What Caused America's First Nuclear Meltdown?

previously gathered evidence indicated that on the night of the accident the three-man crew was in the process of connecting the control blades to the drive mechanism when the excursion occurred the excursion in question was a steam explosion that occurred near idaho falls idaho on january 3rd 1961. the sl1 or stationary low power reactor number one an experimental nuclear power reactor developed by the united states army had destroyed itself in milliseconds investigators said it was human error the army said it was the messy result of a sordid love triangle conspiracy theorists said it was a murder-suicide there is still some controversy about what happened that night to this day but what is absolutely clear is that the reactors only three operators had died with no warning and no witnesses and it was someone's fault this is the true story of america's first nuclear meltdown the sl1 reactor and the buildings that housed it were located at the national reactor testing station approximately 40 miles west of idaho falls idaho part of the army nuclear power program sl1 was designed and prototyped on site from 1957 to 1958 and became operational that december its goal was to prove that miniaturized nuclear reactors were viable for army operations able to provide electrical and heating power to remote locations like the arctic but sl1 was just one reactor in the us military's ambitious plan to harness nuclear power in all its forms in the august 1958 a u.s navy reactor developed at the testing station became the beating heart of the world's first nuclear submarine the uss nautilus which used the relatively inexhaustible energy source to dive underneath the north pole putting all the world's militaries on high alert at the other end of the sprawling idaho station the u.s air force was rerouting hundreds of millions of dollars towards a nuclear-powered jet aircraft that could stay aloft more or less forever the tiny sl1 reactor by contrast the smallest in development was not nearly as flashy and didn't get the attention or the funding that the promise of a nuclear jet or nuclear submarine commanded what it did get on the night of january 3rd 1961 was the maintenance efforts of three young men army specialists richard mckinley and john burns and navy electrician first class richard legg none of them were above 30 years old john burns was just 22. trouble was already brewing years before the accident john burns and richard legge hated each other they had gotten into drunken fist fights at prostitute-filled parties and leg had problems with authority he had been caught sleeping in his car while on duty he kicked his feet up on instrument panels and he would set off alarms intentionally just to startle his crewmates a month before the explosion legs showed up to work trunk in the january of 1961 it was richard mckinley's third week on the job and he was still learning the ropes uncomfortable with all the readings and instruments these were the men tasked with restarting a cold nuclear reactor containing 14 kilograms of uranium-235 on a frigid idaho evening shut down for christmas and new year's sl-1 was to be brought back to life by burns leg and mckinley on the third day of 1961. the most important part of this process was lifting the central control rod manually just four inches to reconnect it to its drive mechanism burns leg subordinate that night prepared to lift the more than 80 pound rod with his bare hands while legs stood with him at the top of the reactor mckinley paced nearby at 901 pm a reactor that was rated for 200 kilowatts of power generation spiked to 100 000 times that amount 20 gigawatts in just four milliseconds the men didn't know it but this minuscule moment much faster than the blink of an eye was the rest of their lives nuclear physics is hard but how nuclear physics creates vast amounts of electricity is easy nuclear material naturally emits particles as it decays which can impact other material and impart a tiny amount of energy as heat if you put a bunch of nuclear material close together on purpose as is the case in a nuclear reactor radioactive decay will heat up other radioactive material causing it to heat up and shoot out even more particles now we have a critical mass that will undergo a chain reaction all by itself what stops this runaway reaction is other materials that get in the way absorbing those particles by moving these so-called control rods up and down in a nuclear reactor you can precisely control how much heat is produced reactors then use this heat to turn water into steam and steam into electricity if anything were to go really wrong at a nuclear power plant control rods would probably be involved the sl1 nuclear reactor used water in two ways as something to turn into steam and as a fluid to slow down the neutrons the particles that start and continue nuclear chain reactions flying out from the fuel rods you see not every neutron has the right energy to continue a chain reaction faster neutrons are actually worse than slower neutrons inside of a reactor and so water a very dense fluid can act as a so-called moderator to help continue the heat production by slowing down particles what's more the water in a reactor like sl1 can act like a fail-safe if too much heat is generated water molecules move apart and expand into steam inside of the reactor now there are voids and less water to moderate too many fast neutrons are flying around and the number of fissions decrease drastically the reactor gets cooler and safer on the path towards shutdown in the interest of simplicity in reducing size sl1 only had five control rods as a comparison the chernobyl reactor number four had 211. because of the small number of