Idaho Falls Page 19

  Some years after that physical examination, and more than thirty years after he rushed into the SL-1 reactor, Ed Vallario was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow. Both he and his doctor, says his wife, had no doubt that the relatively rare condition was the result of the gamma radiation that bombarded Vallario's body while he was inside the dank guts of the SL-1 reactor during the rescue mission.

  Don Petersen, the radiation biologist who assisted in the autopsies of the three crewmen, believes critics of nuclear energy often overstate the danger of radioactive materials, particularly in small doses. In fact, in the mid-1950s, he often volunteered to ingest trace amounts of radioactive material for his friend Dr. Lushbaugh's early experiments in radiological medicine. “I've been accused of munching my way through the periodic table,” jokes Petersen, still in good health more than forty-five years after the experiments. Still, trace amounts are one thing; the hellish cocktail of fission products in the SL-1 reactor shortly after the explosion another, he admits.

  Petersen, who knew Ed Vallario, recognizes that the health physicist's dashes into the reactor may now seem rash, even foolhardy. But not on that January night. Then, they were heroic and emblematic of the mindset of the atomic pioneers in the Lost River Desert. “By the time Ed got to the reactor, they knew they had a problem and there were some victims,” Petersen says. “They didn't know what kind of condition they were in. When you have that kind of ignorance and there's a possibility you could help, then you do some dumb things. Going in there and extracting those people like they did is probably something, in retrospect, that would be done differently had you known all the things you know after the fact.”

  Even a staunch defender of the industry like Petersen acknowledges Vallario's cancer was suspicious. “Multiple myeloma appears to be elevated among radiation workers,” he says. “It's one of those things where it's ambiguous, but it's certainly something that has been questioned.”

  Throughout 1998, cancer ravaged Vallario, destroying his sculpted body and handsome face. His son remembers one hospital visit well, and in particular a comment his father made: “You know, when he—I hate to say it—was really sick, he allowed to me, ‘I have to tell you based on the data that I have and what I know and with my background, this [illness] was work-related.'”

  And what is the data? Vallario kept the records from readings off a dosimeter he wore into the reactor, as well as the results of a far more sophisticated radiation test he underwent soon after the accident. He also had the AEC's official record of his radiation exposure. The first two didn't even come close to matching the last. An emaciated, dying Vallario confided to his son that he believed the official documents were doctored to show he'd been exposed to far less radiation than he really had been.

  After the accident, and to this day, the official story has been that twenty-two of the initial responders to the reactor explosion received radiation exposures ranging from three to twenty-seven roentgens of total body exposure. Three of the rescuers, the government maintains, received more than twenty-five roentgens of gamma radiation but no more than twenty-seven. The government still refuses to release the radiation doses absorbed by individual rescuers, but one of those three was presumably Vallario. At the time, the Idaho office of the AEC allowed rescue personnel to receive a one-hundred-roentgen dose to save a life and twenty-five roentgens to save valuable property.

  Vallario's son Robert also believes his father's dose was far greater than what the government alleges it was. “The original dosimeter was greatly in excess of anything that was reported,” he says. “He knew that, but he never said anything about it. His feeling was, ‘Ah, I've got the records, but I understand what they did. And to me it's happened already. I did what I did because I had to. And irrespective of what dose I received, it wouldn't have changed what I was going to do. It had to be done, and I was the guy to do it.'”

  Vallario was certainly in a position to blow the whistle: because of the radiation he had received that night, he was never again allowed to work in any proximity to a nuclear reactor. Not long after the Idaho disaster, he moved to Washington, DC, where he became the director of radiation protection for the AEC and later, for the Department of Energy. He helped write virtually all the radiation protection procedures imposed at government nuclear facilities, and he ended his career as chief of the Energy Department's health physics branch. More importantly, said his family, despite the nagging knowledge that he had absorbed a whopping amount of radiation, he lived life with curiosity and exuberance, rather than with fear.

  “What do you do in life?” asks his wife Bette. “You can let it eat at you, or you can just go live. And my husband was the kind of person who just went out and did what he wanted to do in life.”

  “I don't want to make it [sound] too altruistic,” says Robert Vallario of his father's experiences. “In this era, we approach things with such skepticism. But these guys had a very different reference point back then. They were like Chuck Yaeger; they were guys out in the Wild West—one minute they're up in the hills plinking with guns and the next they're jumping into hot reactors or flying X-15s at twice the speed of sound. He described it as a different time, you know? It was a time [when] we all lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation by the Soviet Union. What's judged by today's standards to be improper was, in those times, clearly thought to be in the national interest and in the best interest of the American public.”

  Robert insists that for his father, “not blowing the whistle was the right way to go . . . it was a sacrifice he was willing to make for the greater good. He actually said this to me in between stays at the hospital: ‘If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't have done it any other way.'”

  A few years after the SL-1 disaster, Vallario and the six other men who dashed into the reactor that first night received the prestigious Carnegie Medal of Heroism, created in 1904 to recognize outstanding acts of selfless heroism. His son remembers that his dad put the medal on his treasured piano, though he was always modest when he talked about what he had done to earn it. The Carnegie medal was still sitting on the piano when Edward Vallario died on January 30, 1999.

