Idaho Falls Page 4
But even after spending a billion dollars, the air force faced a problem: the reactor-powered bomber, if properly shielded to protect the crew from radiation, was simply going to be too heavy to lift off the ground. In what surely must have been an act of desperation, the air force briefly considered using less protective shielding and manning the cockpits with older men, ones who presumably would die a natural death before their insides were eaten away as a result of radiation poisoning. And there was another snag: the engines that were to be powered by the reactor had been spewing radiation into the sky during several years of test flights. Anti-nuclear activists later estimated that just one test of the nuclear aircraft engine had released 360,000 curies of radiation into the atmosphere. They pointed out that the Three Mile Island accident—which had scared the bejesus out of the American public—had released just 15 curies of radiation.
* * *
It was against this backdrop that SL-1 began its operational history. The reactor produced electricity in October 1958, two months after it first went critical, and in early 1959, it reached another milestone by generating power continuously for five hundred hours. But that didn't constitute much of a track record; it hadn't yet proved itself a triumph or a folly. Through the spring and summer of 1959, SL-1 ran fairly reliably, aided by the wits of the first generation of Army Nukes, as the graduates of Fort Belvoir had taken to calling themselves. The first operators at SL-1 were older men, well schooled in the workings of traditional power plants. Ed Fedol, who was a year behind Jack Byrnes and Dick Legg in the nuclear program, remembers the expertise they brought to SL-1: “I think the first class that went through [Fort Belvoir] in 1956 were all master sergeants, chiefs, e-7s. They were older guys, sixteen of them. What they [the selection committee] were looking for at the beginning were people with power plant experience. They could teach you the nuclear business, but they wanted people who were experienced in power plants. If you had been an ex-navy machinist's mate working in the missile field or you did power plants aboard a ship, you were perfect—you were just what they wanted.”
This first generation of reactor operators used their experience and ingenuity to handle the SL-1's initial teething pains, despite a lack of detailed policies and procedures. They also proved to be good instructors for the operator trainees who arrived at SL-1 in eight-month waves, each wave younger and more inexperienced than the previous. “In 1957, there was one class, and two classes each in 1958 and 1959. I was in the second class in 1959,” Fedol recalls. “Each time they [the navy officers] started a new class, they were looking for younger people because they wanted someone who was going to be in the program for a long time. Those early ones weren't going to be around too long—most of them were going to be retiring.”
Jack Byrnes and Dick Legg reported for duty at the Testing Station when the SL-1 reactor was a year and a half old. In the late fall of 1959, the two men were part of the fourth wave of trainees to descend on SL-1. By that time, conditions at the reactor had begun to deteriorate, but at a pace that made problems seem unrelated, and manageable. There were a few leaks of radioactive water. The odd seal was worn down. The control rods, crucial for mastery of the reactor, were starting to stick slightly as they were raised and lowered in the core. The boron metal placed in the pressure vessel to poison the reactivity of the uranium was starting to flake off and collect in a useless pile on the reactor vessel's floor. These last two problems were likely related to what the old hands considered a poorly designed reactor core. For a machine designed to be operated by only two men, there was an awful lot of personnel swarming around SL-1 just to keep it running properly.
People problems were also starting to crop up at the silo. A civilian contractor, Combustion Engineering Inc., had just taken over supervision of the day-to-day plant operations being carried out by the military and had yet to write and issue detailed policy and procedure manuals. Some of the veterans bemoaned the delay because they believed that the fourth wave of trainees, Byrnes and Legg's group, were undertrained and a little too unruly. They thought the new boys were in need of some direction and discipline. But Combustion Engineering supervisors were never asked to review the military's operation of the plant, and some said later they didn't suspect anything was askew.
Officially, the army was in charge of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen assigned to SL-1. But on the reactor floor, it was often difficult to tell who was ultimately responsible as inter-service rivalries developed among the men and their officers. And the local office of the AEC, which was overseeing the project, was taking a hands-off approach and remained distant. The cumulative effect of these management problems, it was determined later, led to lack of proper supervision and training for the new operator trainees.
