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  Soon there were other audacious experiments afoot in the desert, many aimed at answering fundamental questions of how to build nuclear reactors that were efficient, cost-effective, and safe. The second reactor at the site had a hundred holes punched into its shell, allowing scientists and engineers to subject all kinds of materials to a nuclear inferno. Materials thought potentially suitable for constructing the body and guts of reactors were bombarded with high heat, agitated neutrons, and intense radiation. Soon a series of reactors was being subjected to the most dangerous abuses and extreme conditions the nuclear trailblazers could dream up—just to see what would happen.

  In 1953, a small reactor called BORAX 1 was installed inside a simple water tank whose top had been left open to the desert air. During the next fourteen months, scientists sitting in a remote trailer flogged it in every conceivable way. Time and again they yanked out the control rod that regulated the fission process, provoking dozens of “excursions,” or sudden, sharp increases in the reactor's power level. The instantaneous fissioning of atoms would boil the water in the crude reactor, causing it to shoot up one hundred fifty feet into the open air—eruptions noticed by motorists traveling along the nearby public highway. Each time it was provoked, however, the reactor would shut itself down rather than creating an uncontrollable chain reaction of atoms—the dreaded meltdown in which radioactive particles and gases are spewed into the air. Those results heartened the driving force behind the reactor, Argonne Labs scientist Samuel Untermyer, who didn't think human or mechanical intervention was needed to stop a “runaway” reactor. He had hypothesized that a nuclear chain reaction in an overheated reactor core would eventually grind to a halt simply as a result of the air voids created by boiling water and steam, and the experiments conducted on BORAX 1 seemed to prove him right. In more than two hundred experiments, Untermyer's supposition that boiling-water reactors were “inherently safe”—a designation that represented the Holy Grail for reactor designers—seemed to be substantiated.

  Still, Untermyer wondered if it were possible for these reactors to be pushed too far—if a radioactive core could melt and destroy itself—and he thought it would be instructive to prove that possibility. He calculated how much radiation might be released if BORAX 1 suffered a meltdown. He then sought permission from the AEC to destroy the reactor. He got it, with the condition that a meltdown could be initiated only if the wind was on a course away from populated areas. On July 22, 1954, the wind was blowing in the right direction. Operators in the remote trailer ejected the control rod quicker than it had ever been ejected before. It sent neutrons slamming into one another at an unprecedented rate. The reactor blew up almost instantly, with a force later estimated as comparable to three or four sticks of dynamite. A black column of smoke and radiation rose one hundred feet into the air. Two square miles of the surrounding desert were reportedly contaminated.

  Onlookers had just witnessed the first meltdown in nuclear history. But it wouldn't be the last time that atoms would run amok in the Lost River Desert. Soon after the July 22 BORAX 1 meltdown, four reactors, all dubbed SPERT (special power excursion reactors), sprang up. Each had a different design and each tested different materials, but all four had one thing in common: they were built for the purpose of teaching the researchers what could go wrong in a nuclear reactor, how to avoid such situations, and just how dire the consequences would be if they couldn't. Years later, after fifty-two reactors had been erected on the desert floor—the most in any one place on earth—there had been twenty-seven meltdowns. Nine were intentional; sixteen were from pushing beyond the limits of technology or human knowledge.

  More than one of these meltdowns were caused by Clay Condit, a thirty-one-year-old physicist working for Westinghouse Electric Corp., one of the first big nuclear contractors. Looking back, he's quite pleased about having played such a groundbreaking role in nuclear history. Now retired, he still looks every inch the stereotypical 1950s hero-physicist: tall and handsome, with flowing white hair and a stentorian voice. Condit says it's hard for young people jaded by high technology and cynical about nuclear energy to understand the intellectual excitement afoot in the desert fifty years ago.

  “At that time, the site was called the National Reactor Testing Station, and there was a reason for that,” Condit explains. “It was for testing. It was a playground. There was a lot of interesting stuff. It was fun. You could do anything. Nobody had been there before, you know. After we did tests, it was all unclassified, which was nice. So we'd go out and do the circuit of all the technical meetings and make presentations. And people would clap and ask you questions and want your opinions.”

  Susan Stacy, a historian and author of a book on the history of the Testing Station, says the collapse of the nuclear industry makes it hard to imagine the enthusiasm and passion among those who flocked to the Lost River Desert more than a half a century ago: “The spirit of patriotism was absolutely palpable. That's what motivated people—their patriotic commitment to the United States of America. To compare the excitement of those days with what's going on today is just enough to—oh, I don't know—turn your stomach. Back then, there was a lot of life. Reactors were running and water vapor was exiting the cooling towers. There was a hustle and bustle. And there were things going on that were cutting edge. They were winning the Cold War for the United States, and they were learning things and doing things that had never been done before. And that was just fabulous.

