Atomic America: How a Deadly Explosion and a Feared Admiral Changed the Course of Nuclear History

by Todd Tucker

Overview

On January 3, 1961, nuclear reactor SL-1 exploded in rural Idaho, spreading radioactive contamination over thousands of acres and killing three men. The army blamed "human error" and a sordid love triangle. Though overshadowed by Three Mile Island, SL-1 remains the only fatal nuclear reactor incident in American history.

Todd Tucker, who first heard the rumors about the Idaho Falls explosion as a trainee in the navy's nuclear program, suspected there was more to the accident than rumors suggested. Poring over hundreds of pages of primary sources and interviewing survivors revealed that the army and its contractors had deliberately obscured the true cause of the accident, which resulted from poor engineering as much as uncontrolled passions.

The National Reactor Testing Station, where the meltdown occurred, had been a proving ground where engineers, generals, and admirals attempted to realize the Atomic Age dream of unlimited power-amid the frantic race for nuclear power between the army, the navy, and the air force. The fruit of those ambitious plans included that of the nation's unofficial nuclear patriarch, Admiral Rickover, whose "true submarine," the USS Nautilus, would forever change naval warfare. But with the meltdown in Idaho came the end of the army's program and the beginning of the navy's long-standing monopoly on military nuclear power. Atomic America provides a fast-paced narrative history, advocating caution and accountability in harnessing nuclear energy.

Todd Tucker served as an officer with the U.S. Navy's nuclear submarine force and is the author of The Great Starvation Experiment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803234024
Publisher:	UNP - Bison Books
Publication date:	11/01/2010
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	442,998
Product dimensions:	3.00(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Todd Tucker served as an officer with the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarine force and is the author of The Great Starvation Experiment.

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Prologue

January 3, 1961

A moment before his death, John Byrnes knelt atop the Army's SL-1 reactor, poised to pull the central control rod straight up. His supervisor, Richard Legg, was nearby. The third crewman, Richard McKinley, was pacing around the vessel head, between the movable shield blocks and the motor control panel. As the newest member of the cadre, just three weeks into his hitch in Idaho, McKinley was probably running tools and trying to learn what he could between errands. He must also have observed the simmering tension between his two crewmates.

Legg and Byrnes had arrived in Idaho together, in October 1959, and had clashed since those first days. They had even come to drunken blows at a sleazy bachelor party the year before. But Legg had since surpassed Byrnes professionally and qualified as both chief operator and shift supervisor — this was Byrnes's first shift as Legg's subordinate. Byrnes's steady record of disciplinary problems all but guaranteed that his professional progress in the Army was over. Byrnes hated Legg.

The desolation surrounding them would have reinforced a dark mood, a landscape where even the place-names evoked solitude and despair. The Lost River Desert, the Snake River Plain, and the Craters of the Moon were all places the drafty government buses drove them through on their daily hundred-mile round-trip to the reactor. Much of the ground was covered in ancient black lava so hard and so thick that site engineers had trouble blasting through it even with shaped charges of dynamite as they busily erected experimental reactors up and down the plain. And January 3 was bitterly cold —the overnight low in Idaho Falls was six degrees below zero. Over the decades as the story was retold, many would recall it being even colder.

The reactor that Byrnes, McKinley, and Legg worked on was unglamorous and unloved even inside the fences of the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho. The Navy reactors, in contrast, run by the brilliant and tyrannical Admiral Hyman Rickover, were the pride of the base. Just three years earlier, Rickover had stunned the world when the nuclear-powered USS Nautilus had steamed under the North Pole. It was the stuff of Jules Verne, a development that promised to change the nature of warfare: a submarine that could stay submerged forever. The prototype for that reactor, S1-W, operated in a giant tank of water to simulate the submarine environment, just ten miles northwest of SL-1 but worlds away in terms of prestige and excitement. On the northern end of the sprawling Idaho reservation, jealous Air Force generals played catch-up, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a nuclear-powered jet airplane, a giant bomber that would stay aloft for years, if they could ever get the behemoth off the ground.

