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  It was close to 4 P.M. on January 3 when Byrnes spun his Oldsmobile into the gravel yard surrounding the SL-1 reactor. Clothes were strewn in the backseat. He was sleeping away from home. He didn't have his paycheck, and he hadn't repaid the loan to his boss. His career was going nowhere. And with two beers in him, he was about to walk into the reactor building to take orders from Dick Legg. What a way to start a night shift. As Byrnes climbed out of the car in the waning winter light and approached SL-1, he must have felt the cold—minus ten degrees Fahrenheit and dropping—and heard his Oldsmobile's engine popping and ticking as it quickly cooled down.

  Byrnes and Legg might have worked together at least briefly in the past, but no one knows for sure, and duty logs are no longer available. Coworkers don't remember them being paired up after the bachelor party the previous May, and surely not since Legg's promotion in September, three months earlier. After punching in his time card and hanging his heavy coat in the crew quarters, Byrnes sought out Legg. The two knew what they had to do that night. The previous day, the day crew had gone to the second-floor reactor room. They had moved the large, semicircular concrete blocks that normally surrounded the reactor top to shield the workers from any slight radiation seepage. The day crew had carefully disconnected the control rods from the motors that raised and lowered them. Engineers had then inserted wires into the reactor that would determine where in the core the uranium neutrons were fissioning. It was a routine test; the wires would be pulled out later for analysis.

  The plant superintendent had issued instructions for Legg's crew: (1) perform a reactor pump down; (2) reassemble control rods, install plugs, replace shield blocks, leave top shield off; (3) connect rod drive motors; (4) electrically and mechanically zero rods; (5) accomplish control room and plant startup logs; (6) perform cold rod drops; (7) check for leaks, replace top shield; (8) perform hot rod drops; (9) accomplish a normal startup. It was a lot of work and it required some heavy lifting. The plant's previous supervisors, the men who brought the reactor on-line, thought the job of reconnecting the control rods to the drive mechanisms was potentially dangerous. During their tenure, only they had had clearance to touch the rods. But the current supervisors at the plant had decided the work was fairly routine and could be done by any shift with a minimal crew.

  Although both Legg and Byrnes had reconnected the rods before, this would be the first time Legg would do the work as a supervisor. The task was a little more interesting and challenging than much of the maintenance work at the reactor, but SL-1 managers had decided it could be done without them present. Still, reconnecting the hundred-pound control rods meant manually lifting them so they could be latched to their drives—always a touchy moment. Raising the rods, after all, was the action that sparked nuclear fission in the core. But the rods would need to be lifted only four inches to be reconnected, and that wasn't nearly high enough to start a chain reaction in the reactor.

  Helping Legg and Byrnes that night was Richard McKinley. He was new at SL-1, having arrived just three weeks before from the training course in Virginia. He was only a trainee, but he was already twenty-eight years old, with a lot of military experience. He'd joined the air force right out of high school and served four years before serving with the air force reserves for a year and a half. Unlike Byrnes and Legg, he had decided a military career suited him, so he hitched up with the army. He had spent four years as a soldier, including a stint in Korea, by the time he was transferred to Idaho Falls. The bosses at SL-1 immediately liked him; he reminded them of the first wave of Army Nukes, which had included guys with some maturity and real-world experience under their belts. Legg and Byrnes didn't know McKinley well. They'd exchanged a few words and knew that McKinley was from Ohio, had been married about five years, and was the proud dad of two young kids. About the only thing anyone later remembered about McKinley was that he was studying to convert to Catholicism. His faith wouldn't be tested the night of January 3, however—just his back. He'd be fetching tools, carrying some of the heavier items, and acting as a gofer for anything Legg and Byrnes might need.

