Whats the deal with Idaho Falls? I just learned that there was a Military test reactor hidden in Idaho’s lost River Desert, which exploded on the night of January 3, 1961. Supossedly killed 3 people instantaneously; and the nuclear fallout killed even more. There have been reports of a faulty reactor design and mismanagement of the test-site facilities, to rumors of incompetent personell to a failed love triangle or affair that may have prompted a deliberate sabotage of the plant! This account has been a secret for over 50 years and I am just hearing about this?
Was this info suppressed by the government? and Why? Is this place livable today by our citizens or being populated by our citizens? What happened to the people who lived nearby?
It was attributed to sabotage in a 1979 memo. One is buried at Arlington National Cemetary. This site has pictures.
A small, 3MW experimental BWR called SL-1 (Stationary Low-Power Plant No. 1) in Idaho was destroyed on January 3, 1961, when a control rod was removed manually.
At 9:01pm, alarms sounded at the fire stations and security headquarters of the U.S. National Reactor Testing Station where the reactor was located. Investigation found two operators dead (third died later), and detected high radiation levels in the building.
A careful examination of the remains of the core and the vessel concluded that the control rod was manually withdrawn by about 50cm (40cm would have been enough to make the reactor critical), largely increasing the reactivity. The resulting power surge caused the reactor power to reach 20,000MW in about .01 seconds, causing the plate-type fule to melt. The molten fuel interacted with the water in the vessel, producing an explosive formation of steam that caused the water above the core to rise with such force that when it hit the lid of the pressure vessel, the vessel itself rose 3m in the air before dropping back down (Derived from DOE and US Army records)
Idaho Falls: The Untold Story of America’s First Nuclear…
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by William McKeown
Idaho Falls: The Untold Story of America’s First Nuclear…
Available from Amazon
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Updated on 7-20-2003.
Sheesh, I first read about this in We Almost Lost Detroit back in 1979.
Brad Amundsen, it is a violation of board policy to copy and paste an entire page off another website.
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General Questions Moderator
The official government reports may be found here:
http://www.id.doe.gov/DOEID/foia/archive.htm
This isn’t exactly secret – there have been many accounts of it, and it’s even the subject of a film. I think it was called SL-1, and it came out in the early 1980’s.
As for the title, Three Mile Island was far from the first American nuclear mishap. See, for example, Walter Patterson’s book Nuclear Power, published by Pelican books (no fly-by night or alarmist organization). And, of course, there were foriegn mishaps like Windscale.
Another accident that nearly resulted in a nuclear disaster occurred in 1956, when a USAF B-47 bomber crashed at Lakenheath airbase in England, setting fire to a building which contained 3 nuclear bombs each also containing 8000lb of TNT. If any of the explosive charges had detonated, the result would have been a massive plume of radioactive waste spreading over central England.
SL-1 came out in 1983. More of a documentary than anything else, although it has a dramitization of the one of the doomed men’s last day.
There was an accident involving a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Connecticut, in the 1960’s. Workers at the palnt violated safety regulations, and mixed a large amount of radioactive liquid (containing dissolved uranium). The mixture went critical, and explodedinto steam-and contaminated several men (one died of radiation poisoning).
I’ve also heard that there were accidnts at the Oak Ridge Plant, in Tenn. (where the uranium was concentrated).
Actually, the accidents have been very few-FAR fewer than in the chemical industry!
Okay, I’m curious then. Why did Three Mile Island get so much press compared to the other incidents? From what I’ve read, no radiation was even released at TMI. Nobody died. Some of us drove to Philadelphia to escape the disaster that never happened, but that was about it (I grew up less than 5 miles from TMI; I was a baby when it happened). Some people even stayed in town through the whole crisis.
The big reason for all the attention on Three Mile Island was twofold:
- This was the most serious accident ever to happen at a commercial nuclear plant until Chernobyl. This made the Browns Ferry fire look like a picnic.
- Big-time miscommunication occurred between GPU Nuclear (owner), the state government, the NRC, and the media that resulted in a recommendation to evacuate children and pregnant women that really was not necessary and scared the hell out of the public. Now every commercial nuclear power plant has an emergency planning department, one of who’s duties is to make sure all information released to the public is complete and accurate.
Depending on how loosely you define “accident”, Three-Mile and Idaho Falls were greatly predated by Louis Slotin’s “Tickling the Dragon’s Tail” experiment gone awry, on May 21st, 1946. Slotin was carefully nudging two plutonium masses together when he screwed up and let them touch. They promptly went critical and could have destroyed the facility, but Slotin pulled the masses apart with his bare hands. He died a few days later, but saved everyone else in the room.
I don’t mean to diminish the significance of this, or of Slotkin’s death, but it’s a long way from error in a nuke lab from mishaps at a commercial power reactor. TMI, SL-1, Brown’s Ferry, Detroit Edison, Windscale, etc. are very different in meaning and in scale from “Twisting the Dragon’s Tail”.
Well, significance aside, what happened to Slotin certainly qualifies as an “American nuclear accident” (Slotin was actually Canadian, but the incident took place in Los Alamos) and it certainly predates Idaho Falls.
Not true. There was a very small amount that was released into the atmosphere. Additionally, they did some controlled evaporation of the contaminated water throughout the 80s, since they couldn’t dispose of the water any other way in a reasonable manner.
The reason why it was such a big deal is because it came within 1000 degrees C or so of becoming Chernobyl. That sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t, not at the rate it was climbing before it got under control.
Don’t kid yourself. It was as big a deal as a nuclear accident could be without an explosion, and it was lucky at that.
First try got munched
It did not help that TMI happened shortly after the movie the china syndrome came out.
The media ran with it ,and it sensationalized
Declan
Is this the guy played by John Cusack in “Fat Man and Little Boy?” I saw it a couple of months ago and wondered if that was a real incident of made up drama.
The Cusack incident was modeled on what happened to Slotin, but keep in mind that the events in Fat Man and Little Boy take place while the Manhatten Project is in full swing, during WW2. Slotin’s accident took place in 1946.
Cusack’s entirely fictional character in that movie was named Michael Merriman. The similarity between him and Slotin is briefly discussed here, though the author mistakenly puts Slotin’s accident in September, 1946 and not May.