The Army's goal for nuclear power was vastly more prosaic: small, semiportable power stations for remote bases. Of the more than twenty reactors in Idaho, SL-1 was the smallest, designed merely to generate 200 kilowatts of electricity.

Professional disappointment was just one of many reasons the volatile Jack Byrnes might have been distracted that cold night. He was probably exhausted, having slept on friends' couches the previous two nights, as the latest fight between him and wife, Arlene Byrnes, ran its course. The fight had come at the end of their too-short holiday break, and Byrnes had returned to SL-1 to find a long list of maintenance he was supposed to complete under Legg's supervision, a list that ended with the start-up of the troublesome little reactor. Five hours into the watch, they had barely completed anything.

At 7:00 pm, Arlene had called SL-1 and told Jack that she wanted a divorce. After a year of fighting and loneliness in the Lost River Desert, Arlene Byrnes had finally had enough. Their last conversation ended with a discussion of how to split his paltry Army paycheck.

So at 9:00, it may have been difficult for Byrnes to focus on the task at hand. The procedure for reassembling the control rod drive mechanism called for lifting the rod "not more than four inches." Byrnes was no nuclear engineer, but he was a well-trained Army specialist — he knew that the central rod in SL-1, by virtue of its position in the core, was enormously powerful, capable of starting up the reactor all by itself. If having his hands on that rod wasn't nerve-wracking enough, Byrnes might also have been uneasy to have Legg hovering so closely behind him. Self-conscious about his height at five foot six inches, Legg was constantly physically asserting himself, challenging any and all to wrestling matches and goosing his comrades at inappropriate times. Hunched over the control rod, straining with effort, Byrnes would have made a tempting target for one of Legg's pranks. And Byrnes's task would not have been easy, even without Legg looming behind him. The rod was heavy: eighty-four pounds. What's more, the boron strips inside the core were crumbling, occasionally jamming the control rods in their channels and making them almost impossible to move, a problem that had gotten worse in recent months. Sometimes even the drive motors couldn't move the rods, and oldfashioned Army ingenuity would be applied to the problem, usually in the form of a pipe wrench.

At 9:00 pm, three hours remained in the shift, three hours that must have stretched out like an eternity before Jack Byrnes. There were many things that might have been running through his exhausted mind — perhaps even the terse warnings of the procedure he was about to perform. Despite four decades of speculation, however, no one will ever know exactly what he was thinking at the moment he tightened his hands around the rod, and pulled.

At 9:01 pm, January 3, 1961, a nuclear reactor exploded in Idaho, killing three men who now lie buried in lead-lined caskets. It remains the only fatal reactor accident in American history.

The details released to the newspapers immediately after the explosion were deliberately vague, not so much because of Cold War secrecy, but more in an effort to spare the three widows the gruesome details of their husbands' deaths. The interim accident report published in May 1961 by the Atomic Energy Commission was less coy, as it straightforwardly described the position of the three radioactive bodies immediately after the explosion:

The #2 crew member was struck on his back and legs with water and/or steam causing him to be thrown against a shield block and landing in the vicinity of the instrument wells. The #1 crew member was also struck with water and/or steam and was thrown back against another shield block striking his head first. Simultaneously, the No. 7 shield plug assembly impaled the #3 crew member and pinned him to the bottom of the fan floor a distance of approximately 13 feet above the reactor head.

The #3 crew member, Richard Legg, had been standing over the rod 7 plug assembly when the explosion occurred. The plug assembly was a metal shaft placed over the control rod, but it was not the control rod itself that impaled Legg, as was often stated later. The shield plug was ejected from the core at eighty-five feet per second, entered Legg's body through his groin, exited near his shoulder, and propelled him straight up to the ceiling where he dangled for six days. The impaled body was so radioactive that it took engineers that long to design a safe way to remove it. When they did finally bring Legg down, they were shocked to see that despite the time that had passed, the body was perfectly preserved. It was so radioactive that the sterilized flesh had not decayed.