  The chief of the day shift, Sergeant Stolla, talked briefly to Byrnes before he left for the night. Stolla and his wife had once lived next to Jack and Arlene, and he was well aware that the couple had a troubled marriage. His wife, in fact, was the one who had warned Arlene that her fights with Jack were becoming too public. Stolla had also worked with Byrnes on numerous occasions and was sensitive to the younger man's moods. That night, Jack wasn't looking on his game; he appeared nervous, under strain. Stolla later said he could tell because one of Jack's eyes always twitched when he was under pressure. And it was twitching like mad as Stolla headed out the door that afternoon.

  Shortly after 5 P.M., one of the Testing Station's patrolmen, Marvin Arave, pulled his car up to the chain-link fence that controlled access to SL-1. He stepped into the small guardhouse near the gate and called the reactor's control room. No one answered. He drove up to the complex and went inside the long, corrugated-metal building that was attached to the reactor silo and housed the control room. When he didn't see anybody, he walked around the site, punching the various time clocks that had been set up to ensure people were checking the plant. Arave then went back into the metal building and saw Legg and another man he didn't know. “The men seemed quite busy, and they apparently didn't want to spend time talking,” Arave said later. “Sometimes they'd ask me to stop by for a cup of coffee, but not this time.”

  Arave would be the night crew's final visitor, though not the last person to talk to one of the crew members. Sometime that evening, probably around 7 P.M., Arlene called Jack. She later told a friend that during the phone call, the two had decided to end their marriage—Jack would never be coming back to the house. The two talked about how to split Jack's last paycheck, the missing paycheck that had so angered Byrnes just hours earlier.

  Dorothy Butler was working at the Testing Station phone center that evening. All incoming calls went through her: she would call the desired phone number at the plant, then plug in a patch to connect the caller. At 8 P.M., an unidentified woman called and wanted to be connected to SL-1. No one answered when Butler tried to transfer the call. Arlene later told friend Stella Davis that she had tried to call Jack back to talk about the couple reconciling but couldn't get through. Over the next hour, Butler would take three more calls from the same woman, whom she described as increasingly frantic when no one answered at the reactor. The woman's last call came shortly before 9 P.M. When Butler again failed to reach the reactor, the response of the woman, who has never been identified in official document's, was odd: “There must be something wrong at SL-1.”

  Indeed there was. By 9 P.M., the three-man team had accomplished only one of the nine tasks they had been assigned. It was registered in the logbook: “Pumped reactor water to contaminated water tank until reactor water level recorder came on scale. Indicates +5 ft. Replacing plugs, thimbles, etc., to all rods.”

  The crew would record no other entry that night.

  4. Wayward Atoms

  The residents of Idaho's pastoral Snake River Valley were having an enjoyable first week of the New Year. Elder Franklin Taylor, an assistant to the Council of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Latter-day Saints, was visiting from Salt Lake City, the Mormon mecca two hundred miles to the south. Members of the Iona Farm Bureau were gathering to view the film Lenin's Plan for the Advancement of Communism. The officers of the Idaho Falls Police Department were preparing to be feted at a banquet featuring a piccolo and drum duet by locals Mrs. Robert B. Harrison and her son, Jimmy.

  But for the bitter cold all was right in the valley, a broad swath of potato farms and tidy Mormon towns running south to north along the eastern edge of Idaho. The Christmas and New Year's holidays had passed as ordained. Fueled by nonalcoholic punch and tracked by the watchful eyes of the elders, pious Mormon families had exhausted themselves in a whirlwind of church activities. Farm families got to
gether with kith and kin. The men talked potatoes, the women cooked and organized, and the kids snuck out into the freezing night to make snow angels and throw snowballs.

  Indeed, 1961 promised to be every bit as routine as any other year. It was the beginning of John Kennedy's Camelot; science was God; and serious government money was starting to flow into nuclear research in the Lost River Desert. As the new year dawned, life on the broad Idaho plain was placid, orderly, and prosperous.

  But then, at 9:01 P.M. on January 3, an alarm sounded at the National Reactor Testing Station's main firehouse. Two long rings and then a short one interrupted the contented, post-holiday silence.

