Idaho Falls Page 18

  Or Legg might have criticized Jack about his work that night—they were running behind schedule, after all. Dick was certainly capable of goading his crew, and Jack didn't like to be goaded. In response, Jack could have decided to jerk the rod to get Legg's attention, perhaps to spoil the night's operation, or with the hope of getting Legg into trouble. Maybe he just yanked it as the ultimate retort to whatever Legg said to him, without a thought to the consequences. Like Legg, Byrnes had a history of being quick to anger.

  Four: Jack Byrnes, already upset about his marital problems when he arrived at SL-1 that night, could have been fuming after the phone call from Arlene. She had told friends the couple had decided their marriage was over and had talked about what was going to happen to Jack's paycheck, the one he was agitated about not finding in the mailbox earlier in the day. He could have been roiled with emotion: anger, remorse, guilt, feelings of persecution—all the high, wild feelings that often hit when a marriage disintegrates. Maybe he wanted to do something to get Arlene's sympathy, or just to “show her.” Or, maybe, in that split second before he pulled, an emotional Jack Byrnes decided the future was just too grim. The kid who was always in a hurry to grow up pulled—and pulled hard—to nullify it all.

  It was more of a tangled, mixed-up affair than a group of middle-aged, eastern bureaucrats were willing to deal with. It was 1962 and psychological profiling was primitive. All the possible scenarios seemed outlandish, each in its own way. The variables at play in the SL-1 explosion were the dramatic building blocks of a Hollywood film script, not of a final report about a military nuclear disaster. The nuclear industry hinged on predictable science and logic and was populated by sensible people. Choosing any of the human scenarios as an explanation for the SL-1 accident—especially when they were all based on speculation—must have been distasteful to the committee members. All the scenarios implied that the nuclear industry had put the public's safety in the hands of an angry, brokenhearted kid with little real experience. Certainly the committee members must have known that it wouldn't do to settle on any one of those four scenarios as the definitive cause of the world's first nuclear reactor deaths; all of the choices were lousy.

  Six weeks after receiving Miazga's chronicle on the life of Jack Byrnes, the committee released its final report to the AEC and the US Congress. There was no mention of drunkenness, illicit sex, radiation-sterilized flesh, headless torsos, or concrete graves. There was a de rigueur reprimand to all the managers of SL-1 for shoddy management and use of a questionable reactor design, but this was qualified by a declaration that those factors didn't directly cause the horrible incident. There was a suggestion that the crew's training was perhaps inadequate, but not sufficiently so as to be responsible for the accident. Readers looking for a cause of the explosion would have to settle for the cryptic phrase: “involuntary performance . . . as a result of unusual or unexpected stimulus, or malperformance motivated by emotional stress or instability.” It was, perhaps, as some have charged, a finding that said nothing. But it hinted at everything, conceding strange forces may have been unleashed in the Lost River Desert. That concession—that nuclear energy was only as safe and sane as the humans wielding it—had to have been galling to the investigation committee.

  Years later, before his death, committee chairman Curtis Nelson made just one publicly recorded statement on what investigators really thought about the whole ordeal. “We were unable to fix a real definite cause,” he said. “It couldn't have happened, yet it did. It shouldn't have. We talked to anybody and everybody who, in our minds, could possibly contribute anything, including relatives and friends.

  “One of the boys had had some very bad news of some family sort. And it was our rather far-fetched guess that maybe he wanted to kill himself—or didn't care what happened, more likely.”

  * * *

  With the passage of four decades, there are few people left alive who were in the desert the night SL-1 exploded, and fewer still who want to talk about it. But of those who are alive and will talk, the mystery of what caused the nuclear blast remains intriguing, a rumination on the complexities of human behavior.

  Richard Lewis, then an air force master sergeant and the superintendent of SL-1, remains baffled after all these years. He can't wrap his mind around the idea that one of his crewmen blew up the reactor intentionally: “It could have been done deliberately for whatever reason, but it doesn't make any sense to me,” he says.

  The man who headed the search for a technical cause for the explosion, C. Wayne Bills, thinks a moment of pique might have precipitated the incident, but he is resigned to never knowing for certain: “I think that for some reason, you just get the guy—whatever his psyche was at the time—who just said ‘To hell with it' and jerked. I'm not sure it was as premeditated as some think. They may have been talking to each other. You don't know what kind of dialogue was going on right at that time. Why that happened and the stability of the guys . . . I just figure it's all in that mystery zone somewhere.”

  Historian Susan Stacy was one of the last people to talk to John Horan, a longtime influential site manager, before his death. Horan was the AEC's director of health and safety at the time of the SL-1 explosion, and Stacy says he was privy to a lot of confidential information, as well as to the workings of the investigative committee: “When I talked to John, he believed that emotional instability, as he put it, contributed to this accident. He felt that one of the men wanted to obtain the sympathy of his wife by injuring himself, which is a sick thing to do but you know you've seen that scenario in many families' histories. And he thought maybe the guy tried to do something that would injure himself but would not kill everybody, something to get his wife back into the business of worrying about him, to having sympathy for him . . . I don't know, I think that's a sophisticated way of thinking about getting attention. But why John Horan, who was a man of tremendous experience and was in a position to know, believed that, is the thing that sticks in my craw.”