“The army was just trying to build a reactor,” recalls Condit, who was later asked to review the SL-1 project for the navy's Admiral Rickover. “Combustion Engineering was trying to patch it together to finish the project, and it was not a scientific effort. They were just running a reactor. The difference between the SL-1 and the navy projects was just unbelievable. There were less than a dozen army people assigned to that whole damn project, and they had a few civilian guys from Combustion Engineering. And the AEC . . . well, the AEC was not an influence out there.”
It's unlikely that Byrnes and Legg were at all concerned with what the more experienced Nukes thought was a pretty low-dollar operation. From their perspective, they, along with the ten other trainees who had come from Fort Belvoir, had been thrown into a grueling routine. The men were assigned to one of the three shifts that ran around the clock at SL-1, and those shifts could change from week to week. The hours were long; if the rides on AEC buses into and out of the desert were included, the workday was at least ten hours. The trainees were expected to hone their basic electrical or mechanical skills; learn the complex procedures of operating a reactor; and study for written and oral exams, administered by a board of military and Combustion Engineering officials, that would determine their promotions. Byrnes and Legg found it challenging work, and they thought they were picking it up quickly.
* * *
If Jack Byrnes and Dick Legg were aware, during their first months in Idaho, of technical complications and friction in the ranks at their new assignment, they didn't say anything about it on the record. Neither man seemed to be considering a long-term career in the military; both saw their stint in Idaho as a means to a greater end: lucrative work at the commercial reactors they were hoping would pop up across the country. If all went well in the Lost River Desert, they would successfully complete their few months of training and pass their operator exams. After six months of shift work as part of a crew, they'd be eligible to undergo another set of assessments and climb the ladder to chief operator positions. With the experience they'd get supervising plant operations, they'd be shoo-ins for prime positions in the commercial world of nuclear power.
At the same time that the two men were finding their stride out in the desert, they were also starting to feel their way around their new hometown. Jack and Arlene had settled into a duplex on the east side of Idaho Falls. A number of their neighbors were also military folks, and Arlene found it comforting to be surrounded by people who too were newcomers to Idaho.
It didn't take long for the couple to establish a routine. Jack's long shifts at SL-1 meant many hours away from home, and Arlene spent her days running after the energetic young Jackie while trying to keep the house in order. It was nearly impossible to keep up with the toys that always ended up scattered over the carpet, the dishes that continually piled up in the sink, and the clothes that became dirty just as quickly as Arlene could clean them. She looked forward to the nights when Jack was at home and not too tired after she bathed Jackie and put him to bed; then they would have a chance to talk, a simple thing that seemed almost a luxury given Jack's shift hours.
When winter arrived, Jack's quiet time at home with his wife became even more rare. Since the day they had pulled into
town, he had been itching to explore the nearby mountains. A dedicated skier, he found he'd landed halfway between Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Sun Valley, Idaho—two of the best ski areas in North America. Even though his paltry army pay wasn't enough to fund trips to the hot spots with premier runs, he reveled in the powder and the steep slopes he found at the handful of small ski areas dotting the flanks of the lower Teton Range. The mom-and-pop establishments beat anything he'd skied in upper state New York, and they were only an hour's drive away from his home. That first winter in Idaho Falls, Jack's passion for the sport deepened, and he strapped his skis onto the roof of his Oldsmobile every free day he had. Something about the risk, the speed, and the solitary nature of skiing seemed to dovetail with his own character. He was happiest when his wooden skis were scribing long arcs into the side of a mountain.
Dick Legg, too, had discovered one of the charms of southern Idaho. Her name was Judith Cole, and she was a local girl who, just months earlier, had graduated from Idaho Falls High School. Like many young women of modest means and ambition in Idaho Falls, Judy had sought and landed a job with a contractor at the Testing Station. The jobs at the desert site, including Judy's position as a stenographer, paid better than most in Idaho Falls, but for many of the local girls, the money was just a bonus. The real prize was marriage to one of the young men who came to town to work at the NRTS. The girls saw them standing on the street corners in the morning—recent engineering graduates, soldiers, and sailors waiting for the blue government buses to whisk them westward into the desert. The men themselves may have come from towns just as small and slow-paced, but in Idaho Falls, the nuclear workers seemed exotic in the eyes of the young women who had spent their lives hemmed in by potato fields. “I know the girls around town quite liked all those service guys,” said one resident years later. “They were somebody new, from someplace else. They were quite popular with the young girls.” It was a phenomenon that irked the local boys.
The co-mingling of local girls and site workers had become so commonplace that when the funny and friendly eighteen-year-old Judy Cole began dating Dick Legg, by then twenty-six, no one raised an eyebrow. Except for her folks. Judy was still living in her parents' home on Capital Avenue, surrounded by the mementos of a safe, if a bit staid, childhood. Judy's parents liked Legg well enough, but they thought he was too old for their daughter, and she too young for a serious relationship.
Judy's family was Mormon—no surprise in Idaho Falls—and her parents may also have been disappointed that Legg wasn't. Nevertheless, it was a quiet parental reservation, and it didn't deter Judy from seeing more and more of Dick. With his bachelor digs close to the center of town, Legg occasionally stopped by the homes of his coworkers for a drink, but he spent most of his time courting Judy, taking her to movies or to dinner. If Judy saw in Dick security and the promise of a more exciting life, he saw someone who would defer to him. And Dick needed that. Those who got to know him found that the short, stocky Legg came with a swagger and a dash of arrogance. His personality quirks weren't glaring but were enough to occasionally draw attention. There's a story—third-hand at that—about how mismatched the two might have been. A graduate of the Army Nuke program, now a retiree living in Arizona, went through the Fort Belvoir training after Legg and Brynes and had met them only briefly. The nuclear veteran says a buddy recounted a conversation he had had with Legg:
“At Fort Belvoir, if you went up Highway 1 toward Alexandria, it's a typical army town. You've got bars, you've got honky-tonks, you've got hookers. It's the kind of life you lead sometimes if you're in the military. We called it The Strip; it's where all the action was. Legg told my friend, ‘I've got it all figured out with these gals down on The Strip. I've got this first little bar down here. I sit at the bar, buy a drink. If I sit for a little while, a woman is going to come in by herself and sit at a table. I go over there and ask to buy her a drink. She either says yes or she says no. If she says no, I wait for the next one. If she says yes, I sit down and have a drink with her. Then I tell her, ‘You know, this place has no class. I know a place down the road that has a nice band.' She either says yes or she says no. If she says no, I go back to the bar and wait for the next one. If she says yes, we get in the car and head down Highway 1. I pull in front of this drugstore a little ways down there. I open the door and say, ‘Wait here, I have to go in and buy some condoms.' When I come back to the car and she's there, I know I have it made.' This was what Legg projected, that he was sort of a ladies' man—if there's any truth in it.”
As the first six months in Idaho passed, Jack Byrnes's personality also came into sharper focus for his neighbors and colleagues. He was smart, no doubt about it, they said later. But he was young and a bit immature. He seemed to chafe at the responsibility of a family, remembers Stella Davis, the wife of a sergeant at SL-1 who lived across a courtyard from the Byrnes family.
Stella also noticed that Arlene seemed overwhelmed at times. She had married young. She had a toddler. She was living far from her childhood home. But Arlene's wasn't an uncommon story among the wives of the army's enlisted ranks. Stella and Arlene had known each other casually at Fort Belvoir, but the isolation of the Idaho posting soon drew them closer. Stella was a few years older than Arlene, and the younger woman often turned to her for advice. Stella had two children, one the same age as Arlene's Jackie. Arlene always had a multitude of questions about raising her son, keeping a home, trying to rein in her husband. Once a month, when their husbands got paid, Arlene and Stella would hire a babysitter for their kids and then drive east, halfway to the state capital of Boise, to shop for groceries at the PX, the military's own department store, at the Mountain Home Air Force Base.
“We were away from home,” Stella recalls. “But when you're in the military, you're in a family. We helped each other. There were times when I needed a babysitter and she was there for me. And when she needed a babysitter, I was there for her. We hung out together because we had the two year olds and they played together. Arlene smiled a lot. She talked a lot. She and I always had good visits.” Stella, though, couldn't help but notice that Jack wasn't around as much as he might have been. “He liked to go out and have a few beers with his friends.”
Despite the tension brewing in Arlene and Jack's relationship, the spring of 1960 seemed a glorious time for all the young people who had come to work at SL-1. In March, Judy Cole, against the advice of her family, married Dick Legg, in a ceremony near Yellowstone Park. The newlyweds settled into their own place in Idaho Falls. That spring, Jack and Arlene Byrnes would get together with other “atomic” couples, easterners mostly. They'd buy beer and hold impromptu parties on the weekends, or they'd barbecue burgers at family cookouts. Occasionally the women would dress up and their husbands would take them downtown to The Rio movie theater for a Bob Hope comedy. Sometimes the group would pile the kids into the cars and drive out of town to fish along the Snake River or hike in the Tetons. No one had a lot of money, but it didn't seem to matter. They were all having fun on their days off, and the men were learning a trade at work that would eventually give them the lifestyles they dreamed of.
Byrnes and Legg didn't live and breathe the nuclear world as did their counterparts in Admiral Rickover's submarine program. They didn't toil under Rickover's strict rules and regulations. They weren't subjected to his tirades about dedication. Byrnes and Legg weren't scientists or engineers and likely only dimly grasped the cautionary lessons of the EBR-1 meltdown and the folly that was the airplane reactor program. The two newcomers took an enlisted man's view of the nuclear world: One foot in front of another. Just over the next hill. Pass the bottle. Maybe the atom was indeed a tyrant mistress with immutable qualities unforgiving of hubris, as their more experienced shift mates kept telling them. But to Byrnes and Legg, running their small SL-1 reactor seemed like no greater a task than turning up the stove gas under a kettle. And since they weren't Rickover's boys, they weren't subjected to his aphorisms—the pearls of wisdom he'd snar
l out and expect his men to memorize, internalize, and heed—such as, “The whole reactor game hangs on a much more slender thread than most people are aware. There are a lot of things that can go wrong and it requires eternal vigilance.”
It is more likely that Byrnes and Legg had in mind their training at Fort Belvoir, where they were taught a much different lesson. Martin Daly, a graduate of the reactor program, remembers their gospel, perhaps based on Untermyer's experiments with the BORAX reactor in Idaho: “As anxious new students, we all asked our instructors about the safety of different types of power plants. The doctrine they preached was always, ‘A boiling-water plant [like SL-1] can never blow up!' As the theory went, a boiling-water reactor was the safest of all reactors. We believed it. The designers, the officers, the instructors, and the students all believed it. Why not? After all, we were the pick of the litter. We were Nukes. We were career military people who believed in the United States of America. Our government would never lie to us.”
3. “There Must Be Something Wrong at SL-1”
Despite the human tendency to analyze, to probe, to dissect, life often defies logic, resists being boxed up into neat packages. Talk of a “defining moment” is usually, in retrospect, just so much speculation. But for Jack Byrnes and Dick Legg, there was an event that did seem to mark some turning point in their lives. Though likely regarded as little more than a fairly typical incident at the time, people important in the nuclear world would later look back on the night of May 27, 1960, seven months after Byrnes and Legg arrived in the Lost River Desert for their great atomic adventure, and see the genesis of tragedy.