The Forgotten Meltdown

At 10.35 p.m. on January 3rd, 1961, a physicist named Ed Valario pulled up to a secret nuclear test site in the Idaho Desert.

Ed had received an emergency call about an explosion at the nuclear reactor known as SL-1.

No one had been able to contact the three men who were working that night. Valario waved at his partner who was waiting for him in front of the reactor building.

The two men grabbed their gas masks and rushed inside.

They hurried up three flights of winding stairs that led toward the reactor's control room, past pipes and motors and condensers, towards the cramped nerve center that controlled the reactor.

The building was completely silent, save for the frantic static from their Geiger counters. Valario glanced down and saw the needle pointing to maximum radiation levels.

He'd never seen levels that high before.

When Valario opened the control room door, his heart skipped a beat. The scene inside was total devastation.

Twisted metal scattered across the floor, clouds of steam hovering above the shattered control board, pools of blood and water everywhere. Two bodies lay on the floor.

Bodies so badly mutilated, it was impossible to tell who they were. But where, he wondered, was the third man?

Then something above him caught his attention. Something on the ceiling.
Something that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

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From Bollin Studios and Wondery, I'm Luke Lamana, and this is Redacted Declassified Mysteries, where each week we shine a light on the shadowy corners of espionage, covert operations, and misinformation to reveal the dark secrets our governments try to hide.

This week's episode is called The Forgotten Meltdown.

It was the dawn of the atomic age, a time in America marked by an obsession with nuclear power.

It could be used to create weapons of mass destruction, but could also be used to create an endless supply of energy that was practically free.

This miracle source could be used to power cities and lessen dependence on foreign oil. In short, it could change the way the world was run.

By the 1960s, nuclear power plants were springing up all over the country, providing thousands of jobs and lighting millions of homes.

But in the headlong rush rush into the nuclear future, people seem to forget about the first nuclear disaster that happened on American soil in 1961.

Most people have heard of the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, so why not SL-1?

Maybe because the reasons for the explosion remain cloaked in mystery and misinformation to this day. Was it negligence? A fatal design flaw?

Or was it something darker, like a crime of passion or a murder-suicide? What is the truth behind the Idaho Falls nuclear disaster?

And how different might things be for all of us had that truth really come out?

It was late October 1959 in Idaho Falls. 20-year-old U.S.
Army specialist Jack Burns sprinted out his front door and down the street.

Although the Army had done its best to make him punctual, Jack still tended to be late. And today was no different.
It was his first day as a nuclear reactor operator at the U.S.

Army's National Reactor Testing Station, and he was about to miss his bus. He reached the corner just as the bus rolled to a stop.
Jack leapt aboard and dropped a few coins in the till.

He moved toward the back, but stopped when he saw one of the other passengers. He knew him.
His name was Richard Legg, and they had gone through the same nuclear training program in Virginia.

Jack didn't know Richard well, but he'd seen him around. So he sat in the seat across the aisle and asked if this was his first day, too.

The National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho Falls was created by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1949.
It was a top-secret site built out in the desert, miles away from any town.

As Jack and Richard made small talk, Jack unpacked the lunch his wife Arlene had made him. She'd cut the crusts off his sandwich just the way he liked it.

He and Arlene had only been married a couple of years, and he liked when she did these sorts of newlywed things for him. Jack was a man of action.

He hadn't wanted to wait until he was old enough to join the Army, so he fudged his birth records and enlisted when he was 17. The same went for starting a family.

He got married by the time he was 19, and he and Arlene had already had a baby boy named Jackie.

Jack hoped working at the testing station would lead to a better, higher-paying job down the line, a bigger house, and a better life for his wife and son.

But besides the money, there was something exciting about working with nuclear energy. He felt like he was part of something bigger than himself.

The bus was now moving through the Lost River Desert, a barren landscape of scorched earth, sagebrush, and black lava beds. It was boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter.

Eventually, the bus came to a stop. Jack and Richard got off and walked toward the chainlink fence that surrounded the testing station.

Jack felt a wave of disappointment. The main building looked like an old barn, and the two dozen reactors around it looked like grain silos.