  Dr. George Voelz, the site's medical director at the time of the explosion and one of the few men in the world to see the effects of nuclear death up close, says he and Lushbaugh, the doctor who did the autopsies, often discussed the essential mystery of SL-1, and they disagreed on the catalyst. “I have concluded—and this is different than other people feel—it was a suicide and he took a couple people with him,” he says. “I talked to Lushbaugh about it in earlier years, and he did not feel it was [suicide]. But no one else has given another mechanism that had any significant probability of happening any other way. When you just put two and two together with all the other things that were going on in this group and the hearsay that I had gotten in regard to some wife calling in and suggesting her husband did something rash, I've just come to the conclusion that was the highest probability.

  “You know, ultimately the cause for this thing—if you go back a little deeper—was that about eighty percent of the control of this reactor was on that central rod. In talking to some nuclear designers, I asked, ‘Why put so much control on the one rod?' ‘Well,' one of them said, ‘it just made things simpler.' ‘But,' I said, ‘you've left the possibility that someone could really pull that central rod and you could get a burst of energy.' He kind of looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, but no one in their right mind would do that.' And I said, ‘Well . . . that's one of the possibilities. We see people every day who aren't in their right minds.'”

  8. Nuclear Legacy

  More than two decades after the SL-1 reactor explosion, officials at the Testing Station decided to tear down the lone structure still standing at the site. The white, two-story administrative building had been decontaminated after the incident. Everything inside was painstakingly cleaned by hand and put back into circulation. Fluorescent lights were taken apart, decontaminated, and reassembled; furniture was dipped into detergents and wiped clean; wrappers on office supplies were discarded and their contents saved; even the candy vending machine was washed and restocked. The building, w
ith new interior walls and floors, was used for several years afterward, then abandoned when the army shut down its nuclear program and the site managers couldn't find any other uses for it. It squatted in the middle of the Lost River Desert for a decade, nothing more than a weathered, unmarked memorial to a macabre and mysterious event.

  Doug Caldwell, a radiological control technician, helped dismantle the office building in 1993, chip up asphalt, and box low-level radioactive debris found in the yard. In the dead of winter, when the sun set early and the desert was plunged into blackness, Caldwell came to believe—or at least he said he did—that the ghosts of the three men killed in the explosion roamed that patch of sagebrush. “When it was night, you could swear you could see them looking at you through [the windows of] the old buildings,” Caldwell told a reporter for a news story published in the Idaho Falls Post-Register in 1995.

  The image conjured by Caldwell seems a nice, if trite, end to the saga of the SL-1 explosion, with its suggestion that the unsettled spirits of the dead crewmen roam the Lost River Desert looking for vindication and an end to the rumors that have tarnished their honor. But that's all fairy dust. The reality is Byrnes, Legg, and McKinley are encased in lead, locked in caskets, stored in vaults, and trapped by concrete. They're dead, and they'll be adding nothing to the technical evidence, partial truths, and rumors.

  But there are people willing to speak for the two long-dead men and their hapless cohort, people who steadfastly believe the crewmen deserve exoneration. They have an alternate vision of that night inside the reactor, one that doesn't have Jack Byrnes, in a moment of anger or despair, tensing his muscles and pulling hard. Their version of the SL-1 story is about duty, sacrifice, and innocence.

  The young men's families and most of their colleagues have always believed that none of the crewman did anything wrong on the night of January 3, 1961. They say the explosion was simply an accident: neglected technical problems collided with a poor reactor design and things went boom.

  The SL-1 reactor is transferred out of the testing grounds.

  Some believe Jack Byrnes might have died from being too conscientious. They suggest that after Byrnes and Legg connected the central control rod, Byrnes might have decided to “exercise” it—move it up and down slightly—as all crews had been instructed to do at the start of each shift as a quick fix for the problem of sticking rods. Some of the Army Nukes believe that because of the frigid temperatures that January, icy water was circulating in the shutdown reactor and, because of the previous maintenance work, at a lower level than usual. That change in the reactor's core temperature, along with the loss of the poisonous boron, was enough to put the nuclear machine on the verge of going critical. And that, they say, is exactly what happened when Byrnes raised the rod slightly.

  If their version of events is true, if the explosion was simply an industrial accident, then the ghostly faces that Caldwell says he saw peering through the building's windows on dark nights would be those of perplexed young innocents, offered up as a sacrifice by an industry more interested in covering its collective butt than in taking responsibility for a mismanaged reactor program. And the clandestine rumblings about a love triangle leading to murder-suicide? The investigation commission's broad hint that stress or instability led Jack Byrnes to do something terribly wrong? The suggestion that the crew was undertrained and perhaps underscreened? All just a convenient and effective smoke-and-mirrors campaign to deflect attention away from the reactor's obvious flaws and its managers' sloppy performances. At least that's how some people view the official response to the explosion.