Nuclear power was the younger sibling of the atomic bomb, and both were children of the Manhattan Project. The first nuclear reactors had been a means to an end, the production of plutonium for weapons. After the war, among the scientists and engineers who designed the bomb there was an almost spiritual desire to create something productive from their monumental work, something that would balance the tremendous destructive power they had unleashed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If the atomic bomb was the ultimate weapon, a risk to civilization itself, then atomic energy must be an energy source of unlimited beneficence, the power to uplift all of mankind. Billions of dollars would be spent to prove it true.

But SL-1 was a military reactor, as nuclear power in its infancy was almost exclusively a military enterprise. In those early days, only federal dollars and the urgency of military requirements could support the vast investment necessary to make nuclear power a reality. In addition, the line between nuclear power and nuclear weaponry was blurry, just as it is now, making the military reluctant to relinquish its hold on the nation's nuclear reactors, no matter how often the spirit of "Atoms for Peace" was invoked. Each military service made the case that it urgently needed nuclear power. The Army wanted portable, tireless power plants for Arctic radar bases, the first line of defense against a Soviet air attack. The Air Force wanted a supersonic bomber with unlimited endurance, the ultimate weapon in a world where airpower was ascendant. And the Navy wanted to fulfill the dream of a "true submarine," a ship that would live beneath the waves. Each service was convinced that without perfecting a mission for the Atomic Age, it would become obsolete. Interservice rivalry is a grand American tradition, but in those tense early days of the Cold War, the stakes had never been higher.

The explosion at SL-1 led to the end of the Army program, happened within weeks of the end of the Air Force's atomic plane, and opened the door for the Navy's long-standing, jealously guarded monopoly on military nuclear power. The civilian industry has for more than a generation been staffed largely by Navy veterans, and the Navy philosophy has, in large part, become the industry's philosophy. On March 28, 1979, Three Mile Island became a virtual brand name for nuclear disaster, resulting in showy but shallow reforms. SL-1 affected the DNA of the industry in utero, transforming the very philosophy of nuclear engineering. Questions as fundamental as the number of control rods necessary to run a plant safely were settled at SL-1. The dream of miniaturized, portable nuclear plants died with McKinley, Legg, and Byrnes.

Today, people on both sides of the nuclear power debate anticipate an atomic renaissance in America. Chronic instability in the Middle East and fears of global warming have brought together an unlikely coalition of conservative isolationists and fretful environmentalists, all of whom argue that emission-free nuclear power, already quietly responsible for nearly 20 percent of the American energy supply, is ready to take on more of the nation's energy burden. Over one hundred nuclear plants generate electricity in the United States. Thirtytwo new reactors are planned. All are descendants of SL-1. With so many plants in operation, and so many more on the way, it is vitally important to understand the real reasons, technical and otherwise, a nuclear reactor exploded in 1961.

Understanding the dominant theory of the explosion does not require a familiarity with nuclear physics. Within days of the incident, rumors of infidelity and a love triangle sprang to life, stories of an aggrieved husband who used a control rod as a peculiarly modern murder weapon. There was just enough truth in the story, and it explained the tragedy so neatly, that it rapidly obscured the underlying issues at SL-1. One of the young crewmen was, in fact, unstable and had a collapsing marriage. But why was he allowed to perform dangerous maintenance with so little supervision? The rapid, manual raising of a single control rod did cause the devastation at SL-1. But why would a reactor be designed so perilously close to criticality? Why would procedures actually dictate the manual lifting of that rod? The story of the love triangle and murder-suicide has been handed down faithfully by people in Idaho, the military, and the nuclear industry. Like all good folklore, it embodies the bedrock principles of those who keep it alive, even, or perhaps especially, where it diverges from the facts. And while the story has proven to be extremely durable, it is an inadequate description of what really caused America's only fatal reactor accident, and what lessons should be learned.

