It bears pointing out when we discuss nuclear energy, there are so few mishaps that we can remember them all by name. If you tried to tell the complete destructive history of oil and coal, there’s not enough bandwidth unless we turned off all the porn on the internet for a spell. And I simply don’t have the time. Or self control.
It’s sometimes hard to separate out the reality of the low chances of nuclear threat from the spectacle and fear that comes with an invisible enemy like radiation. But we talk about it so we can find some understanding of our relatively short, yet sometimes fatal, history of nuclear fuckery.
Ours started out at a small reactor in Idaho.
Today’s Moment of Science… the SL-1 Incident.
Nuclear reactors aren’t terribly complicated, and early ones were surprisingly simple. TL;DR, get a startup neutron source to get things rolling, a handful of control rods, fuel rods full of fissile fuel, some water for neutron moderation, and you’re ready to split some atoms.
Control rods take on the oh so important task of absorbing neutrons without the dramatics of fission, moderating the reaction speed. They can be composed of boron, cadmium, silver, and several rare earth elements along with their alloys. For safety, control rods should be evenly distributed through a reactor. In some modern reactors, they’re designed to accommodate fifty clusters of control rods with twenty rods per cluster (varying by size and model).
An imperial assload of control rods mitigates the chances for a DNA scrambling disaster if something goes wrong with just one of them. You’d think one of the geniuses the government trusted with enriched uranium would have given that some before putting even the earliest of these together, right?
Well.
There was a problem with just one control rod at the SL-1 reactor in Idaho on January 3rd, 1961.
The plant was constructed from July 1957 to July 1958, with the Stationary Low Power Reactor Number 1 (SL-1) online and critical by August of that year. It was originally designed for nine control rods. They were only using five control rods. The one in the middle did most of the heavy lifting. They used the others, but this main control rod alone could stop and start the reaction.
It was raised and lowered by hand, pulling it up to start or increase the rate of reaction, and lowering it to slow the reaction. Accidentally pulling it too far out could be disastrous, but there were no fail-safes in place.
In less than two years leading up to the accident, the control rods malfunctioned over sixty times. Every now and then it was reported that the scientists banged on things with a large-ish wrench to get them to do their bidding. There were occasional misalignment issues, as well as some chemical corrosion that made it harder to move the rods.
So, the disaster.
Richard McKinley, Richard Legg, and John Byrnes were working at the facility. Allegedly, Legg had a penchant for occasionally showing up to work drunk. On top of that, McKinley and Byrnes reportedly really wouldn’t have cared if the other one died in a nuclear accident, with only moderate hyperbole. The reactor had been offline for the last eleven days for the holidays, and it was time to power back up.
Byrnes was having the worst fucking day. He reportedly slept on a friend’s couch the night before. Then at work received the “motherfucker I’m not putting up with your shit anymore” phone call from his wife, in which he was told they were getting a divorce.
Then he was asked “hey, wanna fire up the nuclear reactor?”
Byrnes was responsible for physically pulling the 80lb control rod up with his bare hands. Reconstructions of the scene place Legg with him, possibly assisting, and McKinley nearby in the room. He was just supposed to pull it up by four inches.
To be fair, lesser men have also drastically overestimated four inches to their own peril.
All we know next is that John Byrnes pulled that control rod up by about twenty inches. There are rumors about love triangles and Byrnes pulling the control rod out as some sort of ‘fuck the world, I’m out’ plan. But the evidence is mixed on if he even knew what the results of his actions would be.
Byrnes and Legg died instantly. McKinley succumbed to his injuries in about two hours. They had to take an incredible amount of care in removing the bodies because, in addition to the incredibly high radiation level of the room? There was a danger that Legg’s remains and the radioactive materials embedded in him could fall into the reactor and cause a great deal more fuckery.
The site of the disaster was fully decontaminated. It became a “you think we didn’t have to say this but we’re saying it” thing that nuclear reactors generally shouldn’t be reliant on one control rod.
This has been your daily Moment of Science asking, how many places along the way could this have been prevented?
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