Idaho Falls Page 20

  At that time, Judy Legg was living in Fort Worth, Texas—the only wife of the three crew members to live in that state. The general public would likely have been oblivious to that subtle identification. But among a small circle of insiders who knew the three crewmen and their wives, or who knew someone who did, Plastino's on-camera remark forever branded Judy as the femme fatale in the SL-1 love-triangle story. Her comment to Plastino would be her final word; she never spoke publicly after that one interview regarding the explosion that killed her husband and her supposed role in the human emotions at play on the night it happened.

  Nature would deal Judy Legg—and Dick in the grave—one more dirty trick, although it would come from cells instead of atoms. Judy Legg had always been a vivacious woman, with a large circle of friends in Idaho Falls—a “delight,” her brother says. Several months after the accident, her friends began dragging her out to social events, where she met a sailor, an instructor in the navy's submarine program at the Testing Station. Joe Brackney was older than Judy, being nearing thirty at the time, and an accomplished sailor; he'd been under the North Pole on the USS Skate, the first submarine to accomplish that feat. Michael Cole describes Brackney as a “gem, an absolute gem,” and says that Judy fell madly in love with him. In September 1961, the two were married; it seemed that Judy had left the horrors of that January night eight months earlier behind her. Joe adopted Dick Legg's son, Michael Eugene, and treated him as his own. A year after Judy and Joe's fall wedding, the couple had a son of their own, and the four fell into the rhythms of happy family life. But a few years later, Judy and Joe began to notice that their oldest son, Dick Legg's biological son Michael Eugene, was different.

  “He was born with some type of disorder,” says Michael Cole, who suspects it was either autism or one of its related conditions. “He was able to count to, like, a billion when he was really small. He memorized every commercial he ever saw. He can tell you the history of baseball players and what their batting averages were, going back I don't know how many years. He's like an idiot savant.”

  Cole says Joe Brackney fiercely loved Dick Legg's son, but it became obvious to both him and Judy that they didn't have the resources to keep the boy at home. Michael Eugene was eventually institutionalized, and the couple struggled for years to pay the enormous bills. Over the years, military attorneys had contacted Judy several times, encouraging her not to sue over the explosion at SL-1. Confronted, however, with the cost of her son's care, she filed a lawsuit in a federal district court in 1979, claiming negligence led to the death of Dick Legg. She asked for one and half million dollars from Combustion Engineering and the University of Chicago, whose Argonne National Laboratory had designed the reactor. The suit was settled out of court for one million dollars. Michael Eugene's care is ongoing. According to Cole, Michael Eugene, now in his forties, is “not completely functional” and lives in an assisted-care facility in Texas.

  Peering through a window into Judy's life might leave some thinking that life handed her an unfair share of grief. But Judy certainly didn't look at it that way, says Michael Cole. As she was getting on in years, Judy told her brother she was grateful that things had turned out as well as they did. Dick's death was tragic, but she was resilient and had found a soul mate in Joe Brackney.

  Even toward the end of her life, Judy retained the wacky sense of humor her older brother found so endearing. “She told me once—I'll never forget—‘I have two goals in life: I want to have a handicapped parking sticker and watch TV all day.'

  “She eventually did get that sticker when she had to take Joe for dialysis,” Cole says wistfully. “He had a severe problem with his diabetes, and toward the end of his life, dialysis was a constant thing. She'd wait the whole day until they got the thing done and then she'd drive him home. Her health wasn't good at the time, either.”

  Joe's body finally gave out in 1998. Judy died a year later. When her life came to an end, she was happy and fulfilled, her brother says. If Judy harbored secrets about SL-1—and her brother doesn't think she did—she took them with her.

  Judy kept the story of SL-1 close to her. Four decades later, her second son, Scott, hadn't heard the part of the tale that most people find so alluring: “My parents have been virtually silent on the matter. I have not even heard any of the rumors. Murder-suicide? That's unusual. I don't think I've even heard that one.”