control rods and their orientation inside of sl1 the center control rod was immensely powerful moving it could drastically change the amount of radioactivity in the vessel shove the central rod number nine all the way to the bottom of the reactor and it would shut any reaction down and pull it all the way up and it could start up the reactor all by itself make no mistake building a prototype reactor like this was inherently less safe than other larger reactors most of these larger reactors followed a design protocol that held that no single control rod should be this powerful should be able to shut down or start up a reactor all by itself as it would take just one stuck rod to create a deadly situation as fate would have it the control rods inside of sl1 had a habit of getting stuck between february of 1959 and december of 1960 the five control rods malfunctioned a total of 63 separate times the central control rod had malfunctioned seven times in response the army told its operators to exercise the rods regularly move them up and down to prevent them from sticking in the future but the rods weren't the only problem all the way up until 1961 corrosion inside sl1 was building up bearings were wearing down rods were getting misaligned 15 days before the accident two of the rods inside of sl1 had to be hit with pipe wrenches in order to work them loose on the night of january 3rd john burns was leaning over a demonstrably unreliable control rod number 9 preparing to lift it just a few inches as a part of routine maintenance richard legge was watching over his shoulder richard mckinley was standing just a few feet away at least this was where their corpses suggested they were the difference between a nuclear reactor and a nuclear bomb can be as simple as a speed of neutrons when a large nucleus gets cleaved in two during a fission event there are two kinds of neutrons that fly out the first are so called prompt neutrons which are the particles that are launched outwards in less than 100 trillionth of a second the second kind of neutrons are the delayed neutrons which are produced by fission products a few fractions of a second later nuclear reactors take advantage of delayed neutrons in order to control the energy released nuclear weapons on the other hand want to produce as many prompt neutrons as possible creating an avalanche of additional fissions that release energy as quickly as possible when a reaction like this kicks off it's unsurprisingly called going prompt critical and it's a condition that would be an absolute disaster inside of a sealed reactor water and nuclear material would instantly vaporize circumventing the natural fail-safe of a water-moderated vessel and create a situation closer to a nuclear bomb than to a source of electricity at 7 pm john burns got a phone call it was his wife arlene calling the sl1 facility to ask john for a divorce according to todd tucker in his book on the subject atomic america john and arlene's last conversation ended with a discussion of how to split his paycheck jon would hang up the phone exhausted having slept on a friend's couch the last two nights and because of his frequent head butting with the powers that be at the national reactor testing station he was now personally and professionally stuck with the unglamorous unloved sl1 reactor this was all going on simultaneously in the mind of a man who at 9pm that night finally reached the point in his long list of duties that involved moving the central control rod of sl1 with his supervisor leg literally breathing down his neck and a soon to be over marriage surely clouding his mind burns hunched over the almost 100-pound rod a rod that often got stuck a rod that could start the reactor all by itself if handled improperly and prepared to move it just four inches upward and no further operators of sl1 knew what would happen if you lost focus and pulled the central control rod up too far according to susan m stacy in proving the principle when asked whether or not the operators knew the reactor would go prompt critical if the central control rod were fully removed one responded quote of course we often talked about what we would do if we were at a radar station and the russians came we'd yank it out end quote in other words improperly removing the central control rod would immediately kill everyone in the building just 60 seconds later at 901 pm this is exactly what happened as the report completed years later would conclude burns withdrew the central control rod many inches too far and just four milliseconds later a power surge of 10 million percent above normal operation explosively vaporized the core of sl1 cooling water was blasted upwards by this vaporized fuel and struck the top of the vessel with an extreme amount of momentum enough to lift the entire 26 thousand pound apparatus over nine feet into the air the plugs at the top of the reactor were forced open by the over 500 pounds per square inch of pressure and the control rods were fired like missiles at the ceiling the entire reactor room was instantly filled with burning steam contaminated water and fragments of the radioactive core sl1 had just gone prompt critical later experiments would show that the explosion that night was the equivalent of 32 kilograms of tnt and all that energy was released directly into the bodies of leg mckinley and burns there was no one else in the building [Music] long long short this was the sequence of alarm bells that told the firefighters eight miles away that something at the sl1 site was wrong heat sensors had been tripped above the reactor but the six person team on the way wasn't particularly worried they had already responded to not one but two false alarms at the site earlier that same day so when