  Vallario's wife said her husband stayed in touch with many of the men who went into the reactor with him. Paul Duckworth, who helped Vallario rescue the first crewman, later died of cancer, as did health physicist Syd Cohen, who accompanied the two into the reactor on their second foray. Bette Vallario remembers that the cancers were of the type that could have been caused by radiation exposure. Still, she says, Duckworth and Cohen endured their illnesses with the same stoicism and dignity her husband had shown. Not one of them made a public fuss about their illnesses, filed a suit, or sought compensation when they discovered their night mission into the SL-1 reactor had come back to haunt them.

  The family of AEC nurse Helen Leisen also believes that she was one of the uncounted victims of the SL-1 explosion. Leisen was in the back of the cramped ambulance that carried the first crewman taken out of the reactor and down to the checkpoint on the highway. Rescuers had thought he was still alive when they brought him out, and Leisen was applying mechanical artificial respiration while the ambulance sped toward an AEC doctor.

  C. Wayne Bills, the head of the technical team, recalls that he was carrying a five-hundred-roentgen radiation detector when he threw open the door of the ambulance as it arrived at the checkpoint. The detector read a gamma radiation level of four hundred roentgens inside the close confines of the Pontiac station wagon.

  “We had a fairly exact time [of how long] she was there in the ambulance, but she wasn't badged,” he says, referring to the film badges cleanup crews later wore to record their exposure levels while working at the contaminated site. “A lot of these people weren't badged.”

  In addition to the exposure from the intense gamma rays coming off McKinley's body, the nurse, middle-aged at the time, picked up alpha and beta radiation on her white shoes and around her exposed ankles. She, too,
died a few years later of cancer. Her family always believed that Leisen's death was the result of her contact with the soldier's body in the tight confines of the ambulance. Government files still contain black-and-white photographs of the woman's nursing shoes, which had been taken from her after it was found they'd been contaminated. They are a chilling memento of the atomic age.

  Both Bills, a health physicist by training, and George Voelz, the then-medical director at the site, aren't quite sure what to make of the reported radiation exposures of the initial rescuers—nor the fate that befell several of them.

  “Vallario and Duckworth's exposures were, you know, for emergency work and lifesaving purposes,” says Voelz. “Their exposures were sort of within what had been outlined as reasonable for that kind of operation. But, yeah, we would have liked it if we hadn't had to deal with those high levels of radiation. One of the problems, of course, was at that time the radiation instrumentation used an upper limit of five hundred R per hour and the levels in the room exceeded that, so they were kind of going by the seat of their pants.

  “For lifesaving purposes at that time, you could go up to one hundred R per hour, so that would be a fifth of an hour, or twelve minutes,” he says. “It's all based on time if we assume the level in there was five hundred R an hour. But actually the levels in the room were higher than that—seven hundred or so as a general level.”

  Bills agrees that the radiation doses to Vallario and his fellow rescuers didn't seem outrageously high at the time, but concedes something inexplicable must have happened that night: “We knew [radiation] fields and we knew time facts, so we assigned a lot of them about twenty-five to twenty-seven [roentgens of total body exposure]. That certainly wouldn't be any sort of dose—I don't think—that would cause cancer. But there may be something about fresh fission products we don't fully understand because down in Utah, where they got the clouds from the nuclear test bursts, they had a high incidence of cancer . . . If you look at what the probability is of Vallario and Syd Cohen and Duckworth and maybe Leisen getting cancer . . . that's pretty high.”

  And what of the fates of the twelve hundred people who helped in the months-long cleanup of the reactor and the contaminated site? Though hundreds of those workers were exposed to high penetrating radiation fields, the AEC reported that their time exposure had been kept within acceptable three-month limits. But the standards of acceptable exposure were repeatedly lowered in the years following the accident. There was never a long-term study of potential health effects, either among those first on the scene or those who later cleaned up the atomic mess.

  Egon Lamprecht, the eager young firefighter who was on the team that responded to the reactor's alarm that night in 1961, is a grandfather now. He remains fiercely loyal to the nuclear industry and proud of the cutting-edge technology the Testing Station honed. But he remains bothered by how little was done to monitor the health of workers in the aftermath.

  “After the initial response [of the firefighters], because of our exposure, they pretty well kept us the hell out of there. By today's standards, it would be a major disaster,” he says. “This is my pet peeve with the Atomic Energy Commission. Initially, we peed in the bottle for about two weeks to see what was in the bottle and how it was flushed out. And they took stool samples. After that, all it was, was a typical fireman's annual physical, not emphasizing ‘Hey, you guys got exposed. Let's see what's happening to you.' What got in my craw was, after the initial thing, it was swept under the table—‘Yeah, he looks OK.'”