He'd hoped the campus would look futuristic, shiny and metal like something out of Flash Gordon. But this looked like the set of an old western.

Jack took a tour of the campus and saw the reactor where he would be working.

It was called SL1, a three-story, thirty-nine-foot-wide metal silo with a set of winding stairs that led to a control room. Jack squinted at the reactor.

It wasn't impressive to look at, but maybe it would be more exciting once he understood more how it worked. After all, he had already moved his wife and kid to the desert.

He had to make the most of it.

Over the following weeks, Jack tried to keep up with his new job. The reactor had to be monitored around the clock, which meant long shifts and late hours.
But getting sloppy wasn't an option.

He had to stay alert. The slightest oversight could mean the difference between life and death.
That made the job stressful, but also thrilling.

SL-1 was known as a boiling water plant, which meant it worked more or less like a giant tea kettle. The radioactive uranium inside the steel reactor got really hot, boiling the water into steam.

The steam then moved turbines, which produced electricity. Jack's main job was to make sure that the reactor never overheated, which could be disastrous.

The reactor had a braking mechanism using 100-pound control rods to stop the production of energy and let it cool down. Jack had to lift and lower these 100-pound control rods.

It felt a bit like working on a construction site. During Jack's first week, he ran into a serious problem.

He and his crew were lowering the control rods into the reactor to cool it off, but halfway down, the rods jammed. Jack tried to reverse the mechanism to pull them back out, but found they were stuck.

Jack was annoyed. It was only minutes before quitting time, and he could nearly taste the cold beer waiting for him at home.
But he knew he had to report this issue first.

The problem was that that Jack didn't know exactly who to tell. During his short time on the job, he'd noticed the Army liked to find cheap workarounds rather than fixing what needed to be fixed.

So Jack wasn't surprised when he reported the sticking rods to his supervisor and the man brushed him off. He wrote it down, but he didn't seem worried.
Jack decided not to push it.

He wanted a promotion, and no one likes a squeaky wheel.

Still, a nagging voice in his head couldn't help but wonder, what if the rods kept sticking? What if one day they couldn't stop the reactor from overheating?

Then again, Jack wasn't a scientist or even an engineer. He was just a low-ranking trainee, a newbie paid to pull levers.
So he left the campus and headed home to that cold beer.

A few months later, in the winter of 1960, Jack Byrne's wife, Arlene, was struggling to keep up. She was a young mother trying to cope with the endless needs of a newborn.

Little Jackie woke her up five times a night and wanted to be held all day long. Arlene loved her son, but some days she felt like she was drowning.
To top it off, she was lonely.

She hardly ever saw her husband anymore. She was proud of him, but she wished he was around more often.
Instead, it was just her, the baby, the laundry, and a never-ending stack of dishes.

It was nearing midnight. Arlene wanted to stay up for Jack, but she couldn't keep her eyes open for another minute.
That was fine.

They had the whole weekend to spend together and make up for lost time.

But when Arlene woke up the next morning, Jack's side of the bed was still made up. She crept into the living room, wondering if he'd gotten in late and slept on the couch, but he wasn't there either.

She was about to call the office when she heard noise coming from the driveway. She rushed to the front window.
It was Jack, strapping his skis to the roof of their car.

Arlene bolted out the front door, still in her night dress. She asked him what was going on.
Jack motioned to his skis. Arlene's worries about her missing husband vanished in an instant.

She said a weekend on on the slopes was just what she needed. But Jack shook his head.
She had it wrong. He was going skiing, alone.

For a moment, Arlene couldn't move. She was in shock.
Then she found her voice and started yelling. How could he even think of going on a trip on his own? What about his son? What about her?

Jack told her his job was killing him. He needed to cut loose, get away.
But that only made Arlene angrier. Instead of yelling, she turned her back on him.

Jack had a temper and she didn't want to provoke him, so she stomped back to the house and left him standing there.

By the spring of 1960, Jack and Arlene's home life was worse than ever. Jack stayed away more and more.
He couldn't help it.

His work was exhausting, and the last thing he wanted to do was go home to a frustrated wife and a screaming baby.

On the night of May 27th, Jack drove to a bachelor party for one of his SL1 co-workers at the White Elephant Supper Club.