  * * *

  Egon Lamprecht was the youngest of seven firefighters on duty the night of January 3. On the force for just three years, he was a short, good-looking kid with an open face, a raw enthusiasm, and gift of the gab. Born into a large, devout Mormon family in Blackfoot, Lamprecht liked machinery of all kinds, especially hot rods. After graduating from high school, he opened a bicycle and motorcycle shop in his hometown. But there wasn't much of a market for two-wheeled anything in Blackfoot, and he soon got tired of eating beans all winter long.

  As one of the town's volunteer firefighters, Lamprecht leaped at the chance to work at the Testing Station, even though it meant an hour's drive each way. The starting pay was a meager $3,800 a year, but the job promised security, a pension, and an escalating salary. Those benefits were hard to come by in a valley that was largely dependent on its potato harvest. And Lamprecht discovered that, except for the Testing Station's lonely location and the guards at the gates, the job was like any other in an industrial fire department. He checked fire, steam, and radiation alarms; inspected buildings; cleaned up minor chemical spills. The potentially lethal forces being unleashed in the nuclear reactors he routinely visited seemed remote.

  “Unfortunately, we put the nuclear exposure thing on the back burner,” says Lamprecht, reflecting on the sense of sunny optimism—and maybe complacency—that had prevailed at the Testing Station four decades earlier. “When we responded to a reactor, yeah, we took precautions. But that wasn't paramount in our mind. Nothing ever happened. If it never happens, we don't worry about it.”

  At the fire station, groans and mutters greeted the 9:01 P.M. alarm that indicated some kind of trouble at the SL-1 reactor, eight miles away down a dark and lonely road. The air was so frigid that night—the mercury read about minus seventeen degrees Fahrenheit—the desert crackled. The sky was pitch black. And it was the third alarm that day from the small test reactor.

  Lamprecht remembers the firefighters' collective sense of dread, upon hearing the alarm, at the thought of having to head out into an unforgivingly cold desert. “Ding. Ding. Ding. Here it comes again,” Lamprecht says. “Now, you're human. I'm human. It's seventeen degrees below zero. It's dark. It's not a good thing to go out at night from a warm firehouse and drive down the road. But . . . we do.”

  Six firefighters boarded a Diamond Reo fire engine and followed an assistant fire chief, who led the way in a car. They expected to find that the call was just another false alarm; they'd traced alarms at 9 A.M. and at 2:30 P.M. earlier that day to a faulty fire detector in an auxiliary building's furnace room. Pulling into the gravel yard of the remote complex at 9:10 P.M., the firefighters saw nothing amiss—just snow, stars, and the diffused glow of lights burning in the one-story metal building attached to the glorified grain silo that contained the reactor. To their surprise, the furnace detector in the auxiliary building tested just fine.

  Perplexed but not alarmed, Lamprecht, Assistant Fire Chief Walter Moshberger, and two others entered the building wearing the protective anticontamination suits and respirator masks that were a standard part of their uniform. Radiation alarms were sounding. The men had heard the alarms before, in other reactors. They knew that even small amounts of radiation could set the alarms off, and workers at the Testing Station didn't always consider the alarms to be a concern. After wiping their masks of the fog created by entering the warm building, the firefighters continued their search, working their way down a narrow corridor toward the easternmost room from which the operators controlled the reactor. Along the way they noticed lunch pails and three warm cups of coffee on the mess room table. Winter jackets were hung neatly nearby. They noticed no signs of smoke, fire, or the crew. They shouted through their masks but received no answer.

  “We haven't found anybody,” says Lamprecht. “This is a little spooky because there are supposed to be people on duty around the clock. We didn't know how many. But we knew someone had to be there.”

  Using a security radio, one of the firefighters called a nearby complex that had just been built to house another test reactor. “We thought maybe they had a problem and hightailed it out of there,” recalls Lamprecht. “When we didn't find anybody, we thought, ‘Aha! They got the hell out of here and ran down there on foot.' Why else would you abandon a plant? Why would you abandon a plant that you work at unless you had a real serious problem?” But the radio check only added to the firefighters' unease: no one from the other reactor building responded to the call.