  “After the war, all the scientists had proven was that they could blow up a bomb,” Stacy continues. “They had not proven that a nuclear rector could be controlled and managed for the constant, safe output of electricity. They were just so far from that. There were so many unknowns in everything from material science to physics—the whole spectrum of things that were not known was very wide. And I think the people who were working in the field recognized it was terra incognita. This was the first time the continent had been landed on. I talked to some of the wives of the men who were scientists out there, the ones who, if the findings of a particular test were going to be available at 2 A.M., wanted to be there. That meant you didn't go home for dinner and, in fact, it meant you didn't go home at all that night. Well, how did these women feel about that? I had the impression that they shared the excitement. Even though their husbands were not necessarily able—because of security—to discuss the details of what they were doing, these wives seemed aware that the family was in this period of exploration and discovery. Maybe they were carefully hiding any resentments they may have had in the past. But if they had resentments, I did not detect them.

  “I think there was a great deal of idealism about the potential for nuclear energy, this fissioning atom, to solve many of the world's energy problems. The vast divide between the rich and the poor, and rich nations and poor nations, really often boils down to a matter of scarce energy. In many countries of the world, human labor is doing the work. Idealistic Americans in the 1950s had some hope that the tedium and human misery associated with that kind of labor could be ended by putting the power of this little atom to use for the world's good.”

  And so, buoyed in part by such utopian visions, construction workers, soldiers and sailors, physicists and engineers swarmed southeastern Idaho throughout that decade. AEC buses ferried them to the Lost River Desert in three shifts a day from the neat little tract homes that were springing up all over Idaho Falls. There was a palpable sense of pride among the crew-cut men who disappeared into the desert for ten hours at a time, carrying their black tin lunch pails and slide rules. Using a nondescript mineral from the earth and enriching its powers, site workers designed and built contraptions that would soon power ships and submarines. They constructed prototypes of commercial nuclear reactors that promised to make electricity “too cheap to meter,” a phrase nuclear proponents loved to bandy about. The dreamier of those slide-rule jockeys even believed that they were changing the world, engineering salvation through the table of elements.

  By
the late 1950s, millions of dollars were flowing to the Testing Station for the development of military projects generated by Cold War fears. Big commercial utilities were lobbying Congress to use the reactor technology developed at the Lost River Desert at proposed commercial plants near major urban areas. The engineers were confident that they had the nuclear dragon by the tail. And they were regularly—and usually safely—twisting that tail in the course of their desert experiments.

  General view of the SL-1 facility.

  * * *

  When Jack Byrnes and Dick Legg arrived in the Lost River Desert in late 1959, they must have been disappointed when the SL-1 reactor on the Testing Station's grounds came into view. SL-1 didn't look cutting edge. It didn't look like the kind of place where you twisted the tail of anything. It looked, in fact, like a grain operation. As they stepped off the AEC bus in the gravel parking lot and approached the chain-link security fence, they saw a two-story administration building and two long, pre-engineered “Butler buildings”—essentially war-surplus metal huts. On the eastern end of one of the huts was a three-story, thirty-nine-foot-wide by forty-eight-foot-high metal silo with a covered stairway twisting up its side to the second floor.

  Buried in sixteen feet of compacted gravel and rock on the first floor of the silo was the reactor itself. Called a pressure vessel, it was a svelte fourteen-and-a-half-foot-tall container constructed of carbon steel, clad in stainless steel, and thermally insulated. Nestled inside a stainless steel cylinder, the vessel held a few pounds of enriched uranium, in the form of fuel plates, in its core. Tack-welded to the side of each plate was a long, thin strip of boron, a “poison” that absorbs neutrons and helped keep the vessel's chain reactions in check. Originally, scientists had planned to mix the boron within the uranium fuel itself, but they ran into development problems. Tacking the strips of boron to the fuel plates was a rushed solution—one that scientists would come to rue. The reactor was controlled by just five aluminum alloyed cadmium rods that were lifted out of or dropped into the two-foot-wide by three-foot-high core to excite or dampen the movement of neutrons within the uranium.

  The control rods and motors that regulated their movement were located on the second level of the silo, in an area known as the reactor room. Also on the second story were the reactor's top shields—removable steel and Masonite plates that covered the vessel's head—and concrete shield blocks that could be removed to allow crews access to the control rods. Above the reactor room, on the third level, was an air-cooled condenser and fan room. The steam generated in the pressure vessel passed through a turbine located on one side of the reactor room's operating floor and was then carried to the condenser. The condenser returned the steam to its liquid form so that a feed pump could send it back into the reactor. This natural circulation system was regulated from the main instrument panel in the small control room attached to the back end of the metal building that abutted the silo.