The minute he walked in, he locked eyes with Richard Legg, the old classmate he'd sat next to on the bus on his first day at SL1. Richard motioned him over and offered to buy him a drink.

Jack was still on the fence about Richard. He had a big ego and a reputation for screwing around.
Still, Jack didn't see the harm in just one drink.

When the party started to break up around 10 p.m., Richard suggested they all head to a local strip club. Jack said he was game.
So did two other SL1 sergeants who decided to tag along.

By 1 a.m., Jack was halfway down a bottle of tequila and so drunk he could barely see straight. His bleary eyes scanned the bar, landing on a young blonde sitting in a corner.

He waved her over, and to his surprise, she scooted into the booth next to him. Her name was Mitzi, and she and Jack hit it off right away.

Even after they closed down the strip club, Jack decided it wasn't time for the night to end. He convinced one of the sergeants to have an after-party at his apartment.

He asked Mitzi if she'd like to come and promised to make it worth her while.

It was 3 a.m. by the time Jack stumbled out of the sergeant's bedroom, leaving Mitzi to the next guy.

Initially, she'd offered to sleep with them for $20 a person, but they'd haggled her down to just $2 each.

Jack used the wall to guide himself down the hallway, then flopped onto the couch next to Richard. Richard was one of the only men who had said no to any one-on-one time with Mitzi.

Jack was thinking he and Richard would have a nightcap and then he'd head home, but the easygoing Richard of a few hours ago was now gone. He seemed angry, resentful.

He started making snide comments about Jack sleeping with Mitzi when he had a wife and a kid at home. Jack felt a flash of shame.
Who did this guy think he was?

Before he knew what he was doing, he'd pulled back his fist and punched Richard in the jaw.

Richard fell backwards, but before he could strike back, the two sergeants were pulling the men apart and shoving them out onto the porch.

One of the sergeants forced Richard into his car and told him to go home. Jack was left standing there, panting and staring at the taillights as they disappeared down the dark desert road.

He'd gone out tonight to forget his troubles. Instead, he'd made an enemy.

A few days later, after leaving his shift at SL1, Jack sat in a dingy office in the back of a Texas gas station, watching a man with a comb over read his job application.

The Texaco manager glanced at Jack and asked why he wanted the job. Jack said that it was obvious.
Money. Why the hell else would anyone want to to pump gas?

The manager rolled his eyes and motioned for Jack to follow him. Jack was glad to take on a part-time job.
Even more than the money, it would give him another reason to stay out of the house.

He and Arlene had been fighting more than ever, and he just couldn't take it anymore.

He followed the Texaco manager to the back of the station, where he met some of the other workers on their lunch break. Jack soon learned the Texaco boys were a rough bunch.

They liked whiskey, and they liked women. In short, they were Jack's kind of people.
That whole summer, he took as many shifts as he could fit into his schedule.

He stayed out late, drinking with his new friends. Idaho Falls was in the middle of the Mormon heartland, but it had a dark underbelly for those who knew where to look.

Between Texaco and SL1, Jack barely saw his own bed.

One morning in September, Jack walked into the testing station late for his shift. He was clean-shaven, but still reeking of booze.
He flopped down at his desk and spritzed his mouth with Listerine.

One of his colleagues came over to Jack's desk. He told Jack that he'd missed some big big news.
Richard Legg had gotten a promotion. He was now chief operator and shift supervisor.

Jack stared up at him in disbelief. That was the job he had been hoping to get.
Jack shot up from his desk and ran to his supervisor's office. If Richard could get promoted, he damn well could too.

But five minutes later, Jack left the office feeling defeated. His supervisor told Jack he wasn't ready for promotion.
He said Jack was unfocused and partied too much outside of work.

Jack was stunned. He thought he'd been careful to cover up his new lifestyle.
He didn't know how this was Richard Leg's fault, but he was sure that somehow it was.

After all, Richard was the only guy here who hated his guts.

A few months later, on January 3rd, 1961, Jack Burns whipped his car into the gravel parking lot at SL1 so fast, he almost lost traction. His back seat was filled with rumpled clothes.

He had spent most of the holidays sleeping on a friend's couch. It was 4 p.m.
and he already had two drinks in his system, but it didn't feel like enough.