they got to the building's unguarded gate at 9 10 pm they were expecting another non-incident what they were not expecting was that the radiation detectors were blaring seven minutes later at 9 17 p.m a health physicist and a fireman donned masks and air tanks and approached the reactor building stairs halfway up the radiation detectors started ticking and ticking fast they were treated down the stairs for another detector theirs must have been broken they thought there was no way radiation levels inside were that high they returned and found the same worrying readings but this time they took a look into the reactor room the operators were nowhere to be found with enough radiation around them to be dangerously dosing them in minutes the men again retreated emergency crews didn't enter the building for over an hour the radiation levels were high enough that a plan had to be formulated first so at 10 45 pm it was decided that only one entry into the building was allowed per person and that that entry was limited to just 60 seconds when the first team of five men entered the building they found two heavily mutilated men burns was dead mckinley was moaning nearby both were soaking wet with irradiated water both were removed by stretcher and by the same ambulance 15 minutes later however mckinley was dead two of sl-1's three operators were accounted for the third was discovered last because he was barely recognizable shaken men reported back at 11 38 pm after the latest pass through the destroyed site they had seen something stuck to the ceiling a lifeless clump they initially thought was a bundle of rags it was the body of richard legg rod number seven had been launched from the reactor vessel like a rocket and impaled him through his groin and shoulder to the top of the building while the body of john burns and richard mckinley were easily removed the body of richard legge posed a problem it was pinned by control rod 7 directly above the now obliterated reactor core emergency crews were worried that leg's body might fall back into the reactor core during retrieval and if it was covered in enough radioactive material or if control rod 7 still had enough fuel in it it might cause the reactor to go critical a second time so while the bodies of burns and mckinley were taken by ambulance to the nearby chemical processing plant a makeshift hot room for the corpses on the night of january 3rd it would be almost a week before leg's body would join theirs on january 9th a team of 10 men used sharp hooks on long poles to pull leg's body free from the control rod piercing it it dropped onto this stretcher attached to a crane leaning in from outside the building the explosion of sl1 remains the only fatal reactor accident in united states history at the time of the accident there was maybe only a single man on earth who had performed an autopsy on a radioactive corpse that man was dr clarence lushbaugh almost exactly two years before sl1 exploded dr lashbaugh had put a man named cecil kelly's brain in a mayonnaise jar and sent eight pounds of his tissues around the country after kelly died in a criticality accident at los alamos national laboratory but that's a longer story for another time dr lushbaugh boarded a military dc-3 in los alamos at 2 30 p.m on january 8 1961 and arrived in idaho four hours later reportedly officials in idaho were grateful for his availability when lushbo and his team arrived they found three bodies waiting for them inside of the decontamination room of the idaho chemical processing plant an improvised hot room after sl1 exploded the remains of burns and mckinley were in stainless steel tanks filled with alcohol and ice for preservation and leg was still in the lead cask he was placed inside after descending from the ceiling his body was far too radioactive to be in the open air to process these bodies dr lashbaugh's team would have to get creative each body was heavily mutilated and so radioactive that it wouldn't be safe to be in the same room with them according to the actual transcript of lush boss original autopsy report quote since bodies emanating such high levels of radioactivity had never been encountered previously modifications of the usual autopsy procedures and techniques had to be improvised upon the basis of radiologic safety procedures and common sense the personnel who made these examinations comprised a well-trained team of five health physicists one radio biologist one pathologist and two physicians end quote an improvised autopsy table was created from saw horses and a stainless steel tray knives hooks and hacksaws were attached onto lengths of galvanized steel pipes by a nearby welding shop the team wouldn't be able to get anywhere near the bodies with parts of them as radioactive as they were so lush buck cut them off quote leg's head which appeared to be the major source of the prohibitive radiation level had been damaged by the blast beyond recognition there could be seen some obvious cervical fractures which appeared to make feasible the separation of the head from the body this operation was then carried out with a specially prepared knife long handled hook and wire snare controlled through a 10-foot pipe handle the remains of the head were placed in a lead cave 20 feet from the cask end quote again according to the 1968 book atomic america by todd tucker large chunks of burns leg and mckinley were quote sliced sawed and hacked off by loshbaw and then placed in a drum and buried in the idaho desert as radioactive waste end quote rushed by radiation each autopsy only took lush spa between 15 and 20 minutes dr lashbaugh determined the cause of death for each man richard mckinley bled out after his hand and the right side of his face was blown off during the