The complete story of SL-1 is neither a murder mystery nor a love story. It is more than an engineering case study as well, an incident that cannot be explained completely with flux diagrams and reactivity calculations. The story of SL-1 is a war story, a tale of a bloody, costly struggle between the three branches of the United States military. It happened at a time when nuclear annihilation was a frighteningly real possibility: January 3, 1961, was eight months after Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union, and three months before the Bay of Pigs invasion. The military was preparing to fight a nuclear world war that many viewed as inevitable, and nuclear power was seen by each branch as a way, quite literally, to increase its power. Massive budgets were at stake, but it was more than that. The generals and admirals all believed passionately that survival was at stake both for their service, and for the nation. In this struggle for nuclear supremacy, the Army skirmished on the fringes, but the Navy and the Air Force were in a fight to the death, as the flyers argued convincingly that airpower and only airpower could save America from the communist menace. And while many of this war's battles took place in Idaho, it began, as so many American wars have, with an attack on a ship.

Copyright © 2009 by Todd Tucker

Table of Contents

Prologue - January 3, 1961
Chapter one - The USS United States: The Cadre
Chapter two - Rickover: January 3, 1961 - 9:01 pm
Chapter three - Idaho: The Recovery
Chapter four - The Army: The Bachelor Party
Chatper five: The Air Force: Camp Century
Chapter six - The Investigation: The Burial
Chapter seven - Enterprise
Epilogue
Notes
Sources
Acknowledgments
Index

Editorial Reviews

“With the United States again considering nuclear power as a means to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, Atomic America serves as a reeminder that, whether the United States is finally ready to pass the nuclear responsibility test or not, the days of careless, runaway atomic enthusiasm are firmly in this nation’s past.”—Mike Kanin, Washington City Paper

Washington City Paper - Mike Kanin

“Incorporating the career of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the creator of the nuclear navy, Tucker’s work importantly recalls a forgotten warning from nuclear history.”—Gilbert Taylor, Booklist

Booklist - Gilbert Taylor

“Tucker is a good explainer, and his background in the field lends authority to his technical descriptions.”—Seth Shulman, Washington Post

Washington Post - Seth Shulman

“Tucker has achieved the difficult task of entertaining as he enlightens: Atomic America is a gripping narrative as well as a clearheaded caution as we enter what perhaps will become the era of atomic precedence.”—Sara Hov, Army

Army - Sara Hov

“A brilliantly told story of nuclear power development in the United States. At a moment when Americans may be turning to the atom as a solution to our energy and environmental needs, this is a much-needed cautionary tale.”—Priscilla J. McMillan, author of The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Priscilla J. McMillan

“With the United States again considering nuclear power as a means to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, Atomic America serves as a reeminder that, whether the United States is finally ready to pass the nuclear responsibility test or not, the days of careless, runaway atomic enthusiasm are firmly in this nation’s past.”—Mike Kanin, Washington City Paper

— Mike Kanin

Washington City Paper

“Tucker is a good explainer, and his background in the field lends authority to his technical descriptions.”—Seth Shulman, Washington Post

— Seth Shulman

Washington Post

“Incorporating the career of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the creator of the nuclear navy, Tucker’s work importantly recalls a forgotten warning from nuclear history.”—Gilbert Taylor, Booklist

— Gilbert Taylor

Booklist

“Tucker has achieved the difficult task of entertaining as he enlightens: Atomic America is a gripping narrative as well as a clearheaded caution as we enter what perhaps will become the era of atomic precedence.”—Sara Hov, Army

— Sara Hov

Army

The first major American nuclear accident wasn't at Three Mile Island in 1979 but rather at the military's National Reactor Testing Station at Idaho Falls, Idaho, in January 1961, killing three workers at the tiny reactor. Two of these men were later rumored incorrectly to have been rivals in a love triangle-which some conjectured might have affected their ability to work effectively and safely at the facility. Tucker (The Great Starvation Experiment) skillfully reveals the drama of the event. At the same time, he shows how the accident resulted from inadequate maintenance, poor training, negligence and ignorance. Tucker also profiles the inscrutable naval R&D power broker Hyman Rickover, who almost singlehandedly resurrected the potential of nuclear power after the 1961 disaster through a monklike and emphatic devotion to the highest skill in engineering and the best training. Today, trying to balance the realities of global warming with America's energy needs, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received proposals for 32 new reactors-which makes Tucker's book vitally relevant. (Mar. 3)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