  But biologist Petersen emphasizes that, in 1961, there was an entirely different set of priorities. “You have to understand our mindset back then,” he says. “There was a sense of newness and excitement about what we were doing. There was no other reason that everybody worked seventy and eighty hours a week on jobs that didn't pay you any more than working forty. Back then, no one worried about what we considered low-level radiation. Everybody was excited about what we were doing and thought it was important. The Cold War was part of it. We were all worried about the Russians. If you go back and kind of put your feet in the shoes of that time, a different set of issues were important, and things that are regarded as important today, no one even thought about.”

  Ed Fedol remembers that era well. He had been working at SL-1 until two weeks before the explosion. He was back at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, the home of the Army Nuke program, when trainee McKinley's body arrived for burial at nearby Arlington National Cemetery. Fedol attended the funeral with a group of other soldiers and sailors in the nuke program; some were new trainees like McKinley had been, others were veterans who had worked at SL-1. After the short graveside service—with mourners kept at a safe distance—he and his military colleagues stood at rapt attention, listened to the haunting sound of taps, and snapped a salute at McKinley's flag-draped, gray lead box. He remembers that the cadre was “devastated, shattered” by the deaths of their mates. He also recollects the palpable sense of patriotism of that era, and of that day. Fedol says that as the Nukes walked back to their cars, they all had the feeling they had just said goodbye to a soldier who had simply died in an accident, not from a menacing technology that could not be controlled. Not one of the servicemen that day, he says, questioned their faith in the atom. And today, Fedol still doesn't.

  “You know, nuclear power is still the most feasible and cost-effective thing to have,” he says. “The problem is, what do you do with the waste? What do you do with all the spent fuel rods? What do you do with all the paper waste and the rags and the absorbing paper that you have to put in barrels and bury? It's a waste problem. You know, I've lived next door to a nuclear plant, and it's safer than a coal plant as far as I'm concerned.”

  * * *

  Following the funeral at Arlington, Richard McKinley's wife, Caroline, took the couple's two children—John Michael, then three years old, and Ann Marie, nine months—back to Ohio, where she and Richard had married when McKinley was just twenty-three. Caroline and the fatherless kids disappeared from public view and were never subjected to the base rumors and sordid legends of SL-1 as the other two wives and their families were. Trainee Richard McKinley had been fresh, having arrived just three weeks before the explosion. He left the scene the same way he had entered it: the new guy, untainted.

  Judy Legg wasn't as lucky as Caroline McKinley. After her husband's death, she moved back into her parents' home. On February 2, 1961, a month after Dick had been killed and less than two weeks after he had been buried, she gave birth to the couple's son, Michael Eugene. Judy's brother, Michael Cole, was away on a Mormon mission when the newborn arrived. But he remembers his parents saying that Judy was devastated, suffered from postpartum blues, and felt uncomfortable being in Idaho.

  “She recognized that she was a mother and she was alone,” says Cole. “Her family had counseled her against getting married really early, and she just kind of decided on her own to do that. And I think she felt uncomfortable about that because the circumstances didn't work out very well.”

  Judy may have been experiencing a bout of guilt and remorse, too. She later told her older brother, without supplying details, that she'd been having second thoughts about her marriage to Dick Legg. “She obviously had struck it off with her first husband, but she wasn't as happy as she thought she'd be,” he says. “I think that they had a lot of issues they were dealing with. And I really don't know much of that story, either. But she wasn't married that long either and, you know, it takes a while to get used to the idea.”

  By remaining in Idaho Falls, Judy had put herself at the epicenter of the early rumors about the cause of the SL-1 explosion. Her brother says Judy didn't talk to him about the incident except once, eight or nine months later, when Michael returned from his mission: “I remember that Judy mentioned that people thought the fellow on top of the reactor had committed suicide, that he deliberately pulled the rod. Judy mentioned that he was separated from his wife. But she said that in her opinion—and I'm giving you secondh
and information here—he did not commit suicide. She was of the opinion that the rod was sticking and he was just working it and, for whatever the reason, the rod stuck and he pulled a little too hard.”

  Judy never discussed with her brother the other rumor: the love triangle. In fact, she addressed the issue only once, years later. But her flat-out denial of any involvement was the very thing that confirmed her as the woman in the rumor in some people's minds.

  When Hanauer's memo about the love triangle finally broke in the press in 1979, it simply revealed the love-triangle angle; it didn't name or indict either the crewman or the wife allegedly involved. Among the few people who knew the main actors, however, speculation had always settled on Judy, if only because she was the one investigator Leo Miazga had questioned Idaho Falls residents about. When Hanauer's claim became public record, Ben Plastino, a longtime newspaper reporter for the Idaho Falls Post-Register, decided to investigate, hoping to determine the validity—or invalidity—of Hanauer's theory. Plastino, having covered Idaho Falls news for many years, had close ties to several people at the Testing Station. Working those connections, he looked into the “love affair” possibility and found “not an iota of evidence,” he wrote years later in a small book on the history of the Testing Station. However, in a filmed interview just a couple of years after his investigation, he identified, albeit indirectly, Judy Legg as the rumored “other woman.” Plastino revealed that he had spoken to the women purportedly mixed up in the affair: “I took the occasion to talk to the girl myself; I think she lives in Texas. She vigorously denied any such thing ever happening.”