  “The Atomic Energy Commission really worked hard on putting a smooth coat on the whole thing,” says Clay Condit, the physicist who monitored the investigation for the navy. “The AEC was providing the money and it was supposed to be responsible [for overseeing the SL-1 project]. They were aware of the technical problems, but they didn't look into them closely. [Politically, the investigating committee] could not have said the AEC should have shut that facility down.

  “It was really nice to say, ‘Hey, these guys, it was their fault. They had this love affair going or one of them committed suicide.' That's how this bullshit started. It was, I think, one hundred percent fabrication. Somebody threw that out on the table and they said, ‘Let's go with that sucker.'”

  Stephan Hanauer, the nuclear safety expert who first publicly raised the specter of a passion-provoked murder-suicide, remembers top nuclear officials scurried like rats following the explosion: “The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in the US Congress was very, very powerful. And after the accident, they held a hearing [in June 1961]. The chairman said, ‘Who is responsible for this dreadful accident?' And a whole bunch of powerful people said, ‘Not me.' Finally, some captain or major in the army stood up and said, ‘I was in charge, and it's my responsibility.' And the chairman would have none if it. He said ‘Yes, yes, of course. But, in fact, the responsibility is much broader and much higher.'”

  Hanauer was working at the government's Oak Ridge Laboratory when the explosion occurred. Long before he heard the rumor of a murder-suicide, he thought the explosion needed to be examined by the nuclear industry for lessons. His superiors apparently thought otherwise: “I actually wrote an article about it. I was going to publish it in Nuclear Safety magazine, which was an AEC publication, and it was rejected because it was too critical of the [reactor] design. It was rejected in Washington.”

  More than four decades after the catastrophic event at SL-1, Hanauer still suspects that something peculiar happened between the men on shift that January night in 1961. But even if that's true, there's little doubt in his mind that the reactor's managers put a loaded gun into a young guy's hand.

  “We'll never know if one guy pulled a rod on purpose or if he knew it would blow the plant up or if that was his intention or if it was something else,” he says. “We'll never know any of that. But the plant ought to be resistant to the more obvious schemes.”

  Hanauer admits he, too, learned some lessons from the SL-1 affair. He now regrets his own role in promulgating the rumors that tainted the reputations of SL-1's military crew and brought pain and further suffering to their families. “People periodically bring the memo up, either to give me trouble or somebody else trouble,” he says. “I'm the one who put it [the love-triangle theory] on the map, and I'm sorry. I don't think I would say that about three guys today unless I knew it.”

  Ed Fedol was one of the hopeful young servicemen who came to SL-1 in the early 1960s looking for a promotion and chasing the bright future the atom seemed to promise. He had to rush to the East Coast two weeks before the explosion for a family emergency, but he still carries an image of Dick Legg: “He was kind of a fun-loving type of guy. Short, stocky, well built. He used to tease my wife before we were married.”

  Fedol says the military crews that manned the reactor were young men of their time: playful, energetic, and full of vim and vigor. But he is quick to add that they had a healthy respect for the machine and possessed a maturity common to their generation. He didn't recognize the reckless images of Byrnes and Legg painted after the explosion by the AEC investigation. “When we were working, we were very serious young men,” he says. “It was serious business, and we knew it.”

  Fedol says the managers of the plant—the army, Combustion Engineering, and the AEC—all knew SL-1 was experiencing serious problems with the control rods and the loss of boron but chose not to shut the reactor down. When the problems hit a critical level and it all went horribly wrong in less than a second that cold January night, he thinks the military and the AEC ducked and ran, leaving Byrnes and Legg as the scapegoats.

  “I still believe in justice and fair play,” says Fedol, who is disgusted that rumors about the two men still circulate four decades after the incident. “I would love to see these guys exonerated. No one has ever proven them guilty of anything. But they were assumed guilty.”

  Ed Vallario, the SL-1 health physicist who pulle
d the first body from the reactor on the night of January 3, remained a strong defender of the three crewmen throughout his life. Years after the accident, he returned to the Idaho site for a brief visit. When he heard a public relations person tell a group of visitors that the SL-1 explosion may have been caused by a love triangle, Vallario rebuked him. He was there. He knew the men. It was hogwash, he said.

  “The rumors angered him,” says his wife, Bette, also a health physicist. “They really upset him because he felt there was just no foundation in truth to them. This was a man who truly enjoyed people, and he thought those rumors were a great dishonor to both the men and their families. He thought it [the cause of the explosion] was a design flaw in the reactor.”

  Vallario's support of the three young men never wavered, nor did his belief that he did the right thing by plunging into the reactor to rescue the first crewman—even though it was an action that marked, and later doomed, him. “There was a residual red spot along the upper part of his chest near the collarbone that extended down three or four inches and was maybe as wide as two hands. I remember seeing it as a kid,” recalls Robert Vallario, Ed's son, who himself went on to work in the nuclear field. “He said he never actually thought anything about it. But later on in life, many, many years later, he went for a medical exam and a doctor who was a little more astute said, ‘What the heck is this red stuff on your chest—did you ever receive a burn or a radiation burn?' My dad finally put two and two together and said, ‘It's interesting that you should say that . . .'”