Reed (former secretary of the air force) has joined with veteran Los Alamos physicist Stillman to write a complement to his earlier At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War. This book illustrates how nuclear technology and scientific knowledge was developed and distributed according to decisions made within fluctuating global geopolitical contexts. Even "peaceful" research and energy programs can be easily co-opted for military uses. While radical Islamic fundamentalism is clearly a dangerous threat to a weakened America, the authors emphasize how an ambitious and rising China has been quick to aid proliferation in its bid to become the world's leading power. Most important is the human element-who decides to use the weapons and why-and this is not always predictable or preventable. It is all very alarming, no doubt what the authors intended. Suitable for academic and public libraries. (Index not seen.)

Younger's book follows logically from his earlier Endangered Species: How We Can Avoid Mass Destruction and Build a Lasting Peace. Younger certainly knows the high-level policy issues, having been a former director of the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He wants to dispel dangerous myths and inform the debate about the role of nuclear weapons. So while he adds some interesting details to the standard nuclear history of the world, the key chapters are about defense against attack, maintaining our forces, and what the future might bring; these chapters could have been even longer at the expense of the history chapters. Younger believes that nuclear weapons will always be with us, certainly as a deterrent to other countries, and that we should modernizeour forces to make them safer and less vulnerable. According to the author, there is no bibliography or reference notes in the interest of fairness and security. Suitable for academic and public libraries. (Index not seen.)

Tucker, a former nuclear engineer aboard the submarine U.S.S. Alabama, gives us two stories. The first is about the explosion of army nuclear reactor SL-1, probably caused by poor design, maintenance, performance, and procedures, that killed three men in Idaho on January 3, 1961. More importantly, he describes the development of nuclear power from experimental reactors to practical applications for military purposes, with small and powerful designs. There are interesting details about fantastically expensive (and dangerous) proposals for nuclear-powered bombers and an extensive mobile missile system under the Arctic ice, but the centerpiece of the book is a project tightly managed by Adm. Hyman Rickover that led to nuclear submarines and surface ships, now the core of the U.S. Navy. The Cold War was just the bitter context; desperate bureaucratic infighting and program survival at times seemed more important to the Pentagon brass. This is interesting scientific and administrative military history, though the SL-1 event is covered more extensively in William McKeown's Idaho Falls: The Untold Story of America's First Nuclear Accident. Suitable for academic and large public libraries. (Index not seen.) All three books convey the message that we must maintain constant vigilance, though Reed and Stillman deliver the best work.
—Dan Blewett

Library Journal

Romance, intrigue and science converge in an interesting though blandly told tale of the first fatal nuclear accident in the United States. Three people were killed when a military test reactor exploded on Jan. 3, 1961, in Idaho's Lost River Desert. Through extensive archival research and interviews, Tucker (The Great Starvation Experiment, 2006, etc.) reconstructs the specifics of an accident few Americans recall. Although the 1979 partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island is better known, the author makes a persuasive case that the Idaho explosion played a significant role in the development of nuclear power in America. Seeing this story as a morality tale with heroes and villains, the author is especially critical of Admiral Hyman Rickover, who used his considerable stature within the Navy to squelch anyone who questioned "his powerful advocacy of nuclear propulsion . . . to the exclusion of all other forms of sea power." Tucker scants rumors that an adulterous affair had sparked enmity between two reactor crewmen who were killed, though he does acknowledge that they had clashed ever since arriving at the site 15 months earlier. Debates over the value of the nuclear navy, combined with political and personal maneuverings, could have produced a riveting, genre-crossing account-if, say, Tom Clancy and Danielle Steele had collaborated on it. Unfortunately, Tucker lacks their storytelling flair; his workmanlike prose sometimes makes it a chore to get through the text. Cliche-filled take on a compelling story.

Kirkus Reviews