William McKeown - Idaho Falls: The Untold Story of America’s First Nuclear Accident

The SL-1 reactor is transferred out of the testing grounds.

Some believe Jack Byrnes might have died from being too conscientious. They suggest that after Byrnes and Legg connected the central control rod, Byrnes might have decided to exercise itmove it up and down slightlyas all crews had been instructed to do at the start of each shift as a quick fix for the problem of sticking rods. Some of the Army Nukes believe that because of the frigid temperatures that January, icy water was circulating in the shutdown reactor and, because of the previous maintenance work, at a lower level than usual. That change in the reactor's core temperature, along with the loss of the poisonous boron, was enough to put the nuclear machine on the verge of going critical. And that, they say, is exactly what happened when Byrnes raised the rod slightly.

If their version of events is true, if the explosion was simply an industrial accident, then the ghostly faces that Caldwell says he saw peering through the building's windows on dark nights would be those of perplexed young innocents, offered up as a sacrifice by an industry more interested in covering its collective butt than in taking responsibility for a mismanaged reactor program. And the clandestine rumblings about a love triangle leading to murder-suicide? The investigation commission's broad hint that stress or instability led Jack Byrnes to do something terribly wrong? The suggestion that the crew was undertrained and perhaps underscreened? All just a convenient and effective smoke-and-mirrors campaign to deflect attention away from the reactor's obvious flaws and its managers' sloppy performances. At least that's how some people view the official response to the explosion.

The Atomic Energy Commission really worked hard on putting a smooth coat on the whole thing, says Clay Condit, the physicist who monitored the investigation for the navy. The AEC was providing the money and it was supposed to be responsible [for overseeing the SL-1 project]. They were aware of the technical problems, but they didn't look into them closely. [Politically, the investigating committee] could not have said the AEC should have shut that facility down.

It was really nice to say, Hey, these guys, it was their fault. They had this love affair going or one of them committed suicide.' That's how this bullshit started. It was, I think, one hundred percent fabrication. Somebody threw that out on the table and they said, Let's go with that sucker.'

Stephan Hanauer, the nuclear safety expert who first publicly raised the specter of a passion-provoked murder-suicide, remembers top nuclear officials scurried like rats following the explosion: The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in the US Congress was very, very powerful. And after the accident, they held a hearing [in June 1961]. The chairman said, Who is responsible for this dreadful accident?' And a whole bunch of powerful people said, Not me.' Finally, some captain or major in the army stood up and said, I was in charge, and it's my responsibility.' And the chairman would have none if it. He said Yes, yes, of course. But, in fact, the responsibility is much broader and much higher.'

Hanauer was working at the government's Oak Ridge Laboratory when the explosion occurred. Long before he heard the rumor of a murder-suicide, he thought the explosion needed to be examined by the nuclear industry for lessons. His superiors apparently thought otherwise: I actually wrote an article about it. I was going to publish it in Nuclear Safety magazine, which was an AEC publication, and it was rejected because it was too critical of the [reactor] design. It was rejected in Washington.

More than four decades after the catastrophic event at SL-1, Hanauer still suspects that something peculiar happened between the men on shift that January night in 1961. But even if that's true, there's little doubt in his mind that the reactor's managers put a loaded gun into a young guy's hand.