He was in a foul mood as he walked into the SL1 building. It seemed like nothing was going his way.
His relationship with Arlene was rockier than ever.

He'd been passed over for promotion, and now he had to work a shift directly under a man he hated, Richard Legg. It would be just him, Richard, and a third guy named McKinley.

Jack had only met McKinley once or twice. He was brand new and wouldn't be much help, and he doubted Richard would lift a finger now that he outranked him.
That meant all the work would fall to Jack.

Jack stumbled into the reactor room and punched his time card. Then he plopped down at his desk and looked at the to-do list left by the day crew.

His eyes landed on the most annoying task of all, reconnecting the 100-pound control rods that had stuck. Again.
Jack had reported this issue a year ago, and it still hadn't been fixed.

Now he was starting to regret that second drink he'd had. What he needed was a strong cup of coffee.

A few hours later, around 7 p.m., Arlene Burns was sitting in front of the phone. She felt nervous, knowing the call she was about to make would change the rest of her life.

But she couldn't put it off any longer. Jack was a drunk, a deadbeat, and a cheat.
She had heard rumors about him and other women. If she never saw him again, it would be too soon.

When Jack finally picked up his work line after several rings, it was the tone of his voice that set her off. It was dismissive, loveless.

She started to list all the things that were wrong with their marriage. Then before she realized what she was saying, she was asking Jack for a divorce.

But before she could walk it back, Jack said that was just fine with him. They were through.
And then he hung up.

Arlene was stunned. She thought he'd fight her.
apologize for how bad things had gotten and beg her to take him back. But he'd hung up on her as if they hadn't begun a family together.

Arlene didn't know what to do with herself. She sat at the kitchen table, trying to calm down.

She wondered how long it would take her to pack up the rest of Jack's things and leave them in a box on the front stoop. She tried to imagine the look on his face when he saw it.

He would know then that their marriage was over for good. No more picking up the pieces.

But just as soon as she pictured it, she started to cry. Suddenly, the idea of no longer being able to think of Jack as her husband felt too painful, too final.

She thought back to her wedding day when they were in love and full of hope. Arlene always thought they could find their way back.
Maybe she'd been too rash.

Maybe if she'd been more supportive and less concerned with where Jack went at night, they wouldn't fight so much.

Arlene lunched for the phone and called the plant, but nobody picked up. She started pacing around the living room.
Around 8 p.m., she called again, but still there was no answer.

At 9 p.m., she tried again. Nothing.
Now she was really scared.

The wait is over.

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A team of firemen rode on the back of a truck through the freezing January night heading towards the SL-1 reactor. They were responding to a radiation alarm from the testing site.

It was the third call that day. The first two had been false alarms because the alarm system at SL-1 was malfunctioning.
But the firefighters still had to respond to all calls until they fixed it.

As they pulled up to SL-1, the firefighters could hear the alarms blaring. They hoped they could flag down one of the soldiers on duty and confirm that everything was okay.

Then they could all go home. But this time, no one came out to greet them when they pulled up.
That was odd.

The firemen rushed into the reactor building. They passed the break room and spotted three cups of coffee and a couple of half-eaten sandwiches.

They called out for the crew, but the station remained deadly silent except for the alarm.

As the men climbed the stairs to the second floor control room, the fireman's radiation detectors started clicking. They looked down and did a double take.

Levels were pegging at 500 runcheons an hour. It was the highest level any of them had ever seen.
The men looked at each other. There was no question about what to do.

Staying inside with such toxic radiation was a death wish. It was time to call for backup.

Ed Valario drove to the testing site as fast as he could.

He felt a sickening wave of terror pass through him as he ran towards SL1 with a few other staff members. As the physicist in charge, Valario was responsible for the men who worked here.

He knew the three guys on duty tonight. All of them were fairly new to the job, and they were all very young, still in their 20s.

Valario and his men put on their gas masks and rushed into the building. They stopped outside the control room and looked in through the window.
It was completely dark inside.

Valario couldn't even make out the dull glow of the control panels. He cracked the door and aimed a flashlight inside.

Then he heard the sound of moaning and the sound of one word being said over and over.