  The radiation alarms echoing through the empty building suddenly took on a more ominous tone. One firefighter turned and sprinted as quickly as his bulky clothes would allow back into the night. He grabbed a radiation detector from the fire truck and rejoined his colleagues. The small box was capable of measuring gamma radiation levels of up to five hundred roentgens per hour, displaying the reading on a simple needle gauge. That level was lethal if one lingered too long in its field, and the makers of the radiation detectors hadn't envisioned the need for a machine that could read any higher levels. In 1961, it was considered safe for atomic workers to absorb a maximum of three-tenths of one roentgen per week, a standard that has been lowered over the intervening years.

  Lamprecht admits that they should have been carrying the radiation detector before they walked into the building. The firefighters, their senses finally in high gear, moved cautiously into the small control room. It was empty. The instrument panel, with its large gauges, switches, and handles set into a government-gray cabinet, was a crude setup compared with today's slick, computerized control boards. The lights on the panel corresponding to the reactor's steam flow, condenser vacuum, feed-water temperature and pressure, and other critical processes were unlit, as dark as was the area beyond the command center. This meant only one thing: nothing was controlling the angry, lethal atoms in the reactor's core.

  “We got [such] a reading on the detector that, by today's standards, you'd have gotten the hell out of there,” Lamprecht says. “You wouldn't even get close to a field that high. You just wouldn't do it.”

  But in 1961, the golden age of nuclear power, nothing dreadful had ever happened at an American test site and the modus operandi was one of “No Fear.” The four firefighters began climbing the enclosed metal stairs that wrapped around the outside of the windowless, cylindrical reactor building. The stairs led to the second-floor reactor room, where the top of the reactor vessel was embedded in the floor. The room contained additional metering devices and provided access to the business end of the reactor—the control rods that, when moved up or down, excited or dampened the collision of atoms.

  “Starting up the stairs, we got . . . about halfway,” Lamprecht remembers. “The radiation level accelerated so fast. The instrument reading went up just like, like a Porsche does going down the highway in a drag race, until it hit the maximum reading. With that kind of a reading, if you have any sense at all, you're going to get the hell out. We'd never seen a reading that high before.”

  The reading was so high, in fact, that the firefighters didn't believe it—they figured their equipment was malfunctioning. They returned to the base of the stairs, and one of the firefighters ran to get a second detector from the assistant chief's car. Armed with that, the team for a second time began to climb the cramped metal stairway. The detector pegged again at its maximum readi
ng. “That should have told us there was nothing wrong with the instruments,” Lamprecht says. “They're cool. They're telling us, ‘Dummy, you don't belong here.'”

  But Assistant Chief Moshberger, now ninety-seven and still living in the valley, decided to climb all the way up to the reactor floor. Accompanied by one of three health physicists who had rushed to the scene from other areas of the site, Moshberger began his ascent. Within seconds, the two had climbed into a miasma of radiation. The radiation detector that the health physicist carried also pegged at five hundred roentgens per hour. It was a level of radiation that no one at the site had ever encountered. They retreated. It was 9:35 P.M.

  * * *

  In the gravel lot of the SL-1 complex, the firefighters and health physicists gathered in the freezing night air. From the guard shack, they phoned their bosses, most of whom were home in Idaho Falls tucking in the kids or downing bourbon and water. Emergency call lists were hurriedly scanned. Call traffic swelled at the site's central phone dispatch. Prepared or not, the group of men in charge of SL-1 were forced to react to the crisis at hand. But any advice officials gave the firefighters for keeping the situation under control until they arrived at the site was purely theoretical. No one in the young industry had ever encountered—had ever even imagined—the scene that was now unfolding. The men gathered outside the SL-1 complex were utterly alone as they confronted the excited uranium atoms that only an hour before had been safely contained.