  The reactor began producing power in 1958. It was designed to create only a small amount of electricity, about enough to “heat the general's bath water,” as one wag put it. Actually, SL-1 was merely a prototype for a series of portable reactors the army wanted to build in order to power military radar stations in the Arctic Circle. The radar stations, making up the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line, were designed to be America's first line of defense in detecting and tracking intercontinental ballistic missiles and Russian bombers should they cross the ice cap from bases in Siberia. And the army saw the small reactors as a way of snatching a bit of glory and money away from the navy, which was in the process of impressing Capitol Hill with its development of nuclear-powered submarines. The army reactors were going to be simple constructions, light enough to be airlifted to their destinations and as easy to put together as Erector sets. They would run continuously for three years on a single load of fuel; their above-ground structure eliminated the problem of having to sink foundations into frozen tundra; and their minimal water requirements were an added bonus. The reactors' greatest advantage: they could be operated by just two or three men. Because the reactors were to be constructed in remote regions, no provision was made for a containment vessel, the thick concrete shell that surrounds most nuclear reactors and acts as a barrier against accidental releases of radiation. SL-1 was built to test the design of these portable reactors and to train the men needed to run them.

  Interior of the SL-1 reactor.

  The SL-1 reactor was the smallest of the more than twenty in the Lost River Desert. It didn't break any new ground or explore any unusual technology. It was, perhaps, an interesting exercise in miniaturization and application, but that was about it. In fact, most of the four thousand people then working at the Testing Station were only dimly aware of the reactor, and that was only because it sat just three-quarters of a mile from the public highway they traveled to and from work.

  Anyone assigned to the army's SL-1 quickly discovered that there was a definite hierarchy at the Testing Station, and that their little reactor was at the bottom of the prestige pole. Each branch of the US military had laid claim to a portion of the NRTS's desert site. In their designated areas, the army, navy, and air force were free to poke and prod the atom however they liked. As the 1960s approached, the navy's reactor program was premier. On March 30, 1953, a prototype reactor housed in a mock-up submarine that was sunk in a large basin of water and placed in the middle of the Idaho desert went critical. Less than two years later, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, cast off from a Connecticut boatyard, ushering in the nuclear navy and revolutionizing sea warfare. The navy program, with its dozens of topflight engineers and physicists and the cream of the naval officer crop, was the darling of the desert. The visionary behind the navy's top-notch operation was Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was considered a demigod by many of the young engineers at the site because of his role in the development of nuclear energy.

  When Rickover, a fastidious man and a consummate bureaucrat, visited the Testing Station, people snapped to attention. The son of a Polish-Jewish tailor from Chicago, Rickover quickly gained a fearsome reputation. He bullied and intimidated his Idaho naval staff and the young civilian engineers and physicists who worked on his projects; he insisted that every detail be disclosed to him. He demanded technical excellence and complete dedication to his vision. Years later, one engineer would recall how Rickover hated giving him Christmas Day off. He was universally regarded as an odd, driven man and—in the words of more than one nuclear veteran—a first-class son of a bitch. One wife of a civilian engineer later recalled a rumor about Rickover that had circulated during his reign in Idaho: it seems he had a penchant for stealing saltshakers from the homes where he was invited to dinner. Despite his eccentricities, Rickover got results. His reactor project, S1W, was a tight ship. “Rickover was a very strange man,” recalls Condit, who worked for him. “I think he was incredible. He had a focus that very few people have.”

  If Rickover was incredible, Air Force Major General Donald Keim was apparently less so. He has the dubious distinction of being the earliest and most ardent supporter of perhaps the most ill-conceived idea in nuclear history: the nuclear-powered airplane. As early as 1947, the air force was predicting that it would take only five years to produce a bomber powered by a reactor. An elite circle that included the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, thought the idea was sheer lunacy. Many others agreed. In 1948, a group of experts concluded it would cost at least a billion dollars and take fifteen years for scientists to solve the staggering theoretical and technical problems the project presented. And that wouldn't even address the obvious question: How much radiation would be released among civilians should a reactor-powered plane crash?

  The air force and Keim were not dissuaded. The service was well aware of the abundant prestige and cash flow circulating in the nuclear business world, and it wasn't above playing on the country's Cold War paranoia in an attempt to claim its cut. Insiders began hinting that they
suspected the Soviet Union was working on just such a plane. One skeptical congressman reportedly asked a high-ranking air force official if he wasn't worried about the prospect of radiation flying over the heads of Americans. The officer replied that yes, he was indeed worried. But, with a tortured logic that characterized much Cold War rationale, he added that he'd be even more concerned if the reactor-powered bomber circling above the heads of Americans wasn't American.

  Eventually, the air force drummed up enough political support to overrule scientific misgivings about the project. In 1951, a civilian contractor was assigned the task of constructing the airplane reactor in the Lost River Desert. Four years later, the reactor went critical, proving atomic flight was at least a theoretical possibility. Although scientists had made no effort to shrink the reactor to a size and weight that could be lifted off the ground—it was huge—air force brass decided they needed a hangar for their hypothetical plane. In 1959, a massive hangar constructed amidst the sagebrush was unveiled. Measuring 320 feet by 234 feet and rising more than six stories, the hangar cost a cool eight million dollars. The air force planned to build an adjacent runway more than four miles long for its reactor plane, which designers thought would weigh 600,000 pounds and reach 205 feet in length. By comparison, the then state-of-the art B-52 bomber weighed 185,000 pounds, with a length of 159 feet.