  Ironically, Judy's brother too eventually went to work at the Testing Station. Over the years, as people learned who he was, they'd ask—usually indirectly in an attempt to seem polite—about the rumors of a love triangle. Michael Cole's standard response was to point them toward the thousands of pages of government documents about the SL-1 explosion stored in government offices in Idaho Falls. He himself never visited the offices or opened the files: “The story is really interesting. I've thought it was interesting for years. But it was a little too close to home for me to dig into it.”

  Judy Legg and Arlene Byrnes didn't socialize in the same circles when they lived in Idaho Falls, says Arlene's friend Stella Davis. Judy was a local girl, without kids, “just different,” Davis remembers. Arlene and Stella, on the other hand, shared an East Coast upbringing, had young families to keep them busy, and were perhaps simply interested in other things. But Judy and Arlene had one thing in common after the night of January 3, 1961: an aversion to talking about the reactor explosion.

  For nearly twenty years after the SL-1 accident, Arlene had only to dodge personal questions from the occasional pesky newspaper reporter or the odd snoopy neighbor. But after the Hanauer memo hit the press in 1979, she and Judy were approached by writers, TV executives, and even the film industry. Both women knew what really fascinated people about the SL-1 story: the rumors of sex, murder, and suicide. Addressing those rumors, even if only to refute them, meant consenting to an intrusion into their privacy. Independent of each other, both women decided not to open up their first marriages, their intimate lives, and their thoughts to public scrutiny.

  After the initial trauma of the explosion and the shock of being left alone with a child, Arlene adjusted to her new life back in New York. Her son adapted to growing up without a dad. He spent a lot of time with his paternal grandfather, and the two became close. When Jackie was nine years old, Arlene met and married an air force officer and moved to Nebraska. A second child, Charlotte, was born soon after. As the children grew older and Arlene reveled in her happy second marriage, the memory of the traumatic events in Idaho, once so laden with raw emotion, faded.

  Talking publicly about SL-1 would have forced Arlene to confront questions about her first marriage—how troubled it was, how Jack might have reacted on the night of January 3. Arlene, after all, is perhaps the only person who has clear insight into Jack's state of mind in the minutes leading up to the explosion. That night, she later told friend Stella Davis, she had made two calls to Jack at the reactor: the first time, to talk about ending their marriage, and the second time, the call which didn't get through, to seek reconciliation. Those calls, especially the second—which may have quelled some of Jack's runaway emotions—were something Arlene just would not talk about. Or could not talk about, suggests her friend Stella Davis.

  “No one wants to talk to you about it, right? I don't think she'll give you the answers,” says Davis. “You're asking me if she was in love with him? Is that what you're saying? Of course. But it was just like every other marriage. You cannot show me a perfect marriage. Because if you say you're perfect, I'll say you're a big liar. And a marriage has its ups and downs. Some of us handle it one way and others handle it in another way. And Arlene has always been in self-denial about it all.”

  Arlene did bend her no-talk rule—but not by much—to briefly discuss her forty-plus years of silence and to defend the reputations of her late husband and Dick Legg. “My daughter, Charlotte, asked, ‘How come, mom, the three of you women never did a book or a movie on that? Was there something else behind it?' And I said, ‘You know what? There
is absolutely no reason for it.' Us three women never talked after the accident—it just dropped. I would think one of us would have put out a book or a movie, but none of us wanted to pursue any of it—we wouldn't even talk about it. And there was no reason behind it, either. It's just one of those things. My thing was, you kind of have to watch out for your government.”

  Arlene also wasn't willing, then or now, to address the dark rumors that continue to plague SL-1 and its crew: “And it's because . . . you stay away from something because of all the stuff they were saying, all that stuff they were coming out with. There were rumors of joking [Dick Legg goosing Jack Byrnes]. There was all kinds of stuff going around. You just wanted to stay away from it.”