Help.

Valario followed the sound to a spot on the floor where two men lay in a pool of blood. One of them was moving and whimpering.
His face had been entirely torn off.

His body was twisted at a strange angle and his left arm was missing, ending in a bloody stump.

The second man wasn't moving at all. He still had a face, but there was no life behind his blank, staring eyes.
But Valario knew there was the third man on duty. Where was he?

Maybe he'd made it out of the room and gone for help, but then why hadn't the fireman mentioned it?

Suddenly, he felt something drip onto his shoulder. Valario looked upwards towards the ceiling, and then he discovered where the missing man was.

More than nine feet above him, hung a body impaled to the ceiling by a giant metal rod.

One of the reactor's heavy control rods had gone straight through his chest. What was left of the man's body was barely recognizable as human.

He had been torn to shreds, reduced to a mess of blood and flesh.

Valario screamed. He couldn't help it.
It was like something out of a nightmare. He had the sickening thought of a giant bug pinned to a corkboard.

A moment later, he came to his senses and started shouting orders. The first thing they had to do was get the guy who was still moving to the hospital.

Valario and the other men hefted the wounded man onto a stretcher and loaded him onto an ambulance waiting outside. Next, they removed the second man from the wreckage.

But recovering the man on the ceiling was a lot more complicated. Driven by an incredible explosive force, the rod was lodged deep into the ceiling.

and the levels of radiation were so high that nobody could be in the building for longer than 60 seconds at a time. This made the recovery effort both dangerous and slow.

In the end, it took six days to get the third man off the ceiling.

Because the men's bodies were so badly mutilated, it wasn't until after the autopsies that they were able to tell who was who.

It turned out Richard McKinley had been the man with the torn face who was rushed to the hospital. Sadly, he died from his injuries while he was still in the ambulance.

Jack Burns was the second man lying in the pool of blood, and the man impaled on the ceiling was Richard Legg.

Arlene Burns woke up in the dawn hours of January 4th to a knock on her door.

She rushed to answer, thinking it was Jack coming home to make up after their fight. But when she opened the door, she found a trio of grim visitors.

And from the look on their faces, she knew that something terrible had happened. Similar tragic scenes soon took place at the homes of McKinley and Legge.

The officers spared their wives the gruesome details. All they would say is that there had been a terrible accident and that their husbands had lost their lives.

While the test site was classified, there was no hiding the deaths of the three men from the Idaho Falls community. Blaring headlines about the explosion soon hit the newsstands.

One report noted, quote, The first authentic mystery story of our nuclear age is in the record books.

Now, atomic scientists are probing the great Idaho Whodone It, which instantly turned a tame atom into a death-dealing Frankenstein.

All three bodies had been so radioactive that they had to be buried in lead caskets.

Officials at the test site now faced a difficult situation. SL-1 had been widely considered safe.
But now it was in pieces and three men were dead.

So the question remained, what caused the explosion at SL-1 SL-1 that night? A team from the Atomic Energy Commission quickly determined something had caused the reactor to overheat.

The steel reactor vessel had exploded, spraying radioactive steam and metal fragments everywhere and tearing the three men apart.

But what had caused the overheating?

Investigators immediately suspected the control rods. The men were never supposed to pull the control rods out abruptly.

In fact, they were trained to never lift them more than four inches at any given time.

They determined that to cause an explosion, the rods would need to have been lifted a full 20 inches in less than a tenth of a second.

Investigators weren't even sure that was possible, and they were sure that none of the men in the crew would have been dumb enough to do it. Unless, of course, one of the men had done it on purpose.

Investigators soon discovered two of the men on duty, Richard Legg and Jack Burns, had been bitter enemies with a history of violence.

In the wake of the tragedy, rumors exploded across Idaho Falls about Jack and Richard. The darkest of them all was that Richard may have been having an affair with Arlene.

No one could say for sure where this rumor began, but it spread like wildfire. Others thought it was a murder-suicide.
Jack had just received a call from his wife saying their marriage was over.

Maybe he decided that life wasn't worth living and he blew up the plant, taking two innocent men with him.

The rumors were lurid. They were sensational, and the Atomic Energy Commission seemed willing to go along with them.

