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  Sergeant Stolla later speculated that the anger was just one facet of a personality shaped by feelings of inadequacy. Stolla thought Legg was bothered by his short stature; he thought the sailor had a raging “small man complex” that compelled him, always, to prove himself. Some workers recalled that, as a new chief operator, Legg pushed his crew members—at least the ones he didn't like—to impress the bosses. Others said he came off as a know-it-all, a guy who just had to be right.

  When not in a snit, though, Legg had a personality vastly different from the serious Jack Byrnes. Legg, say those who worked with him, was a smart-ass, a jokester, a guy who liked to goad his fellow workers. And while he might have been squat, he was strong. To prove it—and he needed to—Legg would often wrestle with the other guys on his shift. He also earned the reputation at the reactor as a prankster, one not always appreciated. Stolla later remembered an incident that occurred while taking over a shift from Legg. The two were in the reactor control room when a buzzer went off on an electrical control panel. It was so like a Legg prank, Stolla said, that he didn't react to the alarm. He simply told Legg to turn off the buzzer and stop joking. Stolla was less sanguine about another of Legg's pranks, one in which he turned off a fan that cooled reactor instruments. Gauges monitoring water temperature in the reactor cooling system soon shot up, showing dangerous levels of overheating. After scaring the hell out of his coworkers, Legg reached around the instrument panel and restarted the fan to restore normal temperatures. Legg thought it was funny; Stolla didn't.

  Military supervisors later admitted that they'd heard stories about Legg's pranks, horseplay, and impromptu wrestling matches. There had been talk that Legg played cards with his crew members during work shifts. They knew he didn't always do the required checks of the reactor complex. They even caught wind that Legg had at least once been sleeping in his car in the parking lot when he should have been overseeing the operation of the reactor. Sometime in the first weeks of December, the reactor's military superintendent Sergeant Lewis discovered that Legg had altered the time card of a good friend to indicate he had worked at the reactor on a particular day. The scam fell apart when Legg's buddy was spotted in Idaho Falls on that same day. The superintendent had let Legg's erratic behavior slide for a couple of months, but he now decided it was time to take action. He transferred Legg's friend to another shift and told Legg that after the holidays Jack Byrnes would be filling the vacated spot on the crew. Lewis later said he didn't know there was a history of bad blood between the two. Legg did not object to Byrnes's joining the crew, perhaps in an attempt not to make his situation even worse. Meanwhile, however, another of his superiors, his immediate supervisor, was pondering further punishment.

  * * *

  As Christmas approached, Legg and Byrnes weren't the only concern keeping the supervisors occupied. They were planning to shut down the reactor for the holidays, a tradition since SL-1 began operation in 1958. Though the shutdown was routine, the troubles afflicting the plant weren't. The reactor was becoming less amenable to the controlling hand of man. The mechanisms used to regulate the reactor—the five long control rods that plunged into the core—had been malfunctioning for more than a year. This was a critical problem, as the movement of the rods up or down allowed operators to control the chain reaction sparked by the more than seven pounds of uranium 235 located deep within the reactor. The bottom end of the rods contained fins made of cadmium, a metal that absorbs neutrons and slows the activity of the atoms inside the radioactive metal. As the control rods were raised, moving the cadmium, or poison, away from the enriched uranium, a nuclear reaction produced heat that turned water in the reactor to steam, which in turn was used to spin a generator to produce electricity. When operators wanted to stop the production of electricity, the control rods were dropped back into the core and the fissioning of uranium atoms was slowed to subcritical levels.

  The control rods had been sticking for months, sometimes when they were being raised and often when crews tried to drop them by gravity into the reactor to stop the chain reaction of atoms. Sometimes, the rods wouldn't drop at all or would stick halfway down, requiring them to be driven down inch by inch with an electrical clutch. The plant logs revealed that in the reactor's first twenty-two months of operation, the rods malfunctioned 2.5 percent of the time—not a perfect record, but not a dire situation either. However, from November 18 to December 23, the rods stuck on drop tests 13 percent of the time. Even worse, it was hard to predict when they would glide freely and when they would seize. A report on the SL-1 operation drafted in May 1961 states that “the stickings always occurred in a very erratic and random fashion.”

  It was a dangerous situation, one that would have incensed the navy's Admiral Rickover and one that would have caused the immediate shutdown of his reactors. But this was the army, and it approached nuclear power in a different way. It didn't have the level of expertise or the money the navy did, and the SL-1 was in many ways just a glorified generator. It wasn't a concept that would revolutionize the army's role. Top contractors weren't lining up to eagerly bid for work. Nuclear experts weren't clamoring to get in on the project. Compared with some of the other ventures underway at the Testing Station, the SL-1 reactor was a modest proposition, an aside of the atomic age.

  Supervisors of the plant, both military and civilian, believed they knew why the rods were sticking, but the answer was unsettling. They traced it back to the decision to tack-weld the thin strips of boron to the sides of the fuel assemblies that held the uranium 235. The boron, by absorbing neutrons, extended the life of the reactor core and allowed it to remain in a known, controlled state—if everything worked correctly. But investigations revealed that the delicate balance between boron and uranium was changing week to week as the boron flaked off the fuel assemblies and settled at the bottom of the reactor core. The loss of boron meant that the exact distance the control rods had to be withdrawn to start a chain reaction of the atoms changed, and crews often struggled to calculate where that subtle point was. Even more unsettling was that as the boron flaked off, the reactivity within the core increased and reduced the control rods' ability to keep the reactor core subcritical.

  Operators had noticed the problem as early as 1959, less than a year after the reactor had first started operation. By August 1960, large amounts of boron were determined to be missing, and a considerable amount of boron was retrieved from the bottom of the reactor. This was not good news. But reactor supervisors worried that removing the fuel rods for a closer inspection would cause even more boron to flake off; they decided not to take any action. By November, engineers had estimated that 18 percent of the boron in the reactor core had been lost, raising the reactivity of the core. Consequently, a rod did not need to be raised as high as it once did in order to start a nuclear chain reaction.

  SL-1 supervisors and the AEC, the organization responsible for monitoring the plant, had ordered piecemeal measures to temporarily deal with the sticking control rods and the loss of boron, in an attempt to keep the reactor running a few months longer. A new reactor core was expected to be installed in the spring; those in charge predicted that this would take care of both problems. In the meantime, crews were ordered to “exercise” the rods, manually lifting them up and down, in the hopes that this action would encourage easier movement when it came time for them to slide in and out of the reactor core during regular operations. To counteract the boron loss, poisonous cadmium shims were installed to reinforce the effects of whatever boron had managed to stay in place.

  During the December 23 day shift, civilian engineers and supervisors helped the military crew shut down the reactor. A few of the control rods failed to drop into the reactor and had to be driven down manually. Most of the reactor operators weren't sure what to make of the situation. The equipment problems were worsening, and they weren't entirely convinced that the band-aid solutions those in charge had ordered would keep the reactor operating until the spring. Later, many of the crew me
mbers said they didn't think the problems with the reactor posed an actual danger. Unofficially, though, a few would say the reactor scared them.

  The reason: The SL-1 had a unique design, one never used before or since. The reactor could be brought to a critical state, the uranium atoms in its core fissioning like a swarm of angry bees, just by withdrawing the central control rod. All other reactors required that a combination of control rods—sometimes a dozen or more—be raised in sequence to induce critical fissioning. That gave crews time to monitor the process and react if problems arose. Putting all the “worth,” as nuclear engineers called it, into just one rod in the SL-1 was foolish, raising the possibility of a cataclysmic accident if the rod was moved too quickly or too far. Later, it would be recognized as a fatal engineering flaw.

  Legg worked the evening shift that day, cleaning up after the day crew, making last checks, putting away tools—nothing unusual. It was just a normal shutdown, he told colleagues when he arrived at the Hotel Rogers to catch the tail end of the cadre's Christmas party. Many of the crewmen and their wives had already come and gone, and those who remained were making merry. Legg grabbed a drink and began to circulate. He ran into the reactor's training officer, Sergeant Conlon, who wasn't in the mood to wish Legg a happy New Year. Conlon pulled Legg aside and told him he wanted to see him in the administrative office at SL-1 at shift change on January 4, the next time that the two would be on duty together. Legg, his hackles rising, asked why. Conlon said he had heard about Legg's latest stunt; that letting a subordinate leave his shift and then altering the time card was the final straw. Conlon told Legg that he and other supervisors were seriously considering transferring Legg out of Idaho Falls—and maybe out of the Army Nuke program altogether. Legg became enraged. He pulled himself up to his full five feet six inches and challenged his boss to a fight. Conlon, who had broken up the fight between Legg and Byrnes at the bachelor party six months earlier, now saw the same rage turned on him. He turned away and left soon after. If Legg's fate at the reactor wasn't sealed before, it was now.

  Jack Byrnes appeared to be struggling with his own demons at the party. A woman who sat at the same table as Jack and Arlene later described the nuclear worker's demeanor that night to an investigator, who paraphrased her observations in a classified memo: “He was quiet and withdrawn and his mind appeared to be on matters other than the party. She said his mind appeared to be in turmoil and he reminded her of a smoldering volcano.” The woman also offered a rather peculiar observation. Byrnes had worn brown dress clothes to the party. But afterward, in her mental image of him, he was cloaked in a somber black suit.

  One of Byrnes's friends from the Texaco station, Homer “Les” Clary, spent some time over the holidays with the servicemen assigned to SL-1. An army veteran himself and a former draftsman for the Boeing Company, he liked the soldiers who were coming to Idaho to work in the Lost River Desert. They were full of energy and life. They liked many of the rugged outdoor activities that the local men did: hunting, fishing, and skiing. And they knew how to have a good time. “When those guys partied, they had fun,” he says. “When they partied, they partied hardy, but I don't know that they partied all the time.”

  But they did party over the holidays. Clary remembers in particular one holiday party thrown by the servicemen. People were drinking and having fun; it was a typical get-together. Clary chatted with Legg, whom he had not met before. Legg—a “heavy-set fellow even shorter than me”—was there with his wife, Judy, who was heavily pregnant with the child the couple was expecting in February. Clary and Legg struck up a conversation about archery. Clary had just taken up the sport, and Legg was giving him some pointers. It was a relatively tame night. Everybody was feeling good, but no one got sloppy drunk. And Legg appeared happy enough, at least to his new acquaintance.

  Clary also saw Byrnes toward the end of the holidays, on New Year's Day, as he recalls. Byrnes and Clary had hit it off earlier in the year while working together at the Texaco station; their friendship jelled when each learned that the other was a die-hard skier. That winter of 1960, Byrnes had volunteered for the ski patrol at the small Pine Basin Ski Area, northwest of Idaho Falls. Clary was a ski instructor at Taylor Mountain, another small ski area southeast of town. Clary earned some money instructing, but Byrnes volunteered his time. For both men, though, the part-time jobs were essentially a way to get in more skiing without paying for it. When Jack showed up at Taylor Mountain on that first day of January, with Arlene in tow, the two men skied some runs together. The snow was good, but it was cold. A frigid blanket of air had moved into southeast Idaho with the new year, and it had yet to move east. The two men chatted mostly about skiing as they rode the chairlift to the mountain top. Byrnes seemed in a good mood. It was just another day on the slopes, Clary says.

  That Sunday evening, when Jack and Arlene returned to their duplex in Idaho Falls, something happened. A television documentary released years later reported that Jack had fallen asleep on the couch and was awoken suddenly by Jackie jumping on him. Groggy and angry, he lashed out and slapped the boy. But that account has never been substantiated, and the ensuing argument could have been about money, housekeeping, or the myriad other grievances that couples use to vent their frustrations. Whatever sparked it, Jack and Arlene had a major quarrel that New Year's night. Their hapless neighbor, Robert Matlock, an engineer at another reactor at the Testing Station, had become used to the couple's fights. But this one was particularly loud, and long. Sometime before 8 P.M., Arlene knocked on Matlock's door and asked to use his telephone. Some people later speculated that Arlene called one of her husband's commanding officers. Matlock told officials later that he didn't hear the conversation. But after Arlene hung up and returned to her apartment, the angry sounds didn't resume. Matlock thinks Jack must have left the apartment while Arlene was making her call.

  He was right. Jack drove to the apartment of Roger Young, a civilian engineer who was often assigned to work at SL-1. One supervisor at the reactor later said that Byrnes much preferred working with civilians than with the military folks on the crews. He must have: Young was one of the few nuclear workers at SL-1 who didn't recall ever seeing signs of a bad temper or moodiness in Byrnes. In fact, over the year just past, the two had become fast friends. They'd gone camping in the summer, hunting in the fall, and skiing in the winter. Young was also at the bachelor party where Byrnes and Legg had their confrontation, though he thought it had been a verbal, rather than a physical, dispute. When Byrnes showed up at his door that evening, angry and tired, Young took him in.

  Byrnes rose early the next morning and drove to the apartment of another single friend, Martin Buckley, a soldier who was learning the intricacies of health physics at SL-1. Like so many of Jack's friendships in Idaho, this one was forged by a common love of skiing. Early on that Monday, Byrnes strapped Buckley's skis to the top of his car, and the two headed to Pine Basin. There they worked ski patrol—but mostly skied—from 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.

  When they arrived back at Buckley's apartment, it had already been decided that Byrnes would spend the night. The two made dinner and chatted. Just before 7 P.M., Jack called Arlene. He told her his paycheck would likely be showing up in their mailbox the next morning. He wanted her to leave it in the mailbox; he'd pick it up before he went back to work at SL-1 that afternoon. Arlene apparently agreed to the plan, Buckley says. After the men ate, Byrnes went out for the evening. Buckley went to bed at 11 P.M.; Jack hadn't yet returned. The next morning, both men slept in until about 10 A.M. and then ate breakfast together in Buckley's small kitchen. Byrnes didn't say where he had gone or what he had done the night before, and Buckley didn't press him for details. But with Jack's ability to find nightlife—even on a Monday evening—it's safe to say he hadn't returned home to reconcile with Arlene.

  Sometime before noon, Byrnes drove to his duplex. A neighbor saw him check his mailbox by the sidewalk, then stand there for a moment before leaving. It wasn't long before Jack sho
wed up again at Buckley's apartment. He was enraged and barked that Arlene must have taken his paycheck. Although he was supposed to board a bus in a few hours to put in an evening shift at the reactor, Byrnes wanted a drink. He and Buckley, who had the day off, drove to a local tavern, where they had two beers each. Buckley later said Byrnes was “emotionally upset” over his domestic problems and missing paycheck. The two left the bar at about 2:45 P.M. Byrnes told Buckley he was going to drive by his place again to see if he could get his paycheck and then take one of the AEC buses to SL-1. As it turned out, Byrnes missed the bus. He must not have retrieved his paycheck either: Earlier in the afternoon, perhaps in the bar, he'd called Kelly Calhoon, the owner of the Texaco station. Calhoon had loaned Jack eighty dollars, and Byrnes had called to say he would deposit a check that day to repay part of the debt. He didn't.