  Although Arlene would not agree to an extensive interview, she rejected the notion that her late husband or Dick Legg was somehow responsible for the world's first nuclear reactor deaths. She says that, despite a battery of evidence to the contrary, the two men were under no unusual pressure that night.

  “They were young guys. They weren't stressed,” she firmly contends. “We have more stresses in the workplace in today's world. Back then, living where nothing was around? No, there was no stress. Today's world has the stress. Back then, they didn't even think of it that way. There were just three young guys who wanted to work, and there was just a bad reactor. That's all.

  “There were a lot of problems with that reactor which were covered up,” Arlene says. “Nobody said anything about that, you know. There was all that behind the scenes, but it was very hard for us to get hold of [official documents] at the time because it was all very secret. Back then, they kept everything real quiet. You have to remember that. They didn't want us to know a whole lot.”

  Arlene confirms that all three wives eventually received settlements from the companies involved in the SL-1 reactor, with Judy Legg's by far the largest. As Arlene sees it, the decision to settle was a clear indication that those who designed and oversaw the reactor had no defense against a negligence claim.

  “Judy got a lot more, I think, than any of the rest of us,” Arlene remarks. “She settled for a million dollars. For something like that [the way Dick died], she should have gotten a lot more. All three of us should have. But we didn't. We just didn't. And for them to say that they [the crew members] were at fault even when you win your settlement. . . .”

  But why would the government implicate her husband? Why would investigators conclude that the disaster resulted from a crew member's “involuntary performance” or “malperformance”? Arlene's take on the situation cuts with a distrust she has honed for more than four decades.

  “Why, they're crooked as crooked can be.”

  Today, Arlene lives in Colorado with her retired air force husband. The years since have been kind to her, and she's been blessed with love and a family, much like what she had dreamed of as she drove into Idaho's Snake River Valley for the first time in 1959. And there's still a reminder, a happy one, from those years: Jackie, her son by Jack, who was just shy of his third birthday when SL-1 exploded. Now John Byrnes is a forty-something systems analyst, husband, and father living in Nebraska. He has the same quick mind and inquisitive nature as his father.

  John Byrnes has always been intrigued by what happened in the Lost River Desert that night in 1961. Since he was a kid, he has been sharing the story with anyone who will listen. He's fascinated with the technical details, the heroism of the rescuers, and the ingenuity they showed in responding to the unimaginable. He's also interested in the SL-1 story because his dad died on top of the reactor that night.

  To John Byrnes, his father certainly isn't the cardboard cutout portrayed in government reports. But nor is he a fully remembered presence. John Byrnes has the perfect distance to feel wonderment of his dad being part of military and scientific history without the deep pangs of loss or anger over what people claim he did. When John was younger, it was just the right distance for school writing assignments. “I did my first report on SL-1 in the fourth grade,” he says, “and I can't tell you how many times I recycled it over the years!”

  Over the years, Byrnes collected many of the government documents on SL-1, including the final report by the investigation committee and the closely guarded autopsy report that details the horrific injuries his dad sustained. He even got his hands on his father's graded exam from reactor school; “He got very high markings.”

  When the Internet was first developed, Byrnes, who earned a university degree in mathematics, posted a Web page about the incident, along with pictures of the crewmen, information about the men who went into the reactor to help them, and even cutaway graphics of the central control rod.

  What he didn't get, and wasn't even made aware of, were the reports by investigator Leo Miazga, the confidential memos that seemed to sully his father.

  But it's doubtful those reports—a collection of anecdotes and hearsay, after all—would change his opinion about what happened to the SL-1 reactor. He's read the technical reports about the reactor's problems. He's talked to friends of the family back then. He's heard his mother's story. He believed in the fourth grade and he believes today that the explosion was simply an accident, and that his father, Dick Legg, and Richard McKinley died doing their duty. John Byrnes doesn't believe that there was a love triangle, and he doesn't believe that his father was unstable and pulled the rod to kill himself.

