. Highway 20 heaved and fell with the desert's contour. In the winter it was pummeled by ferocious winds and driving snow, which collected in its swales. It could be treacherous, and Jack wouldn't have been the first site worker to be hurt or even killed on the ribbon of asphalt that led to and from the Lost River Desert.
Once she had been escorted into her living room and guided to a chair, however, army officials told Arlene her husband had been killed in an accident at SL-1. Her response, between the tears and shock, was odd. She turned to the army captain, sergeant, and wife of another sergeant huddled on the couch and said Jack had told her—she didn't say when—that the reactor would blow up and he would be killed in the explosion. He even instructed her to have one of his good friends, a civilian employee at the reactor, invest her money if something happened to him. It was a peculiar statement. But those present didn't question the distraught widow. Maybe they thought that in her traumatized state, she was misinterpreting or exaggerating some comment Jack had made. Maybe she was implying—and this seemed most likely—that Jack believed the reactor was unsafe. But there was another way of interpreting her statement, and the implications were staggering. Could Jack's warning have been a veiled threat—or a distraught promise?
In the coming days, the investigation committee quickly appointed by the AEC would ponder that disturbing question, but secretly. Arlene's late-night revelation and another bit of information—that a crewman's wife had made an unsettling phone call to a top site official—would quickly lead investigators into murky psychological waters rarely navigated by the orderly minds that dominated both the AEC and the nuclear industry. The scientists and professors on the committee knew the half-life of every radioactive element known to man. They comprehended complex mathematical formulas. But the human heart? Too messy, too unpredictable. It soon became clear committee members were learning about human fallibility, and it was not a lesson they wanted to share with the public.
On January 16, Allan Johnson, manager of the AEC's Idaho Operations Office, issued a memo that for years afterward would guide what the public learned, and what it wouldn't: “All documents concerning the SL-1 incident, not otherwise classified Confidential or higher, are to be marked Official Use Only. Exceptions occur in the case of information published in the form of press releases. Press releases themselves are Official Use Only until approved by the Manager or his designated alternate(s).”
Even site medical director Dr. George Voelz wasn't privy to the details of the investigation. But as one of the higher-level employees, he was aware that something was brewing: “I answered questions from the investigating committee, two or three or four days afterwards. They were meeting all day long with various people to try to get details on what happened and what the status was out at the SL-1 site—the psychological things I wasn't directly involved with. But I knew that there were questions being asked. This got started within about twenty-four hours. There was a telephone call between one of the crewmen and his wife. They'd been having problems over the weekend. He was out at the site, and I guess the telephone call didn't go very well, and he got angry and slammed down the phone. And a very short time later, this accident happened. Then, soon after, one of the wives had actually called the [site] manager and expressed her concern that her husband may have done something rash. And that triggered off immediately this whole investigation about what was known about the stability of this crew.”
Then site manager Johnson is now dead, and records don't indicate which wife called him. But within days of the accident, Leo Miazga, a special investigator with the AEC's Division of Inspection, then working in Richland, Washington, was flown into Idaho Falls to conduct classified interviews—and he was told to focus his inquiry on Jack Byrnes. Even though months would pass before the investigation committee received confirmation from the autopsy team that Byrnes was the one pulling the rod that night, its members saw evidence mounting that twenty-one-year-old Jack Byrnes played a key role in the incident. They'd established that Byrnes was having problems at home. They knew he had received a troubling call from Arlene shortly before he died. They had a record of a second call that didn't get through, followed by a frantic call to the operator that something must be wrong at the reactor. They had learned of Jack's comment to his wife about the reactor exploding. They must also have heard rumors about Byrnes's sex life.
It all smelled funny, but did it mean anything? Armed with only that scant information, AEC investigator Miazga got down to work, talking to anyone who might possibly have information about Jack Byrnes's personal affairs. Surprisingly, a gas jockey was one of the first in the nation to know there might have been something kinky going on at SL-1.
Homer Clary was instructing beginner skiers at Taylor Mountain, southeast of Idaho Falls, a few days after the accident when a couple of men in suits showed up, looking out of place at the bottom of the ski hill. The investigators, one of whom was Miazga, had heard Clary had been at a party during the holidays with some members of the SL-1 crew and had skied with Byrnes just a day or two before the explosion. They also knew Clary worked with Byrnes occasionally at Kelly's Texaco Station. Based on the kind of questions the men asked and a few of their comments, Clary reckoned something was up.
“The CIA-type people who questioned me shortly after the accident were asking me questions about whether there was something going on within the group of the three guys, problems with their wives,” Clary recalls more than forty years later. “They were speculating that one of the guys was fooling around with the wife of another guy. I don't remember who they thought was fooling around. But I know they were quite heavy into this kind of thing. I had no information for 'em. I just know there seemed to be a lot of speculation on that area.”
The only thing that Miazga's interviews with Byrnes's neighbors and coworkers was able to confirm with certainty was that Jack Byrnes was leading a troubled personal life, increasingly unhappy in his marriage and in the responsibilities he had taken on at such a young age. Neighbor Robert Meyer confirmed that Jack and Arlene argued frequently about money and her housekeeping, and that Jack spent very little time at the couple's duplex. Byrnes flitted from nightclubs to the Texaco station to the ski hills—he seemingly wanted to be anywhere but home. Meyer also said that he saw Byrnes show signs of temper at work when he talked to his wife on the phone, apparently not caring who overheard. Ano
ther Texaco station worker, Jim Meak, told the investigator that Byrnes “invariably got mad and used profanity in talking to his wife.” Meak also recounted how one night Byrnes had asked that he cover for him should Arlene call while he was out carousing with a friend. Another neighbor of the Byrneses, Robert Matlock, talked about the couples' screaming matches—often punctuated by Jack's clothing being tossed onto the lawn—and how they were as routine as the mail delivery. He also confirmed that the couple had had a loud fight on New Year's Eve, a fight that prompted Byrnes to leave home and shack up with a buddy. Byrnes's friend Martin Buckley recalled how upset the reactor operator was about his marital problems and about his missing paycheck, which he thought Arlene had taken. He also admitted that he and Jack had downed a couple of beers an hour or so before Byrnes headed off to work on January 3.
By January 20, seventeen days after the accident, Miazga had prepared a classified memo for his boss back in Washington, DC, who forwarded it to Curtis Nelson, the investigation committee's chairman. The report was never released to the public, given to the victims' families, or circulated outside a small group of top government officials. Miazga, through seven interviews that covered seven pages, recreated the final days of Jack Byrnes. All in all, it was a succinct report of a rough three days for Jack and Arlene. It was a quick sketch of a young man who arrived at SL-1 on the night of January 3 upset, angry, and frantic about his domestic problems. However, Miazga apparently did not talk to Arlene directly; her insight into Jack's state of mind was missing from his investigation. And although Miazga had been asking around about Jack Byrnes's sex life, the report did not suggest anything unseemly.