explosion john burns quote died the instant he struck a flat surface that fractured his chest and drove a rib through his heart and richard's leg quote died instantaneously from the destruction of his viscera by rapidly expanding gases that penetrated his abdominal cavity along with a heavy missile in examining the bodies lush ball was able to place the men the instant before sl1 went prompt critical this answered the question of how but not the question of why why did john burns remove the rod like he did that night was it an accident a suicide or something else [Music] thankfully most of the radiation released by the sl1 explosion was contained inside the building this allowed the general electric corporation to remove the reactor vessel and clean the contaminated buildings from 1961 to 1962. on may 21 1961 ge constructed a burial ground sixteen hundred feet northeast of the original site of the reactor and sealed 99 000 cubic feet of contaminated material underground the bodies of mckinley burns and leg were not returned to their families they were instead placed in lead line caskets inside of metal vaults and covered with concrete richard mckinley john burns and richard legg had died during america's first nuclear meltdown on a frigid night in rural idaho there were no witnesses based on the circumstantial evidence it was either an accident suicide or murder it's not surprising that the story of an unstable john burns just off the phone with his now ex-wife who is possibly having an affair with richard leg committing a murder-suicide with a prototype nuclear reactor is the story that gets retold the most often and you'd be hard-pressed to find any retelling of the story of sl1 that didn't include these details however according to the final report which took almost two years to complete and involve literally hundreds of scientists experts and engineers from a dozen different research and government entities no evidence of a love triangle or murder-suicide was ever found the best explanation as mock-ups and experiments testing every aspect of that knight demonstrated was that the central control rod number nine was likely stuck as it had been stuck many times before and burns pulled the rod up too far while attempting to free it this wasn't anywhere near as exciting as a jilted lover bent on nuclear revenge but it was no less damning for the military the sl1 reactor was in a terrible state before it exploded it was literally falling apart and looked after by young men whose total experience could be measured in months as todd tucker asks in atomic america quote why would a reactor be designed so perilously close to criticality why would procedures actually dictate the manual lifting of that rod why was burns allowed to perform dangerous maintenance with so little supervision direct cause of the accident clearly appears to have been manual withdrawal of the central control rod blade by one or more of the crew members considerably beyond the limits specified in maintenance procedure however there was insufficient evidence to establish the actual reason for such abnormal withdrawal the army's hope for a miniaturized nuclear reactor had died with the men tasked with operating it rather than revolutionize power generation in remote areas the meltdown of sl1 solidified a safety criterion for all future nuclear reactors built in the united states no reactor after sl1 would be constructed in a geometry that would allow for just one stuck rod to force it into criticality two decades later the world would experience the worst nuclear disaster in history chernobyl reactor number four would melt down and end up contaminating an area that was the size of countries this meltdown was far worse than anything that ever happened in idaho but interestingly it was also the result of improperly withdrawn control rods also during the maintenance of a shutdown reactor and also overseen by a small unsupervised crew in the middle of the night when we don't learn from history it tends to repeat itself until next time thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially i want to recognize research assistant joe james and visiting scholar michael sontek if you want to join the facility if you want to join me and the over 1500 staff members that are draping on silky white lab coats getting episodes early getting members only live streams with me not like that you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and sign up for the facility today and hey if you support us just enough get your name on ra here each and every week and as you can see there's literally over a thousand of you so i have no idea how i'm going to pass it yeah quite a transition huh going from that narration to looking at me anyway it's it's quite telling to me that the story about the sordid love triangle and the murder-suicide is the one that's retold most often when you hear about sl1 i think it speaks to our desire to have some reckless human element as part of the story but it turns out there's no evidence for that and really just came down to poor supervision poor maintenance poor engineering and it's not quite as sexy but it still teaches us something and no matter what our brains want from us we have to go where the facts tell us to go think about that thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 701,039

Rating: 4.9768066 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, nuclear reactor, nuclear power plant, nuclear disaster, nuclear meltdown, nuclear power, sl-1, chernobyl, idaho falls, nuclear energy, nuclear history, dark docs, atomic bomb, because science chernobyl, chernobyl disaster, nuclear explosion

Id: uJ8cYheR5xo

Length: 24min 54sec (1494 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021