  “My mother reassured me it was absolutely ridiculous that there was any hanky-panky going on,” he says. “And any kind of mental health issue just doesn't seem consistent with my family history. My grandfather was a beautiful man, and my dad's two brothers have had happy, successful lives.”

  That's not to say he thinks his dad or his buddies were saints. But they were guys in their twenties with dreams, not worn-down men with nothing to lose. “I just have this picture of them being very typical army guys,” Byrnes says. “At night they'd go out and drink Schlitz and party. These were very young men. But they were hoping to get ahead in an industry that was just blossoming. My dad's whole goal was to operate a nuclear plant on Lake Ontario.”

  The passage of years has allowed the adult John Byrnes to see how the night of January 3, 1961, negated one possible future but created another, much like it did for many of the main actors in the SL-1 saga.

  “It sucks. My dad is dead. I grew up seven years without a dad,” John says. “But I couldn't imagine any other life now. Who knows how different my life would have been if my father had lived and had come back to work at a reactor in upper state New York? I would never have met my wife, and I would never have had my children. It's really kind of bizarre if you think of all the implications as you go pinballing through life.”

  One of the implications of Jack Byrnes' early death, of course, is that he can forever be fixed in time in the minds of others. The son chooses to remember the father as he was captured on eight-millimeter family film. It was Yellowstone Park in October 1959, just before Jack Byrnes drove his wife and baby son into Idaho and the Lost River Desert. “He was somewhere in Yellowstone, standing next to his car. He was a slender, good-looking young man. He had blond hair and a crew cut,” says John Byrnes. “You could see the dew glistening off the rocks.”

  Others, those who believe what the scratches on the control rod seem to indicate and who accept the picture of the troubled young man painted in Leo Miazga's reports, fix Jack Byrnes in history on January 1, 1961, at 9:01 P.M. He's on top of the SL-1 reactor. He's looking down at the head of Dick Legg and the port of the central control rod. His strong fingers are wrapped around the lifting tool. His knees are sinking slightly, and his muscles are tensing.

  “Call it a moment of insanity,” says George Voelz, the doctor who saw in the chemical plant's steel sink what the violence of the events of the next millisecond did to John's dad.

  Epilogue

  The story of America's first, and only, fatal nuclear reactor accident has never been—and ultimately can never be—told. There are things known and t
hings unknowable. In the days following the explosion, the world's press descended on the remote Idaho Testing Station, producing a spate of “who, what, and where” articles. Reporters adequately sketched the mechanics of the explosion and the kind of cleanup that would follow. They listed the names of the victims, their survivors, and their hometowns. But missing in the stories was the cause, the why.

  A year and a half later, the final report on the SL-1 incident was released by the Atomic Energy Commission. The history of the sticky rods and the loss of boron were detailed. The physics of the “nuclear excursion” were explained. Possible mechanical and chemical causes were explored and dismissed. The training and supervision of the crew were examined; the findings seemed damning to some, mild to others. In the end, all plausible explanations were dismissed but for one. The AEC told Americans the explosion was caused when a crewman pulled the central control rod too far too fast, vaporizing instantly the water in the reactor core and creating a steam hammer that blew the top of the reactor apart. But why would a crewman who had reconnected the central control rod at least four times before that January night make such a critical mistake? Human “malperformance” was all the report said. By whom? It didn't say. With investigative, autopsy, and radiation exposure reports sealed, the final report would have to stand as the final word on SL-1. The explosion was, in essence, declared a mystery that would never be solved. Bigger things were at stake for the nuclear industry, and it appeared officials were content to let the secrets of that January night lie undisturbed in the lead-wrapped coffins of Jack Byrnes, Dick Legg, and Richard McKinley. The AEC report was, after all, an admission that atomic energy and the people who created and harnessed it were not infallible.