After weeks of interviews, reenactments, and poring over the autopsies, they issued their final report to the public.

It blamed Jack and Richard for the disaster, or as they put it in NuclearSpeak, it was, quote, malperformance motivated by emotional stress or instability.

In other words, something had happened that night to cause one of the men to act erratically, and that one erratic move had caused the explosion.

The blame, they said, lay not with the government, but a few bad apples.

The only problem with the commission's conclusion, it was a lie, a classic distraction tactic.

So what was the likeliest culprit? A deteriorating facility that no one wanted to fix, combined with a badly designed machine.

First, there were those control rods. In the three months before the explosion, they got stuck 13% of the time, five times more more frequently than when the plant had first opened.

This should have been considered an alarming increase, but nothing whatsoever was done about it. Next, SL-1 was poorly designed.

Why was it even possible to lift the control rods high enough to cause an explosion in the first place? Why weren't there clear safety regulations in place?

More warnings about the dangers of lifting the rods too far?

Probably because these reactors were meant to be run by experienced scientists, not young military guys with just a few months of training under their belts.

Despite all of these obvious mechanical issues, design flaws, and leadership failures, the media chose to focus on the personal drama between Richard Legg and Jack Burns, and nobody of any rank spoke up in their defense.

Why risk their careers to defend the reputation of three dead men? Nuclear energy was the way of the future.

This would cause it to grind to a halt, and so the Atomic Energy Commission sat back and let the rumors spread.

Over the following years, nuclear power plants were built all over the country. But because of the SL-1 cover-up, the industry remained a sitting duck for a major accident.

That came with the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster, when a stuck valve and inattentive plant operators caused the release of radioactive gases into the air. and a near meltdown of the nuclear core.

Since then, almost no nuclear plants have opened in the United States, while dozens have shut down.

What if the government had taken steps to make sure nothing like SL-1 happened again? Would the nuclear industry have avoided some of the devastating accidents both here and around the world?

If so, maybe thousands of lives would have been spared. But instead, the government chose not to learn the lessons of SL-1.

And Richard McKinley, Richard Legg, and Jack Burns all died in vain.

From Bollin Studios and Wondery, this is Redacted, Declassified Mysteries, hosted by me, Luke Lamana. A quick note about our stories.

We do a lot of research for our stories, but some details and scenes are dramatized.

We use many different sources for our show, but we especially recommend Idaho Falls, The Untold Story of America's First Nuclear Accident by William McEwen, and Atomic America, How a Deadly Explosion and Feared Admiral Changed the Course of Nuclear History by Todd Tucker.

This episode was written by Aaron Lann. Sound design by Ryan Patesta.
Our producer is Christopher B. Dunn.

Our associate producers and researchers are Sarah Vitak, Teja Palaconda, Adam Mellian, and Ruffa Faria. Fact-checking by Sheila Patterson.
For Bollin Studios, our head of production is Zach Levitt.

Script editing by Scott Allen. Our coordinating producer is Samantha Collins.
Production support by Avery Siegel. Produced by me, Luke Lamana.
Executive producers are Mr. Ballin and Nick Witters.

For Wondery, our head of sound is Marcelino Villa Pando. Senior producers are Laura Donna Palavota, Dave Schilling, and Rachel Engelman.
Senior managing producer is Nick Ryan.

Managing producers are Olivia Fonte and Sophia Martins. Our executive producers are Aaron O'Flaherty and Marshall Louie for Wondery.

In the fall of 1620, a battered merchant ship called the Mayflower set sail across the Atlantic. It carried 102 men, women, and children, risking it all to start again in the new world.

Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of American History Tellers.

Every week, we take you through the moments that shaped America, and in our latest season, we explore the untold story of the Pilgrims, one that goes far beyond the familiar tale of the first Thanksgiving.

After landing at Cape Cod, the Pilgrims forged an unlikely alliance with the Wapanog people who helped the pilgrims survive the most brutal winter they'd ever known, laying the foundation for a powerful national myth.

But behind that story lies another, one of conflict, betrayal, and brutal violence against the very people who helped the pilgrims survive.

Follow American History Tellers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of American History Tellers The Mayflower early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus.