Idaho Falls Read online

  Ed Fedol, a fellow trainee at Fort Belvoir, recalls the facility's crash course on nuclear power: “We only had four months of academics: nuclear theory, nuclear engineering, some mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, radiological engineering,” he says. “It was rather heavy. It was a tough four-month grind. Then you went through four months of specialty training. You were either going to be a mechanic, an electrician, an electronics technician, or a health physics person. After that, you went through four months of reactor operator training.”

  Fedol, like Byrnes and Legg, learned about the program somewhat incidentally. Like all the young men who enrolled in the Fort Belvoir training school, he had developed his own version of an atomic future, one that was invariably rosy: “I thought, ‘This is a brand-new field, this is a way to get promoted.' I was twenty-five. I had done four years in the navy, from the age of seventeen to twenty-one. I was out for two years, and then I was broke and hungry and went into the army, and I had been in for two years. And here I'm thinking, ‘This is a way to get promoted pretty quick.'”

  Martin Daly, also a graduate of the program, says the young recruits might have lacked college degrees but they were subjected to the most intense, real-life training their instructors could devise. “The last part of the course, the operations phase, started at a control-room simulator located at the school,” Daly recalls. “Yes, we had a full-blown nuclear power plant control-room simulator back in the '50s. The instructor had the ability to introduce any number of problems at any time and observe the reactions of the operator. We had to spend many hours in the simulator before we ever were allowed to sit at the controls of a real nuclear reactor. We also had to memorize the schematic piping diagram and electrical diagram of the entire power plant. We had to know the location and function of every valve, every pipe, and every device in the entire plant. When we finally got to work in the plant, we were assigned to work with experienced people as equipment operators. The equipment operator works in conjunction with the control room to see that the plant always ran smoothly and to correct any malfunction immediately.

  “Finally, as a control room operator, we were put under enormous pressure to perform,” Daly says. “Working with a live nuclear reactor, we had to perform cold startup procedures, system shutdowns, and recover from SCRAMS [emergency shutdowns]. We also had to learn to recover from loss of commercial power, synchronize with commercial power, deal with runaway turbines, and supervise wastewater treatment. And all of this while keeping an accurate log of every move we made while on shift.”

  Both Byrnes and Legg did well in training, though no one remembers them as standing out from any of the other men in the class. But their instructors decided that they had potential. Having passed the psychological test required of all trainees, the two, their bosses reckoned, were ready to take the next step and become licensed reactor operators. For that they would need to go to Idaho's Lost River Desert, to the National Reactor Testing Station, where the army had built a small nuclear reactor called Stationary Low-Power Unit 1, commonly referred to as SL-1.

  * * *

  Forty-one miles west of Idaho Falls, the Lost River Desert has always been one of those just-passing-through places in the American West. At the peak of summer, the sun and heat are relentless, and shade is as scarce as water. When the sun drops at dusk over the dry mountains to the west, the desert radiates an unsettling power as it gives up the heat of the day. In the dead of winter, the desert, assaulted by wind-driven snow, seems to stretch out endlessly.

  Even fourteen thousand years ago, when the climate was cooler and the landscape was dotted with shallow lakes and forests, prehistoric humans didn't linger in this northeast corner of the Snake River Plain, a band of flat land that curls across southern Idaho like a crooked grin. Molten rhyolite bubbled up from the planet's core, flowed out of fissures like black tongues, and then retreated, creating tubes, or caves, of fantastic forms. Under the extreme pressure, the desert's surface cracked wide open and volcanoes pushed their way upward. Three mark the desert floor; the largest, Big Southern Butte, rises up almost two thousand feet.

  The desert, implacable in its harshness, withstood the first incursions of the white man. Fur trappers passed through in 1818 but quickly decided the barren landscape harbored more hazards than pelts. In the 1840s, westbound emigrants crossed the desert on a cutoff from the Oregon Trail; still-visible wagon tracks that head toward the sunset indicate they didn't stay long. Gold and silver strikes in 1860 attracted miners to the mountains north of the desert, but they saw no riches in the sagebrush they traversed carrying their supplies.

  By the 1880s, industrious Mormon farmers were flooding into southern Idaho as a result of increasingly crowded living conditions in Utah. They settled along the eastern and southern edge of the Snake River Plain. Here they could use the river to irrigate the crops of potatoes, sugar beets, seed peas, and wheat they grew in the region's light soil, which was enriched with volcanic ash and trace minerals. Other settlers—ranchers and sheepherders—claimed land in the mountainous valleys to the north, where the water flowed freely. By the early twentieth century, much of the Snake River Plain, from eastern Oregon to Yellowstone country, had been transformed into a green patchwork of farms and quiet Mormon towns. Just one scrappy town—folks called it Arco—had carved out a tenuous hold on the western fringe of the Lost River Desert. The town owed its dusty existence to only one thing: its residents—never more than a few hundred—who were adaptable. They'd moved the town three times since its founding in 1882, chasing whatever kind of fortune-seeker happened to be passing through at the time. But the desert itself remained untouched, its thorniness no enticement to humans. Until the military decided it was the perfect place to install a nuclear testing ground and practice blowing things up.

  * * *

  When the easterners—Jack Byrnes with his family and Dick Legg on his own—finally arrived in Idaho's Snake River Valley, they were awed. On the eastern horizon, Wyoming's Teton Range—at that distance barely an inch high—thrust skyward, jagged and one-dimensional. Only a wisp of cloud at the summit hinted at the winds that raked the range's granite flanks and loaded snow into cornices as menacing as a cocked gun. To the west of the valley, past the interlocking blocks of cropland and the Snake River, lay the Lost River Desert, a vast sweep of sagebrush and black lava beds pocked by the occasional crater. And over their heads was a sky they'd never seen before. By day, it was an endless sweep of delicate blue; at night, the stars glinted like stilettos. Under that sky, during that fall of 1959, a promising future seemed waiting to be claimed.

  Idaho Falls, the settlement straddling the turbulent Snake River, took the arrival of outsiders like Byrnes and Legg in stride; it was used to change. Picturesque but plucky, it ebbed and flowed with the fortunes of its residents. Its resilience had caught the eye of concrete, steel, and lumber manufacturers, all of whom brought their industries to the area. So when men from across the country answered the call of the atom and descended on the city, the reaction of the locals was for the most part no more than a collective shrug. The presence of military personnel and scientists signaled just another transformation of a city that had gotten used to reinventing itself over the course of almost a century.

  In 1865, freighter J.M. Taylor hatched a plan for transporting goods across the fast-moving Snake River. He oversaw the construction of a log toll bridge, a successful project that resulted in the settlement naming itself Taylor's Crossing in his honor. But the town's name changed a few years later to Eagle Rock, a moniker coined by a group of travelers who spied an eagle perched on a juniper tree growing on a large rock in the middle of the Snake River. But that name didn't last long either. The city settled on its current name of Idaho Falls on August 26, 1891. The name recognized the waterfalls, almost fifteen hundred feet wide, that were created when William Walker Keefer built a dam and retaining wall to harness the power of the rough rapids that cut through the heart of the city.

  T
he municipality chose to commemorate its vibrant history with an official city seal that featured the most prominent symbols of life in Idaho Falls: a sun rising over snow-capped mountains, a long swath of field, a stretch of choppy river, an eagle with wings unfurled. The seal eventually came to include the symbol for atomic energy, a nod to the thousands of workers who, like Jack Byrnes and Dick Legg, settled in the region and made the daily trek into the desert to wrestle the atom into submission.

  As the 1950s drew to a close, Idaho Falls was the quintessential all-American town, a perfect place for a couple of young men to get their careers off the ground and begin raising families. While the Mormon presence grounded the town with its wholesome family values, the locals never had difficulty finding fun. Teenagers cruised the downtown streets, their car radios tuned to the latest hits being broadcast on KOMA out of Oklahoma City. After dark, the daring ones would sneak out to Lincoln Avenue, just off the north highway and a favorite spot for drag racing.

  When they weren't working, residents lined the sidewalks in front of the town's movie theaters to catch whatever Hollywood happened to be pushing. When the weather was cooperating, they strolled the greenbelt, the developed land skirting the banks of the Snake River, as well as the grounds of Tautphaus Park. Others preferred to drive to Peterson Hill and look out onto the lights that flickered in the city as evening came.

  Kids of all ages flocked to diners like the Arctic Circle and Doug's Dairyland and soda fountains like the one at the Don Wilson Drug Store. Local merchants kept the town outfitted in everything from work dungarees, plaid shirts, and work boots to the more fashionable items of the day. And there was a neighborhood grocer on just about every street corner, where residents could stop in for their twenty-cent loaves of bread and one-dollar jugs of milk.

  Given its homegrown American charm, Idaho Falls seemed an unlikely posting for a young soldier and a sailor. There was no major base close by. No facilities to hone the arts of war. The town boasted an enormous Latter-day Saint temple instead of tattoo parlors and seedy bars. But what it did have was the National Reactor Testing Station. And for Jack Byrnes and Dick Legg, that made it the perfect town. They wanted careers in the fledgling atomic industry, and there could be no better place to get a decent foothold on that dream than at the sprawling, classified research site situated forty-one miles west of their new hometown, where more than two dozen experimental nuclear reactors were scattered throughout the desert sagebrush.

  At this point—the early 1960s—the nuclear industry was still in its infancy. It seemed to offer unlimited opportunities, even for a couple of average guys from average backgrounds with average education. Everything was new. Everything was possible. And it was all being dreamed up, and built, at the Testing Station. The experience of working at the site would kick open countless doors for ambitious men like Jack Byrnes and Dick Legg. It was fitting that the two arrived in Idaho toting just a few possessions and a lot of big dreams. They were ready to explore the nuclear frontier; they wanted to be nuclear pioneers.

  Just fourteen short months after their arrival at the National Reactor Testing Station, the two young and eager enlisted men would make atomic history. The fulfillment of their strange destinies would make them legends in the tight-lipped, insular world of the nuclear industry. The bits and pieces of their personal and professional lives would make them either the main suspects or the unfortunate innocents in one of the most bizarre stories never told to the American public.

  2. Atomic Energy Meets the Cold War

  Following Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States Navy decided it needed a place to test-fire behemoth guns before shipping them into battle. Officials thought the vast stretch of sagebrush and broken lava fields in southeastern Idaho just the place. The Lost River Desert, finally, would yield to man.

  Late in the year, the navy withdrew from the public domain a swath of desert about nine miles wide and thirty-six miles long, laid a railroad spur to the middle of nowhere, and named the area the Naval Proving Ground. Soon, the crack of sixteen-inch battleship mortars could be heard reverberating across the desert, followed by the thud of shells crashing into the fallow earth. When the war ended and many of the great battleships were decommissioned, it appeared the desert would return to being uninhabited. But one of the last experiments on the Proving Ground, the classified Project Elsie, assured a continued presence. The project involved a different kind of sixteen-inch shell, one crafted of depleted uranium, a heavy metal that helped the projectile penetrate thick armor. But the obscure, silvery-white metal that gave the shell its density had other special properties, both wonderful and deadly.

  Just a few short years after unleashing the destructive power of uranium on Japan, atomic pioneers in America were toying with the idea of directing the force contained within the uranium atom toward something more than a destructive end. Could the atom be controlled, played with, made to mambo for months, years even? If so, the implications for providing energy in one form or another were staggering. Atomic visionaries knew that the fission process, despite all its seeming complexity, came down to one simple principle: An atom creates energy—and lots of it—when it splits. The fission of one uranium atom produces ten million times more energy than the combustion of one carbon atom found inside a chunk of coal. Machines that could harness that power and convert it to electricity, trumpeted the popular press, would change the world by lighting homes, powering transport vehicles, and ushering in an atomic age of cheap electricity and Buck Rogers–like gadgets. The directors of America's new military nuclear program, the civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), would need to oversee a barrage of experiments to give them a deeper understanding of nuclear energy before atoms could be lassoed for a purpose other than one big destructive bang. That meant they'd have to find a space to play atomic cowboy. The AEC, like the navy, decided the inhospitable Lost River Desert was a perfect place to do dangerous things.

  On February 18, 1949, the agency took over the navy's Proving Ground, added another two hundred thousand acres to it, and called it the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS). The classified site, the AEC told wide-eyed and slightly nervous residents of southern Idaho, would lead the world in the development and refinement of nuclear reactors and the materials needed to make them run. The folks in the small towns ringing the eastern edge of the desert likely didn't grasp the subtleties of the technology. But they suspected it meant a wave of Uncle Sam's cash was heading their way, as well as jobs for themselves and an opportunity to sell baseball mitts, tires, and homes to the newcomers.

  On August 24, 1951, in the shadow of Big Southern Butte, the Testing Station's first nuclear reactor went critical, that elusive moment when enough fissionable material is arranged in just the right way to achieve a sustainable chain reaction. Designed and built by the government's Argonne National Laboratory, Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1 (EBR-1) was housed in a nondescript, boxy building at the end of a dirt road. It was the first nuclear reactor in the world to use enriched uranium and the first to use a liquid metal coolant to carry away the tremendous heat generated by a nuclear reaction. Six months after the first chain reaction, the scientists at EBR-1 set another first—and pulled off a crude public relations coup. By hooking the reactor to a small generator and lighting four incandescent bulbs hung by a wire, theirs was the first reactor to create a usable amount of electricity; it was soon providing all the electricity needed for routine operations. The feats were heralded in 1951 as proof that nuclear fission worked and could eventually be harnessed to produce large amounts of electricity. The accomplishments were noted on a chalkboard hanging near the reactor and were accompanied by the signatures of the sixteen men present when they occurred.

  The EBR-1 reactor managed to chalk up yet another achievement, one with implications that sent ripples of excitement through the industry. After the reactor had been chugging away for more than a year, samples of the nonfissionable uranium 238 that surrounded th
e reactor—the more mundane cousin of the scarce uranium 235 that created the atomic reaction—were shipped to an eastern facility for testing. Those tests revealed that EBR-1 had woven gold from dross: it had turned the relatively useless U-238 into fissionable plutonium. A wave of enthusiasm swept the nascent community at the Testing Station as scientists envisioned a world powered by an unlimited power source.

  But EBR-1 would also remind scientists that they were dealing with complex, elemental forces that didn't brook human error. In 1955, during a test that pushed the uranium fuel to extreme temperatures, an assistant reactor operator made a mistake. When the plant's power level reached the desired level of fifteen hundred kilowatts, he pushed a button that sent a slow-moving control rod into the reactor core instead of the faster one that would have immediately quenched the nuclear reaction. It took only two seconds for his superior to notice the mistake and hit the button for the correct rod, but it was long enough for half of the football-sized radioactive core to melt. Fifteen minutes later, radiation alarms sounded and the reactor was evacuated. The first unintended meltdown in American nuclear history was reported to the AEC—but not to the public. It would be another year before the news leaked out to mainstream media.