Episode 183: SL-1 Nuclear Reactor Explosion

Here's the fucking thing.

Roz, can you tell our beloved hogs why you had to take a minute to

get into that?

We're all

inconvenient bathroom use time.

No, it's not the inconvenient youth bathroom use time.

I don't give a shit about that.

I live in the bad for you.

I had to give a shit about that.

No, no.

Tell them what you had to do before we started recording.

I had to delete an old file so I had room to put this one in.

I see.

I mean, it's going to sound like a scram's album when I'm done here.

I had the exact same thing where something was filling up my boot drive because like all my all my stuff is on the like um ssds and the hard drives uh that are like you know loose in the in the computer case but the uh like actual like boot drive is just a little like 250 gig um ssd which is now constantly full and i'm like why is this constantly full and i finally like free up enough space to install cleaner and look and see what's what's filling it and the answer is using Zencast requires me to use Satan's own Microsoft Edge you can use Chrome uh yeah but in any case like I don't want to and no I understand that I hate that I have Chrome installed I am a Firefox boy but so um the whole time it's on Microsoft Edge is just just just just taking up data gigabytes of it like why why does it have 12 gigabytes of cache data for the thing that I only use on this website I don't know but it does and so I got rid of that and now happy days, problem solved.

But that was a stressful moment.

You could also use a Winderstat.

Windowstat?

WinDirth.

WinDirectory Statistics.

Which gives you, in my mind, I use that a lot because you may not know this, but Audacity

also hogs a lot of space because it doesn't, at least in my experience, doesn't cleanly delete files I'm done with.

Yeah, no, yeah, for sure, for sure.

Well, this has been fascinating.

I don't, I, I, I am confused.

This is great podcast.

Well, I've seen you operate a computer, Roz.

It's uh, I, friend of the show, uh, Andrew Saltz, who's a teacher in Philly, said that we should do a 24-hour charity live stream where it's just Roz attempting to use Linux.

But you can install the thing where the window goes wobbly when you drag it around, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, wobbly windows.

Yeah.

I have the kind of trans woman's natural affinity for old computers, so I'd like it if we went back to the kind of reel-to-reel thing.

Whereas with Justin, I feel like the kind of time period that you're pitching at is

pretty eniac, yeah, yeah, yeah, like punch cards or something.

Yeah, sort of, sort of a babbage adding machine.

A computer is a room that you go into and then some people take care of it for you.

What?

You mean like the guys who wipe down the holodeck?

Yeah, I guess so.

Which the worst job in Starfleet, no question.

I'm the guy who wipes down the loads.

Yeah, it's like I'm doing the viscera cleanup detailed DLC where I've got to mop all of Riker's cum out of the holodeck.

Thank you.

Just open with that line, no context.

Thanks so much.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Stage direction.

Clean cum question mark.

Stage direction.

Confetti question mark.

We were doing the live show at the film where they were like, all right, we're going to have a safety brief, which this is the only venue that did a safety brief and because and they got the assignment yeah yeah and they just and they were like okay so is it like are we expecting like stage diving i was like probably i hope i like can i do it and they were like no you can't i was like okay well then no like it's whenever we do whenever we do the kill james bond live shows there's always um a question on the the safety assessment that's like are you going to use any replica firearms And I've always had to tick no, but I've always kind of wanted to tick yes.

And I've never had an inkling of what that would look like.

I think it's mostly I want to do it just to tick the box on the form, but I want to tick the box on the form so bad.

This is what you do: that at the beginning of the show, you inform the audience:

you know, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to inform you that during the duration of this show, a pistol will be fired, and then someone else immediately fires the pistol.

I mean, yeah, what's my bit.

That's from the Maryland Renaissance Fair Act hack and slash.

It was a really good bit.

I did like too that they were just like,

what do you want us to do?

Like, I had to explain, like, we will be heckled, but it's fine.

It's just the hogs.

And they were like, are you sure we can kick people out?

But I was just like, I kind of like kind of wanted to use unnamed person

as an example, but only kick them out.

I feel like getting kicked out of a Well Azure Problem live show for heckling us is like a spiritual injustice that can never be righted.

Like, you would have to kill one of us with a sword for us to make that up to you.

And speaking of being killed with a sword, I always do feel a little bit like, um, because, like, whenever I do live shows in person, I always get to meet the fans.

It's always really lovely.

Um, a bunch of them are wearing like shirts that we designed or whatever.

People come up to me, people say things to me, uh, and it's very nice, but there is a little bit of me, like one percent, because I have an anxiety disorder that's like, you know, any one of these people could Inajiro asanuma you.

Uh, you know, the Japanese Communist Party guy who got like killed with the sword on stage.

I'm just like, you could, you could, you could get fucking killed with a sword right now.

Um, so you know, please don't kill me with a sword is the main thing.

The film war had metal detectors, we were good.

Um, just stabbing the flat screen, and I'm just like, completely fine.

You know, it's funny, is they also made us go through the metal detectors, yeah, just in case you were going to smuggle in something.

Yeah, you were supposed to

padded me down, I got to get felt up for that show.

You were supposed to go through the metal, it's fine.

Uh, security theater is how terrorists win.

Uh, Real quick, before we begin, this is an ad for us.

Please buy the shirt that

is now on the store that is my dad leading my dad as chairman Mao.

Yeah, it's magnificent.

With all three of us.

Yeah.

I mean,

if you haven't checked the store in a minute, check the store because there's like two or three new shirts on there.

Yes.

I saw someone wearing a meat deck shirt at the most recent Trash Shuter show.

Yeah, so I bought one.

I was so gratified.

So, yeah, shout out to my meat deck heads out there.

Yeah.

June thought that it was bootleg merch, and I had to explain that.

No, this is our

kind of

workwear that just says meat deck on the back in big letters.

My design concept for that one was to make it intentionally bad.

I designed it, so I like to think that I succeeded at that.

Yeah, we've we've uh we collaborated on that one.

Oh, can I reach my fan?

I'm I'm so hot and sweaty.

Yes, I reached it.

Yeah, and uh, the other thing is, as uh, as I mentioned on previous episodes, uh, I slash my coworkers are raising money for my co-workers' grandson to get a handicap accessibility van.

Uh, the Glorious Hogs have raised over $9,000.

Jeez, over a short period of time.

That's so good, though.

Yeah, every time you open the browser window, it does that.

Um, uh, yeah, you will drop the the

link in the in the video description.

Uh, absolutely, thank you so much, Hoggs.

Uh, you will be spared during the upcoming uh, well, there's your problem podcast purges, yeah.

Spare, spared by your dad specifically.

Oh, yeah, it's comic, it's comic.

So, why are we here?

That being said, can I say one thing real quick?

Yes, oh, yes, shouldn't we do a sync point?

Oh, yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah, thanks, scooter.

All right, what I, Dev, Dev, what I want you to do is I want you to leave in the Riker cum line and the links and nothing else, uh, and And we can just do the same point.

So I'm going to do three, two, one, mark.

Everyone clap.

Three, two, one, mark.

Okay.

Chris.

Okay, we did it.

Yay.

And with that in mind, hello and welcome to, well, there's your problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I am November Kelly.

I am the person who is talking right now.

My pronouns are she and her.

I got hit with a sudden wave of like dissociation beam attack saying my own name there.

Not sure what that's about.

Yay, Liam.

Yeah, yay, Liam.

Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.

God damn it.

My pronouns are.

You got pronouns?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I got him.

I got him.

I got them.

Did they get you with a beam attack as well?

Because it's going around.

No, no, I was spared the beam attack, but I probably have some sort of concussion.

I don't know.

And we have a guest.

We have guests.

Well, there's your problems number one enforcer.

Yes.

I didn't know we had a goon, you know?

We do.

We do have a goo.

Hit somebody.

You can say that.

The live shows were wild.

I'll say that.

Yeah, someone tried to kill me with a sword.

It was

having a flat screen.

It was less effective than you would think it was.

No, hi.

My name's Angry Scooter.

My pronouns are he, they.

You want to be careful with those angry scooters.

That's how Palestine action got prescribed.

Man of many hats in exactly one outfit.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think it's completely valid to go in Bart Simpson mode.

If you find one thing that works for you and you just get like six variations of it, then yeah, ideal.

Or not even variations, six identical, like same t-shirts, same pants.

Yeah, perfect.

We have work uniform work and work uniform nice.

So

it all looks like like the railroad, baby.

The work uniform nice is the work uniform, but you've just got a bow tie on.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, close.

Bow tie should be banned at this point.

That's when I when I lead the glorious vanguard party,

I think I believe it.

Under the under the guidance of Chairman Bill, yeah.

Chairman Bill, yeah, of course.

Uh, uh, I was telling

I was telling my mom that on the LA Transit Bonus episode, there's a story redacted.

And she was like, oh, you can, And my dad pipes in from the other room and goes, you can tell that story.

It's been long enough.

I'm like, nope, it's paywalled, baby.

Why are we looking at a big grain silo someone's built into a Quanta hut?

That's not a quantum hook, but you know what I mean.

Yeah, Razz, you want to explain this to us?

Or Scooter?

Scooter, are you taking this one?

Yeah.

I think so.

It's built in the middle of the desert to hold stuff.

We're going to talk about.

Oh,

built into the stuff in the desert.

Yeah, it's been too long since we did a Spicy Rocks episode.

Yeah.

So, yeah, today we're going to talk about a particularly gnarly nuclear incident at a reactor known as SL1.

But first, we have to do the goddamn news.

I actually added a drop for this, and then the strike ended.

AFS CME 33

are garbage workers.

DC 33 local, yeah.

Yeah, they uh they uh whatchamacallit.

Um, they they reached some kind of contract negotiation last night.

It was not the pay increase they wanted.

These are some of the lowest paid workers in city government.

Um, certainly the largest, blackest, and lowest paid union we have in Philadelphia.

Yes.

And, you know, they got, I want to say,

3% raises per year as opposed to the five they were angling for.

Don't they make like $40,000 a year or something like that?

Yes,

incredibly difficult, agonizing work, especially garbage collection.

Meanwhile, would you like to know what the minimum salary for a Philadelphia police officer is?

$69,532.

Don't ask why I know that.

If they ever get back to any of my emails,

the thing about these wage increases is that given cost of living and inflation and so forth, this is still, in real terms, nothing.

I mean, very little.

Don't Parker's scab mess.

Yeah, people are just like, I love the people who are like, you're not, the public isn't obligated to participate.

Yes, you are.

You are.

I saw that one woman, yeah, with the, with the like back of the car full of garbage being like, for $25,

I will take your garbage.

By the way, I'm not a scab.

And it's like, yes, you are.

Like, just because you're like, because you're doing the work, you're taking money for it.

You're doing like the work that the striking workers are doing,

and you're not in a union.

Like, that's scabbing.

It just is.

I'll tell you one thing.

I held the picket line.

I did not go to any of the city-designated drop-off points.

Nor did I.

Yeah.

And hooray for us.

You know, exactly, exactly.

We were good at solidarity.

Problem is, you know, even though the strike ended late last night, I still didn't get my garbage picked up this morning.

No, it's not going to happen until the 14th, bud.

Not happening until Monday.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the union rank and file still has to vote on this contract.

So, if you don't have DC33 members vote, no, get the pay increase you deserve, yeah,

them, fuck them all, buddy.

Just the sort of like solidarity forever, we can smell worse, yeah, exactly.

I thought,

uh, I thought this was gonna go uh for longer.

So, um, yeah, you have prepared for it.

I mean, if anybody find your way to work the market instead of sitting around with your feet to work, you're ass step around

there's a union out there called ask me and they're busting their balls for you doing a lot of shit work you take for granted for example we pick up your fucking garbage garbage we got broads out there

i thought this was going to be a segment for like three weeks

recurring like philadelphia trash update i mean the thing is right if anybody at ask uh at ask me uh your fucking union uh doing comms wants to take this solidarity forever we can smell worse and make it into into like merch, by all means, please do that.

Yeah, you can have it.

Send me one.

Yeah, so I would rate this as, okay, finally, Mary Sherelle Parker did a thing, and that thing was bad.

Do you remember when she said that Kamala Harris was struggling because there wasn't enough Marriage Sherelle Parker in her like campaign material?

Just really need you to be like tied to my personal reputation and brand.

We live in the dumbest city in America.

Maybe not the dumbest, but we're top five for sure.

Go burn.

I'm so proud of it.

They're trying to give trying to give us Waymos, and it's just like, maybe they should fucking fund ZEPTA first.

I don't know.

I'm just an asshole who cheers to the Eagles when I thumb up my ass.

I'm excited to see what the city can do to our Waymo.

Because I know in my heart, there's going to be some shit I've never seen before.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Gonna mangle a car in ways that haven't been seen since Burnout Revenge.

Yeah, doing

crash mode on the first first waymo that shows up yeah

i'm gonna slash its tires gonna make hitchbot look like asimo

well

in other uh non-news

weirdly for a podcast that keeps getting outpaced by events we kind of don't have a lot of news on this one yeah no i i we could have put uh elon made drock and nazi but i was just like you all see that i don't want to yeah for sure

And now it's this thing, which is Zoran Mamdani

getting subject to some really difficult scrutiny here of exactly what race he identified as, as a 19-year-old.

And it seems like.

Was worried to get out scooped by what's that fascist I hate, Christopher Russo?

Chris Ruffo, yeah.

Chris Ruffo, and this one guy who is going by Kremier, Edward Lasker or whatever.

He looks like, as I saw someone say, looks like he could eat an apple through a chain link fence.

I did realize that.

He's really like an equine dentician.

That guy was like,

I'm going to break this devastating story about Zoran.

And it's nothing.

It's so much a non-story that even talking about it being a non-story is a non-story.

This isn't the goddamn news.

This is the goddamn lack of news.

This is lack of news.

Yeah.

I mean, the full context of the story is Zoran Mamdani, who is a man of Indian descent who was born in Uganda and immigrated to the United States, ticked the boxes for his Columbia application for both Indian and African-American.

Yeah, which is like, doesn't Elon Musk call himself African-American all the time as a joke?

Like, I mean, you know, this gets into like complicated questions of race, like, okay, what's an African-American versus what is black?

You know, um, this is not something that the like Columbia admissions department has a kind of uh

real sort of like status to interrogate you know um

it's kind of like an awkward bureaucratic thing that doesn't also matter that much necessarily exactly and then then people went out and started trying to find his sat scores i mean this this i i it's something

to do

generally found over the past you know uh

eight or ten months with regard to like palestine protests and all this stuff is like why do people talk about college so much?

Because, like, it's weirdly, all Republicans are college Republicans.

Um, because all the ones who aren't college Republicans don't know how to read.

So, the ones who are like, the ones who are typing,

they're the ones who like were Republicans in college out of contrarianism and racism and never got over it and are still kind of mentally stuck there.

It's, it's different in the UK where the Labour Party is the still, is the like real, like, never got over university party.

But, like,

yeah that's my diagnosis is

it's all college republicans you know that that's why when they were pushing the whole like oh there's too much woke on campus thing um it like or or going to college campuses and trying to like debate and trigger sjws back in the day like that's why it's always been about that it has always been about like

I wasn't popular enough in college and therefore, you know, the West is falling.

Yeah, you weren't popular because you were a fucking creep who wouldn't stop hitting on underage girls at parties.

Exactly.

And like, it's the same reason they try and start their own like anti-woke universities, like the University of Austin at Texas or whatever the fuck it's called.

Like,

it's just that it's an extended kind of wish fulfillment of like, well, I wish I had been to college in a way that I think was cool, you know?

And it's like, you know, most people still don't love their college experience, right?

Like, most people feel kind of isolated.

It's just, you don't have to turn into the fucking sixth Reich about it.

Yeah, exactly.

I sure did not love mine.

Oh, yeah.

I definitely, I definitely had some pretty bad experiences in college.

Yeah.

Yeah, but instead of letting that lead you to like incel shit, you became a successful podcaster instead.

You know, exactly, exactly.

That's a bit of a trick.

My college experience was great.

I barely was there.

I mean, I just finished my like open university degree, and that was that was the ideal college experience in that I regularly forgot I was doing it.

Um, I never had any communication with them outside of like the bare essentials.

Every email they sent me went directly to spam and stayed there.

And yeah,

I paid the tuition.

I submitted the assignments.

I'm hopefully going to get a degree out of it.

And I had absolutely no involvement with anything beyond that.

Totally atomized.

The dream.

You had the good version of the nightmare where you signed up for a course and forgot to go to all the classes.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

I barely opened the course materials.

Like, I'm sorry to say, but just, yeah.

I'm just going to read about this on my own and I'm just going to do the essays.

And that seems to have worked out.

So, you know, maybe after the right completely defunds college education, that'll be the only thing that's left, you know?

Probably.

Well, on that piece of non-news, that was the goddamn news.

No, it wasn't.

All right.

We got to talk about it for a while.

There's one more piece of news.

We've got the Philly's 113-0 thing.

We're back, baby.

Oh, hell yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

That's it.

Let's talk about spicy rocks.

Spicy rocks.

I feel like I've seen this diagram or some variation of it about six different times on this show.

The explain how a nuclear reactor works one.

Yeah.

It's all turbines.

It's the Drake's well of spicy rocks.

Drake's reactor.

Drake's reactor.

Yeah.

One guy dug up a bunch of weird rocks, got cancer from them, and was like, what if

he used it to power Philadelphia?

Yeah.

And

everyone knows that, okay, nuclear reactor, spicy rocks, boil water, turn a turbine, make electricity.

But Scooter here knows more about them than we do.

Okay, let's go.

I mean, I'm going to try not to explain on a college level because that's boring.

That's fine.

I won't listen to it anyway.

Perfect.

So

it's technically Drake's Well and Rickover's reactor.

We'll get there.

But on the right, you have your pressurized water reactor, which is what like your everybody knows has a nuclear reactor, pretty much.

This is Three Mile Island.

And if you want to get into it, go to the Three Mile Island episode.

But simply, a pressurized wire reactor is full of water, bottom to top, has the spicy rocks in the center, some control rods that keep the spicy rocks from playing too much with each other, and then a water loop that goes out out to a heat exchanger.

That then takes the hot water, puts it in other hot water in two separate vessels, which then the second loop of hot water spins a turbine, gets condensed with the big cooling tower, goes back inside the heat exchange.

Fair enough?

Right.

The water's under pressure.

There's two separate loops of water.

The very hot water from the reactor heats up the less hot water from outside the reactor so the turbine doesn't get covered in radioactive water.

Exactly.

The important thing to note about a PWR reactor is that it doesn't boil.

It's kept under pressure so no steam gets generated in the reactor.

Is it done?

Sorry if I'm asking the obvious, is it done in these?

Oh, I see the steam generated.

I just didn't see that at first.

Yes.

All right.

Continue.

Okay.

So on the left, you have the boiling water reactor, which this one, the opposite.

It's in the name.

Much steam.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You want steam.

You want a lot of steam.

It's not full.

It's depending on the reactor, like one quarter full to three quarter full.

And it's one loop.

It goes out to the turbine, down to a condenser, and back into the reactor, real simple.

Now your turbine is all nice and radioactive when you got to work on it.

Exactly.

And that's the reason why these didn't catch on as much.

But they're still used commercially.

They have their purpose, especially when you want simple, which is today's subject is making nuclear power simple.

So next slide, please.

Right.

So when you talk about boiling water and making steam, you have to talk about how these things interact with each other when

you make your spicy rocks.

You're trying to get them more spicy, essentially.

Right.

So in a reactor, you normally have a coolant, which also acts as a moderator.

And the coolant, obviously, is to keep the spicy rocks from getting too hot and becoming a puddle of spicy rocks.

That's bad.

Spicy lava.

That's not bad.

I don't like the idea of radioactive lava.

I'll tell you that shit right away.

But so it's a coolant, number one, important.

But two, it's used as a moderator.

And what a moderator is, and I get in trouble with this explanation, but I'm going to do my best.

When you get thistle material and it's naturally breaking down, it breaks into fast neutrons and slow neutrons.

Slow neutrons have a better chance of impacting the next atom, breaking it and continuing on.

Fast neutrons pretty much zoom by it.

Think about it like bowling, right?

You want to hit it, the pins correctly so that the pin hits the next pin and so on.

You don't want to divide into a 7-10 split.

I'm looking at this and I'm thinking more along the lines of croquet, actually.

Okay.

Yeah.

This is the funniest possible way to conceive of nuclear fission is a big croquet game on the sort of like lawn of a big

country house.

I got into an argument about that it was billiards.

Somebody I was working with called it more like billiards or pool.

And it's like billiards.

It's like bocce ball.

It's like, I don't know.

Name another sport.

What are the sports where a ball hits a thing?

Squat.

Right.

Yeah.

Squat, yeah.

Handball.

High lie.

It's like high lie.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's actually a lot like polo.

There's water involved.

It's water pole.

Yeah.

There you go.

Yeah.

But so what water does is it slows your fast neutron down by giving it a medium to pass through.

It bounces around and becomes a slow neutron, which gives it a better chance to hit and continue the site.

It gives it Riz.

Okay, sure.

I'll see myself out.

It's fine.

My bad.

No, it's fine.

I left.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I was sort of caught off guard.

I believe.

Just because chance to hit, like,

it's idiomatically, like, took up sexual songs.

Yes, yes, yes, of course.

I am

of pure mind and body, and I don't

stoop to your puerile ways, Nova.

Actually, they're actually like puelal now.

Isn't that how you would switch the gender of puerl?

Because

whatever.

Come back to me.

I'm going to get my Latin dictionary.

All right.

You do that.

All right.

Let me hear about spicy croquet.

So

the moderator is important.

So you get more chain reactions.

Control.

Puell.

From Puella, meaning girl.

Okay.

I like this.

I like that this is just copyright 2012 Encyclopedia Britannica ache.

And we're just like, yep.

Yeah.

It works.

Someone commented, like, hey, can you include like a bibliography of your sources?

And I was like, well, there's a couple of reasons why we might not want to do that.

This is the best thing I could find that wasn't like somebody personal's own diagram that would come back and be like, that's mine.

If, if, if, you know, if you saw us stealing the Encyclopedia Britannica's content, no, you didn't.

No, you didn't.

It's fine.

If they sue us, we just take it down and we do like a hand-drawn crayon version.

It's fine.

Exactly, exactly.

Roz

and his ms paint uh genius delirium yeah it was hard not to include those ms paint diagrams it was hard not to include roz's nuclear reactor diagram in this the sun yeah with the the sunglasses on i was considering going back and grabbing that and putting it in i just couldn't remember which episode it was on or i couldn't find the silence through my own

We lost those tapes in the great Roz's hard drive disaster of every year he's ever been alive.

It's fine.

I keep the backups in one of these.

Yeah.

All right.

So, Madre.

Did you like the sound of me kicking it for real?

No, I didn't.

Ah, my sweet baby, soon you will be liberated from the shackles of terror of November.

Listen,

this computer case has

an expired Windows 10 license key stuck to it,

a logo for something called Crapco stuck to it, and then two big googly eyes, one of which has fallen off.

It's just Cyclops, but just

cyclops is some sort of massive CTE diagnosis.

Yeah, and

this is the key to my livelihood somehow.

I have a nice it.

My PC has a place of honor.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Oh, don't look at my stuff.

None of the viewers can see this.

I don't care.

Go ahead.

All right.

All right.

Let's go.

All right.

Anyway, so moderator.

That's why you have it.

Control rods stop reactions entirely between fuel assemblies.

Moderator helps them hit each other better.

That sounds so like a forum, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Moderator is

ensuring that there is some level of disorder and violence.

But a controlled disorder.

Yeah.

Successful protest, not a violent protest.

Yeah, we're not allowed to call for organized violence with this podcast, YouTube will get mad at us.

So also on this slide, I want to talk real quick about steam fact because you're using water as a coolant, right?

Steam is a horrible moderator.

It does not allow the reaction to continue because it's it's more spaced apart.

It's less dense.

Make sense?

Yep.

Yes.

That easy.

Boiling water reactors, you have to use a pump to push water through so you don't get voids in.

You get steam voids as it's boiling because that'll cause your

fuel assemblies and everything around them to start vibrating and all kinds of other bad stuff that you don't want.

So you just keep it full.

You don't get steam except where you want it.

Problem solved.

So all of this, all of this radioactive steam, you just keep it over there and then nice and contained.

Yes.

Not your problem, unless anybody has to work on it, which you just hope they don't.

It's fine.

That's their problem, not yours.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not yours.

Yeah.

So there's the science of it.

So now we get into the history.

Next slide, please.

Oh, fine.

Sorry.

Pile one baby yep so you have chicago pile one on the left and this is our first real nuclear reactor used to test the theory of fission essentially it's made out of graphite it's built in chicago under stag field and squash cord right under a squash cord they are playing they are playing atom squash okay yeah yeah yeah

my favorite note about this is not that any of the the real history about it, but the workforce was 30 high school dropouts.

They didn't care.

They didn't value human life yet in that way.

My question is, you say it's under stag field.

What is stag field?

Is that a sports field?

Yeah, it's the football field at Chicago.

Oh, hell yeah.

Chicago used to be a legitimate football program.

I'm just wondering why every football player of that generation has like mega like foot cancer.

Oh.

No, these are my mutant atomic supermen.

Getting the okay on this by telling a football program that it might give them powers.

Yeah, exactly.

But yeah, there were these like 30 guys.

Sorry, I just got to finish this.

These 30 guys are getting ready to ship out for World War II.

So it's like getting your friends together to move and giving them the queenatti light

to stack some blocks.

Calling your one friend who has a pickup truck to get you to move the nuclear reactor.

This, this is kind of a trend with Argonne National Laboratory reactors.

We'll get into later, but that's what the University of Chicago's nuclear laboratory becomes.

And there's just this different vibe of their reactors that comes from the 30 guys stacking the blocks.

On the right is EBR-1, which is the experimental breeder reactor.

This was built in 1951 at the National Reactor Testing Station.

So out in the middle of Idaho, there in a little bit.

built as a breeder reactor so they were testing that's one of my kinks

sorry

if you're into it uh

they built it to this take uranium q38 and turn into plutonium it's breeding fissile material it used a liquid sodium potassium coolant instead of water.

Why?

They were test, it was early nuclear reactors, so they were were testing what coolants were going to be best for heat transfer, going to be best for all different types of reactor usage.

And this is really good at being a coolant and moderator, but it's really bad for life, for corrosion,

pretty much everything.

So it's not really used commercially.

Yeah, this has been like the problem with all like the molten salt reactors.

It's like uh molten salt's not very good for metal you know correct

so

interesting thing about this is on december 20th 1951 it was one of the or it was the first reactor to produce in-house electricity

being generated and they powered four 200 watt light bulbs which hell yeah incredible later on they hooked it up to the city of arco idaho and powered it for a while and arco's like 12 houses though

This is also notable because in 1955, it

suffered a partial meltdown during a coolant flow test.

My light bulbs.

Oh, no, they're melted.

They fucked up.

They didn't plan for the thermal expansion of the reactor and the fuel, and it jammed up the control rods and, you know, just melted it a little.

You can still go see this.

It's out in Idaho.

It's a museum now.

Cool.

Cool Cool fact about it.

It'll be fun.

You can go see the partially melted down reactor.

Kids, get in the car.

We're going on a road trip.

Yeah.

You're going to get superpowers.

Going to get so good at football.

So that's

dimly remembering the history of American atomic exploitation and being like, yeah, Americans invented

nuclear power in order to get good at football.

Yes.

That would track, though.

I mean, mean, have you seen the CFL?

Yeah.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

Actually, I have seen a CFL game, but I wasn't in the stadium.

I was on an overlook on what you would call it,

Mount Royal.

So next slide, please.

So that's what we just talked about is just the general beginning.

of reactor history, but this is the 50s.

Everybody wants in on the nuclear craze, right?

Yes.

Commercial, military, and every branch of the military wants to do their own thing.

What if we put them in planes?

We'll do a thing about nuclear aircraft sooner or later, I'm sure.

I've done it once, but

it's a little crazy.

What if we just do it all over again?

Like at a certain point, I forget enough that it becomes like funny for me to do different jokes.

I love this for you.

There will be a slight refresher further on, but Long story short, everybody wants to get in on it.

So the armed forces splits it up to where the navy is going for nuclear power and submarines the air force is trying to do it in planes and the army makes sense gets stationary reactors for just general generation they didn't they didn't want to put it in a tank or something they did of course but that was down the line

just yeah what once things elaborate to the point of like what if we dug one of these into sort of like pack ice or like what if we put one in a tank but right now it's like what does the army have Building.

Pretty much.

So the army starts a test program and they decide to build a prototype reactor, but also one that they can train people on.

And in 1957, they build the SM-1 in Fort Belvoir.

Fort Belvoir.

Fort Belvoir, yeah.

This is where I had my first Boy Scout camp out.

What?

Not near the reactor, but it was on base.

Belvoir is across from the commissary.

I want some Belvoir because the NSA isn't me.

Don't they do some intelligence stuff about Belvoir?

Yeah, the Army Intelligence, the Army of Northern Virginia, whatever they call it.

I was going to say it at the end of the slide, but Fort Belvois is headquarters to Defense Logistics Agency, the Defense Acquisition Agency, or Defense Acquisition University, Defense Contract Audit Agency.

Defense Technical Information Center, the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command, United States Military Intelligence Readiness Command, the Missile Defense Agency, the Defense Reduction, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the National Geospace Intelligence Agency.

DTRA is cool.

I mean, I hope they haven't all gotten doged yet.

A shout out if we have listeners out there.

Thank you for making sure the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons didn't get loose in the 90s.

Yeah.

Also, I think Geospatial is actually just off base now.

They got that nice new building on a Fairfax County Parkway.

We're not beating the Fed allegations if we're talking about one of these agencies like co-workers.

I do have to say, the guy that was at the live show in DC that was really mad you didn't bring up the DOE as one of the three-letter agencies.

I'm sorry,

I know you guys are special.

I know you have like special clearances that you don't even get to talk about that are like fucking just letters and numbers and sigils that make you go mad.

He's got a kill clearance.

I know this for a while.

Rick Perry was one of the most powerful human beings to have ever existed.

I know that Ernest Meniz and his hair was also one of those.

I'm aware of the Department of Energy.

I have a special clearance that means it's safe for me to hold the Cobalt 60 rod.

Driving rod don't find me, baby.

Let's do this.

Wait, listen, I don't think it's problematic to be interested in the Fed shit and to say that sometimes the Fed shit is aesthetically cool and interesting.

That just means you've played control once in a while.

Like, of course, yeah.

I just want to say he wouldn't say what part of the DOE he was in.

So I fully believe he was one of the crazy cops that chase nuclear weapons.

I, those guys roll.

Yeah.

No, I'm a huge, huge fan.

Okay, well, back on subject.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

I got like an hour more of this.

I am

on Trash Future, because we have a similar relationship with the sort of like organs of the British state.

We had a running gag about doing a shirt that's like the GCHQ logo,

but it says gender confirmation headquarters and it's in the trans flag colors.

And because we haven't gotten the like those people haven't gotten doged yet, yet here.

And so I was like, oh, it's a funny joke.

Well, we never got around to making it.

And then at some point, I heard from somebody being like, it's a shame you never got around to those because I know like two dozen people who would have have kept those in their locker to change into so

i i i don't know where that leaves me in terms of my relationship with like the security state other than that i could have been purveyor of t-shirts to it you know

hey just fyi my audacity crash that's that's that that's them now i guess hey guys uh what's up

sorry i never like using guys for a group that includes trans women so um uh high uh seasoned professionals of the of the government communications headquarters.

What do uh, what do I do with Audacity Crash?

So

they also uh they let you take, I think they do tours to the Pentagon.

I'm not sure,

probably not anymore.

I actually maybe not anymore.

Well, yeah, they don't

do tours of the Pentagon, yeah.

They're hardly gonna, you're hardly gonna be able to fly a plane into the Pentagon from inside it.

I don't know.

Uh,

bringing sneaking a plane in through the metal detector.

This is allowed.

I do not wish to join her with you, sir, trying to hustle my sest sign into the Pentagon.

So

the reason the reactor was constructed 18 miles away from Washington, D.C.

at this fort was because it's the headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers.

So they wanted their nice fancy toy right next to their headquarters.

In their backyard, sure.

Those guys are so good at putting one brick on top of another brick.

They did quite a bit

because they had to build a pressure or a containment dome here on this one, too.

So they not only did the internal bricks, they did the out external bricks on a leg, too.

I don't have anything for containment dome, and I'm disappointed in myself.

Should you give that containment dome until the cobalt?

So the shit I was doing in lockdown was getting containment done.

Very good.

There we go.

We got there in the end.

This was the prototype for a reactor that was going to go to Fort Greeley, Alaska, up where it's cold as hell and they're just using coal power.

And it stands, the SM1 stands for stationary, medium-sized reactor prototype one.

Wes missing the R and the P there.

It's the Army.

They forget.

They're not good.

They're not so good at letters.

No.

They're not chewing crayons, but they're close.

Yeah.

The cool thing about this one and quite a few of the Army reactors that it was built by Alco.

It's the American Locomotive Company of Alco Smoke Fame.

Yeah.

The train people?

The train people because they're good at building boilers.

And that's all a nuclear reactor is.

Yeah, I mean, you know, by this time, they're winding down.

steam locomotive production.

So, you know, you got all the equipment for it.

I mean, a little bit of retrofuturism where you're like, well, I've had a long career building steam engines, but now I can finally do the work of the future.

I can build the pressure vessels for the reactors.

Everything's going to run off, I assume.

Yes.

Surely after this, we won't go back to building

coal power plants or whatever.

No, no, they'll be in everything.

They'll be in your car.

They'll be in everything.

Energy to cheap tomato.

Yeah.

They'll be in your toaster.

They'll be in your tank.

Yeah.

Your tank.

So

home hot water heating by nuclear reactor.

Oh, boy.

This was a a pressurized water reactor, so more akin to what commercial use and so on, because they had space to build it.

You didn't have to worry about, you know, logistics of moving this thing or setting it up.

Everybody was trained on this.

So Army, Air Force, and Navy reactor operators that are going to work on stationary reactors would go here first and then go to whatever project they were working on next.

I mean, that's not a bad system.

You know, this is the training wheels, you know?

Correct.

Yes.

And if they up they're only 18 miles away from washington dc so it works out yeah so this is your uh you know fisher price baby's first reactor either i do my job right or it's not my problem anymore

so moving on next slide please camp sanctuary let's

go

we'll start with the dew line on the left so It's the 50s, the Cold War is raging, and the Russians are coming to our doorstep, maybe, probably.

And they would likely come over.

You see all those bombers, right?

Yeah,

coming in in the form of like Tu-95s and shit.

Like, again, retrofuturism, Soviet bomber engineer being like, I've, you know, I've designed the last sort of like four-engined

propeller bomber of the Soviet Union after there's all jets.

We're not going to still be using it in like, you know, fucking 2025.

Haha, stupid.

Yevgeny, I will make bomber fly over parade seven times so we do not have to build seven bomber.

Oh shit, we need 500 bombers.

So as Evgini comes over the North Pole,

we wanted to make sure we could spot them.

And we had lines of radar stations.

close to the United States, but they wanted to build one as close as you could get to Russia.

So they came up with the distant early warning line.

It was built along the 55th parallel, the Arctic, and it had like multiple stations.

So you'd have big air or big air bases with multiple radars, you'd all the way down to like a station that was self-contained and no one was at, called a gap filler.

The problem with the Dew line is it's in the Arctic.

So you're having generators run all this non-stop.

Did we lose Liam?

Right.

Did we lose Liam?

Liam.

Liam.

Liam.

Fuck.

Shuck.

God damn it.

It's fine.

We'll claw our way through through this one.

So keep going.

Keep going.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you're using diesel generators.

You're in the Arctic.

It's unforgivable.

So I'm going to have to fly a C-130 full of barrels full of diesel out here every like month.

That's really.

Yeah.

It's finally like, you know, transport fever where you put the fill the airplane with diesel.

Yeah.

But...

So the thought is put a small nuclear reactor there, problem solved.

You got heat, you got energy, runs itself.

It's the bit in Kerbal Space program where you unlock RTGs and you're like, this will solve all my problems.

This game doesn't model radiation.

I can stick 50 of these fucking things in like a radial formation around whatever it is I'm doing.

It's going to run forever.

Yes.

It'll be fine.

Don't worry about the launch pad.

So about the Dew line is it came online in 1957.

What else happened in 1957?

Sputnik.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Cool.

Roger the gods.

Let's do this.

The second it came online, it was outdated.

I love the Cold War so much.

I will play all comers at Twilight Struggle and I will win.

It's my favorite period of history, largely because of how simultaneously dumb and terrifying it is.

Hell yeah.

I'll buy that.

Just any moment, any single moment, the whole world could have ended.

Like human civilizations, we know it could have ended, and it kept not happening for

like 50 years.

Can you imagine?

Duck and cover, baby.

Wow, it's great.

We would have a very different podcast if it did happen.

Oh, yeah.

Welcome to Nuclear Fallout.

Well, there's your problem podcast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, there's your mutants.

Yeah, so go to football.

So the Dew line stayed intact to an extent all the way up to 1990 in certain forms.

So even though it was outdated, it stayed operational.

Existing primarily as a kind of internal management tool, somewhere they could send you if nobody likes you.

Bingo.

So there's still a point to build something to put up there in 1957.

That's the thought.

The other place.

I don't know in Siberia, except it's in Greenland.

Well, speaking of Greenland, the other place that makes sense to put a nuclear reactor for the army is Camp Century.

Yes.

Camp Century was built on the public idea of having a research station under the ice up in Greenland.

Have a place to learn about the polar ice caps and melt them more efficiently.

Stuff.

Yeah.

Then Roz's priest is up there too.

Literally, yeah.

I don't know if I've told the story on the main feed.

I think I told it in the Catholicism episode.

Yeah, go for it,

So at Nativity Catholic Church, back where that was my parish growing up, there was Deacon Corpy, Deacon Bill Corpy.

I think he's Father Corpy now.

I'm not sure if he's still alive.

Anyway, he, you know, but he was, I went to the Catholic school.

Deacon Corpy was known, you know, he was a big hit with the kids, known to be a big bullshitter, though, you know.

But one of the stories he would tell was about, oh, yeah, I was a chaplain at

a secret army base under the ice in Greenland.

We're like, oh, yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Then I saw a documentary about Camp Century on YouTube.

It was an old one from the 50s.

And, you know, they've gone through the various base facilities.

And, you know, they like we even have a chapel.

And then the camera swings over, and there he was.

It's Deacon Corby.

Holy shit, it was real.

Everything was real.

Ross's eyes just melting out of his skull.

Calling up Father Corby to be like, I'm sorry, brother.

Like, I wasn't familiar with your game.

He's not brother, father.

Fuck you, man.

So the real point of Camp Sentry was to test whether or not you could make a missile base underneath the ice.

It was part of Project Ice Worm.

And the thought was...

What a name.

he would tunnel miles and miles of tunnels underneath the ice build a rail line between all these tunnels and then put nuclear missiles

uh medium-range nuclear missiles on rail cars and move them between the different tunnels so the soviets could not track and hit them my understanding was this this is also like proper trains like not like you know some kind of uh yeah man

trainer

yeah, no, no, we're, we're gonna, yeah, we're gonna dump a diesel locomotive in there and supply cars, you know.

Yeah, imagine being the poor son of a bitch that has to collect a railroad retirement for these jackoffs.

And so, it's literally like we'll build our own Siberia home, right?

Like, we will have our kind of like, instead of just driving around in like TELs, we're just gonna like do it on trains.

I also note that this is between this runs between Thule Air Force Base, Camp Century, and Camp Fist Clench.

So

where did you serve?

I was at Camp Fist Clench.

I was in the gay army, actually.

So you'd be in the Navy.

New tunnels were to be dug every year

so that after five years, there will be thousands of firing positions among which several hundred missiles can be rotated.

That fucks.

About that.

So they build Camp Sentury to test trying to do that.

And they decide Camp Sentry is like the place you need a nuclear reactor because it's cold.

It's under the ice.

Makes sense.

So, they build the PM2A reactor, which is a smaller version of what was a Port Belvoir, but it's closer to what we will be talking about later in its design.

Get there.

You're here in this box from the American Locomotive Company with a cute dog on top.

I love that picture.

Yeah.

I also love the portable reactor plant on the box.

It's like an Acme box.

You know what I mean?

Disorder the portable nuclear reactor shows up instantly.

Alternatively, it drops it off on your head.

I like that it's addressed, you know, just in case it got to someone who wasn't the core of engineers and they were like, no, no, sorry, this isn't for me.

It had to be small enough to fit in a plane to transit in like 1950s planes, so pretty small.

I just like the idea of them just dropping this out the back and leaving.

Like, fuck Greenland.

We're lit.

Here you go.

Here's your reactor.

And it's liquefied.

All right.

Dropping a sorry we missed you card onto Camp Century.

We were out, and it's like, motherfucker, you didn't even knock on the ice door.

I mean, we've spread nuclear material all over Greenland before, so like it wouldn't put a pass to anything.

What's one more?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm looking at the map of Camp Century here, and

chapel had to share a space with the theater, which must have been fun.

I'm also noticing that the officers had a separate latrine, privileges of rank, I guess.

Hell yeah.

So, just while we're on the subject of sentry, the reason why we never got completed Project Ice Worm is because ice melts, ice shifts, and Camp Sentry over the decade or so it was around would have situations where a whole tunnel would just kind of fall in and go sideways.

Chapel's gone.

Chapel's gone.

So it's just gone.

There's a famous picture of one of the barracks where the beds are sideways and the roof's right on top of the one of the beds.

And I just thought, what if you were sleeping there when that happened?

Fuck

that would not be ideal.

Of all the

things that you want to happen to your little containerized nuclear reactor, crushed in ice flow is not like...

No, I feel like that's down on the list.

Yeah.

Probably going to be hard to use at that point.

So

the reactor room and it's like on the side of the wall instead of on the floor and just like oh okay deal with this later yeah it's greenland's problem

i'm going to the chapel slash theater

i'm going to the going to the does this a glycol trench i don't want to go to the glycol trench gotta bury it somewhere

So let's take a step away from Greenland and let's go to another wonderful place that's cold, frigid, and barren.

We're going to go to Idaho.

Oh, you're on.

America's Siberia Part 2.

So we're in the deserts of Idaho near Idaho Falls at the National Reactor Testing Station.

It's 1949 when it opens, and everybody runs to it to put their new nuclear project on site.

The EBR-1 was there that we talked about.

It also became the target for Admiral Hyman Rickover to place his testbed reactor for the Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine.

Many of us are an unfortunate name.

We've talked about Hyman Rickova.

Have we?

Yeah, I'm sure we've talked about Hyman Rickover because

if nothing else, I've laughed at the name Hyman privately.

I see.

I see.

The father of the nuclear navy.

Famous for stealing salt shakers.

You motherfucker.

Yeah, he would, when he went over to other people's houses for like dinner parties and stuff, he'd leave and their salt shakers were gone.

Apparently, this happened every single time.

He was an admiral.

What do you

mean?

What do you mean?

What is he doing with the salt shakers?

Fucking

no one knows.

Did he have like a little serial killer like

kill room full of other people's salt shakers?

Well, if you read anything about Rick Over, like he would be the type to do something serial killer-y, but not actual commit.

He was a hard ass.

Uh, his like claim to fame that I find the most interesting is everyone that joined the nuclear Navy to be a reactor operator had to interview with him.

Every single person.

And he would come in and fry you.

No matter who you were, he'd sit there and berate and rip your resume apart.

There's multiple parts to this.

I won't spoil all of them for somebody that would want to research him further.

But my favorite thing he did, other than the salt shakers, was he would get, he'd light you up, and then he'd go, Give me your tie.

What?

Give me your tie.

And if you gave him your tie, he would open up a drawer, throw it in with all the rest, and throw you out of his office.

You just lost the job.

Jesus.

If you stuck to your guns, you would get the job.

Just one of one drawer, ties.

One drawer, salt shakers.

Yeah.

Somehow, somehow, this man nuclearized the entire united states navy submarine fleet with a drawer with a desk that like was one half neckties one half salt shakers

this is this is why this is why i kind of get the like atomkraft nine danker stuff that like anti-nuclear stuff is that like Atomic power, it works.

It's safe.

It's like an incredible civilizational advancement.

Everyone who likes it, dangerously insane.

Yes.

Well, and that's what's crazy about rick over

yeah yeah

at the end of his life he admitted that he did not agree with nuclear power it was a necessary evil to win the cold war

okay dude

just like

why'd you do so much of it man yeah it is a necessary evil he was committed to the military he was he was doing his his his like the thing he was really fond of which was stealing people's cutlery yeah exactly i i i mean the the advanced coal turbine plane or your aircraft coal propulsion just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Yeah, what do you do on the bomber, Dimitri?

I'm a stoker.

I'm a stoker.

Well, when it comes to the nuclear navy, they build a nuclear submarine in the desert of Idaho in a pool so the reactor can actually interact with the outside water.

It's instead of a stone frigate, it's an adobe submarine.

But they build this thing, and all Navy nukes are sent out here to train on this and then go out to their subsequent submarines when something went wrong because rickover believed that it's not the engineering that that was going to keep reactors safe it was the people so if there was anything up with these reactors especially this one when they're designing it say a steampipe would break well they would pull the steampipe out investigate it if it wasn't what they wanted what was supposed to be they'd tear everything out of the reactor that had anything to do with that and put it back, put the right thing in.

There was no excuse in the nuclear navy for any failure.

And to this day, we've never had a reactor issue in the nuclear navy that caused the fatality.

And the price of it was letting one deeply, deeply unwell man run it as his own kind of personal fiefdom.

Yes.

Sometimes dictatorship works.

Not even a a benevolent dictator, just a dictator, but he just

knew what he was about, I guess.

So also at the test site, they have, if I say so one more time, beat me.

It's fine.

I say like an a so many times whenever I listen back, I want to hit myself with a hammer.

I hear that.

Also on the site, there's test area north, which is relegated to the Air Force, which goes, well,

the Navy gets propulsion.

I want propulsion.

I want a nuclear bomber.

This is the problem.

That's Nuclear-powered.

This is insane, but it's a different kind of insane, right?

Because

the real weirdos, your Hyman Rickova or whatever, any uniform service, any bureaucracy, right?

You get a limited supply of those.

And it just so shook out that the particular kind of nuclear-inflected weirdo that the Air Force got was your strategic air command kind of guy.

I'm not saying we won't get a hair must, but like 100 to 200 million tops kind of guy, rather than rather than like, it's the like, I just want to see Moscow get vaporized once in my lifetime.

Please, God, let me not die without seeing Moscow get vaporized, guy.

Yeah.

Rather than the, I want to put the nuclear reactor in the back of the plane, and I want all of the guys who work on the nuclear reactors to be like personally traumatized by me in an interpersonal setting.

And I want their tie.

Yeah.

The tie is a metaphor for blood.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The thing about the test area north is they it's away from everything because they're testing nuclear-powered jet engines that is open air.

So you're just tacking a reactor onto the back of two J-47.

J-47.

Yeah, J-47.

Bump a sticker on the on the exhaust nozzle that just says fuck the environment.

Yes.

Yes.

They built a smokestack for it to just get it up high enough to not contaminate the area around where they were testing so that it would blow down wind.

This is like it's fine.

There's no environment in Idaho.

This is the same program that in Georgia as TE for testing materials.

They had an open-air reactor that, when they were testing, like, well, what does aluminum do when it's under intense radiation?

They would fire it off and it taxidermied everything around it.

Everything would drop dead and then stay there because there's no bacteria left.

left jesus all from the air all from the aircraft nuclear propulsion um it's it's an episode in itself it's out there it can come back but there's so much to this that's just wild and we did it for a billion dollars 1960 money i'm i'm so sad that um because you know that like uh as much as the soviet union should have won the cold war they were also allotted their number of weirdos right and despite it all all, despite a lot of historical investigation, we don't know half as much of what their weirdos were up to.

And I wish, I wish deeply that like someone could go into the archives and find out the type of shit they were doing to like, you know, wild deer in Kazakhstan or whatever that we still don't know about, you know?

So the important thing about this.

and relating to our story is they built a hangar for what was going to be this nuclear plane at Tesla North.

I love the trifoil on the rudder there.

Hell, yeah.

The NB-36 was like the coolest plane ever built, and it is a shame it was scrap.

But so they built a giant hangar for this giant plane that was going to haul a reactor, and then they canceled the program.

So there was no reason to have it.

That was a cold war.

What do you care?

And it's a turbine.

It's a turboprop.

It's all turbines.

Radiation gets sad when you don't use it to turn a turbine.

All right.

it's it's it's a Convair six turning, four burning.

Hell yeah, one spicy.

I guess one boiling.

I don't know.

So that's kind of what's going on around the rest of the rest of the Nevada, or sorry, Idaho testing site.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The Nevada is where they are doing the other crazy shit with nuclear propulsion.

You had a lot of states and they used like five or six of them just to be like, we can just light shit out.

Just a radio.

It's a testing range.

The whole state's a testing range.

Fuck y'all.

So another thing they were doing at the testing site was the borax experiments.

And this one's the boiling reactor experiments.

Oh, it looks like it's boiling, right?

Yeah.

I feel like this image on the right, things have gone well/slashed poorly.

Well, what they would do with borax is it was testing to see if a boiling water reactor would shut itself down if it got too out of control.

And so they would run excursions,

run the reactor up too hot, blow it up in small geysers.

It wasn't like blowing the reactor apart.

They would just

melt some fuel, melt some rods,

make everything around it nice and spicy.

And they did this 70 times.

Oh, okay.

Same reactor.

That feels unfair.

But they discovered that a boiling wire reactor tends to inherently be safe because once you produce steam, the reaction shuts down.

The reactor goes back to normal.

You might get a small geyser, but you won't get a meltdown per se.

But they had fucked it up enough to where they decided that, well, let's just see what happens when we blow one up.

So the last test they do with it is they stick a spring underneath the main control rod.

The last one being like, let's do a silly one.

Yeah, it is literally.

They get in a lot of trouble for doing this they shoot the control rod out in like two milliseconds and the whole reactor just heats up and detonates and blows the mound that's around it apart and shoots the uh shoots the control rod drive mechanism that top part on the top of the mound 10 meters into the air

and then everybody at the testing site gets real mad at these guys for just contaminating everything around their site but their experiments prove that boiling water should be safe

and is simple to operate.

This creates a false sense of security.

No, no, trust me.

I just blew up one of these things.

I tortured it for like 12 months and now I blew it up to put it out of its misery.

I'm pretty sure it's safe.

It's good, bro.

Trust me.

Yeah.

Well,

the real thought was like, look what it took to blow it up.

Like,

you can't fuck this up by doing anything normal.

So that's

that creates this false sense of security.

Like you cannot, if you design this right, you can't do anything wrong.

And that percolates throughout everybody in the reactor community when it comes to boiling water reactors.

Next slide, please.

Yes.

We made this one idiot proof.

And also, I'm kind of distracted because Hyman Rickover, I think, is breaking into people's shit and like stealing their neckties and salt shakers.

That's why he couldn't build a molten salt reactor around them.

He'd steal it.

He had an incredible gift for stealing the door.

He'd be working on this and you'd be like, I swear I was wearing shoes.

Oh,

Rick Overstrikes again.

Oh, God.

I love that, man.

So we're back to the Army.

We're back to the Army programs.

And they decide to build a prototype of what they want to put out on the do line and what is being built for Camp Century.

And they want to make this a simple,

incredibly simple, incredibly easy to operate, incredibly portable small reactor.

So

they have Argonne National Laboratories design the SL1, the stationary low-power reactor prototype one.

Notice that it was not built by ALCO or anybody else that's been doing reactors so far.

It's built by a laboratory.

They built it in.

I mean, you start start under a squash court.

It's like, it's all good.

Yeah.

They built it in 1957.

It goes first time critical in 1958.

So since it was built by a laboratory and it's for the army, they still need somebody to maintain it.

So they still build those like 30 dropouts.

No, they got turned into mulch.

Well, it's even better.

They hire combustion engineering, which is famous for locomotive superheaters.

So it's

another group of people that are familiar with steam, but not particularly familiar with the Army or reactors.

No, no, it's all steam locomotive, guys, all the way down.

So this reactor, just for some statistics, is a three-megawatt boiling water reactor that's designed to generate 200 kilowatts at the generator.

So it's for like small applications, small bases, small steams.

You run the lights and you're kind kind of like horrible ice hole correct is that a usual amount of efficiency there i'm just thinking three megawatts to 200 kilowatts seems like kind of there's a lot of wastage here there is but you're you're the wastage is fine because you're only trying to hit a certain target you're not trying to look you can only get so big of a generator in a plane for instance right okay that makes sense

this thing's supposed to be portable you'll see in two slides that this thing's only like 20 feet tall total.

So it's a little guy.

We'll get to another little guy here in a bit, too.

It looks like a fucking grain silo.

That's what I was thinking.

Yeah.

That's they designed it.

It's a big metal building, round building, because, again, you're putting this out in the middle of the Arctic.

You don't need anything but protection from the elements.

So it didn't have like a containment dome because it's why you're making it simple.

It's and it's inherently safe.

Boiling wire reactors can't explode, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

yeah, yeah.

So you don't need to have it.

Let's dogwood now, baby.

Let's do this.

Yeah.

So, and it runs it, just to put a number in your head, it runs at 300 pounds per square inch of pressure when it's operating and generating electricity.

Are we sure that it didn't have a containment dome and then Hyman Rickover visited?

Opening a desk drawer full of domes.

Well, it's portable, so he would have stolen the reactor, too.

Well, I was going to get to this later, but i will say rickover has nothing to do with this and he's he's a really fun guy okay sure sure sure he is mad as that the army is doing this without his oversight or at least input you dare create fissile reactions without my input so give me your tie

just escalating be like you know what give me your pants too right now let's go throw it out

well walking out of his office pantsless and being like having to call my wife and be like, no, no, honey, I didn't get the job.

Sorry.

Also, also, we need to get new pants.

What the Army does to keep him out of it is the Navy has an agreement to train people on it, but the Army demands that only the Navy CBs, the engineering leg of the Navy, can be on it, keeping all of Rickover's men away from it.

This becomes important later.

So, next slide.

So, we're looking.

Oh, this looks gluey.

And what it is, is it's mostly aluminum.

The fuel assemblies, the boxes that hold the uranium are an aluminum alloy.

Big waffle iron.

Big waffle iron.

Big waffle iron.

Yeah.

I could go for some waffles.

The plus signs that you see are where the control rods go.

And what the control rods are is they're actually like paddles instead of a round rod there or square.

They're like paddles.

So you get four paddles to each rod that gets pulled up and out of the reactor.

The idea is to keep it small so you have more reactivity per control rod.

Make sense?

Right.

Yes.

It's built to take 59 fuel assemblies and nine control rods, but they decide to make it only 40 fuel assemblies and five control rods to, again, help minimize this design and the react and

the complexity.

But what it does is it increases the reactivity in this in the core so that center rod becomes the if you pull it out can start up the reactor by itself that's good right

i mean it's good if you're trying to start the reactor quickly i sure am it's good what if i'm trying to start the reactor really quickly yeah what if i'm trying to start the reactor really really really really quickly like microseconds quickly we'll get there oh no

so it turns the the outside rods into like trim rods so like it helps adjust but you don't particularly need them uh there were also tacked onto the fuel assemblies boron boron poison strips and when i say tacked on i literally mean somebody went in and tack welded these to the side of the fuel assemblies oh hell yeah nice it's not engineered in it's it's just some some dude at where at argon just like

works Looks good.

Pretty sure welding uranium signs.

It's just like, slap it.

This bad boy can fit so much energy inside of it.

So

what kind of welding do you do?

Like TIG or like, no, uranium.

Uranium.

Are you okay, dude?

No.

Just wanting to have it.

But I'm really good at football now.

It's like.

It's like the guys that were hired at the bud plant.

You know,

people.

You want to do some shot welding?

you want to live for 10 years?

You're hired.

People, people don't know this, but like the guy who in Chernobyl, who gets like super irradiated and he looks like Krispy Bacon,

that guy could have kicked a field goal from any distance.

Yeah, yes,

getting him off the bed.

That's an issue, sure.

But like, incredible legs on that guy.

His foot might go with the ball, but

that's not a pedal.

Shut up.

No,

I think that's three more points.

I think that's the equivalent of a touchdown.

I think you're right.

So, part of him touched the end zone with the ball.

Oh, there you go.

Oh, yeah.

All you got to do is break the plane, baby.

Yeah, well, as long as

the foot hit the is it in the rules the foot has to be attached to the player?

I mean,

we're going to find out, buddy.

So, you show me, you show me where it's actually

There's a percentage of the body that has to be in the end zone, and it's 2%.

So these boron poison strips are to help trim reactor startup, the reactivity.

So essentially, it keeps the center from burning up faster than the outside.

That makes sense.

Without getting way into it,

that's the gist of it.

The problem with these is that they started rotting fairly quickly, and they would rush jack against the control rod channels.

Another one of my kinks.

Sorry.

I like to just leave them to die in silence just to make you feel bad and give you a complex.

Listen, I crave attention like a monkey at a circus.

None of this bothers me.

Can you tell I was an only child?

Hi, mom.

I was also an only child.

I don't, maybe it just makes you like this.

I don't know.

Who's to say?

So

there's this rush jacking happening, and there's also flakes of boron falling off into the reactor and getting swished up into the control rod channels.

So these channels are getting really sticky, like really sticky.

Meanwhile, next slide, please.

The reactor was built to be incredibly simple.

to operate because it's going to be operated by like three guys in the Arctic.

You want to be able to maintain it easily with like pipe wrenches and a small crane.

Yeah.

Keep in mind those three guys, you know, only like half of them know how to read.

Half of one of them knows how to read.

So the thing about how this was designed, which we'll get there, but everything can be taken apart with like a dude and a crane, but all of the drive mechanisms for the control, all the like.

motor control is like liftable by a man.

You don't need a crane.

You don't need anything to make it easy to assemble and disassemble.

Because the reactor is only 20 feet tall, like end to end, that means every single part is

maintenanceable, but it also means everything's fairly easy to move and deal with.

So the army is like the reactor, throw it over your shoulder, walk to the next base.

Yep.

Yeah, you and Rick Over can do that together.

But the Army sees this as

Parker.

The Army sees this as like, oh, they can just do the work.

It's their problem now.

So they minimize the amount of staff that would work on these, but also they minimize the amount of combustion engineering's oversight.

So this reactor is built new in 58.

And as people are trained on the maintenance of it and the general operation of this thing, it starts to wear down.

really quickly.

So one, control rods are getting stuck when would use the motor to drive them in and out.

If you scram the reactor, which shuts supposed to shut it down instantly, drop the control rod, shut it down instantly.

There were times where it would drop the rods and they would have to manually crank them down through the channel.

There were also circumstances where, when they were doing maintenance, they would find like all the all the mechanisms that move stuff were wearing out.

Seals were wearing out.

Uh, bearings were starting to fail and wear out.

My favorite story about this is right before January 1961, they're doing the procedure where you put the reactor back together after like changing fuel out or doing general maintenance, and one of the control rods gets stuck and they have to take a pipe wrench and beat it down into the reactor.

Not all the no, but fuck now.

Now, if you look at the diagram and look to the right in the right, spiritually so Soviet, I have to say,

uh, it's we're in competition with the Soviet army, we're gonna act like them, right?

Yeah, yes.

We they build a Davy Crockett, we build a Davy Crockett, they build a Shea reactor, we build a Shea reactor.

Yeah, the Soviets, in order to melt down a reactor, the Soviets spent millions of rubles developing the AZ-5 switch, and the Americans used a wrench.

Yeah,

so just to point out on the right-hand side, if you look low in like the last quarter, the core of this reactor is only fuck.

I can't see it on the I can't see it on my own presentation.

50 inches tall.

Two feet two inches tall.

Three apples high.

Yeah, two feet two inches tall.

So it's like half the height of my legs, honestly.

It's not very big, but that means, that means 50 inches.

Yeah, you're right.

I'm sorry.

I thought you said 50 feet.

50 feet tall.

No, that's a good minute.

No, it's not.

That's too big.

Yeah, but it's 50 inches tall.

So it's not very big.

That means that the control rod, and that's the long pieces in the center that go up to those, that drive, those are shield plugs.

And above that's the rod that you can manually operate to do work is only 84 pounds.

So again, this is really easy until things start failing.

Sorry, I lost my place here.

Nuclear chain of thought.

Yeah.

The control rod fell in.

It just shut everything down.

So long story short about what I'm trying to get to is this thing is incredibly easy to work on, but also incredibly...

The margins of error are also really small.

We're talking in two feet.

You have your whole core.

So you figure

half of that core is like operating, is like your operating depth of the control rods.

I think it shows on that diagram as well how high the water is, which is like two-thirds of the way up the vessel.

Right, yeah.

Doing like miniaturized nuclear reactor operation, but also I have to use, I have to do it with like a wrench.

Yes.

So the water only being like two-thirds of the way up is important in a little bit.

So keep that in mind.

So next slide, please.

Hi, it's Justin.

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Back to the show.

So they would call the groups of people doing the operations a cadre.

And the cadre working in January 1961 were the three guys in front of us.

Oh, boy.

I feel similarly to when you give me like name and photos when I hear a date at this point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I also love this photo because it's like, this is the photo of these guys.

There's no others that are used.

And it is the worst photo I've ever seen.

About to to say, you know, it's an official document if it's got that much photocopy.

There's a lot of photocopy to burn on this.

So this cadre is, they operate in three-man teams, and they're sending these guys out from Fort Belvoir.

Belvois.

Fort Bovo.

Named, I imagine, after a Confederate, because that's some shit I can hear Shelby Foote saying, you know.

Well, the Midwest in me is like Fort Belvoir.

Call it Belvoir.

Fort Belvoir.

Well, no, it's Fort Belvoir.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So these guys

named Virginia Moment.

It's named after the plantation it was built on top of.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Yeah.

So these guys get trained for a year

in Virginia and then get sent out to SL1 to learn how to operate this reactor and so on.

The goal of almost everyone in the reactor program is to spend their year, like their initial sign-on with the Army, learn how to run a reactor and get the fuck out of the army and go work in commercial nuclear power.

Because that's where the big bucks are.

So nobody in this program actually gives a flying fuck about going to Greenland or the Arctic Circle.

They just want to do their time and get the hell out.

So starting with the youngest, we have Jack Burns, who's 22 years old, a father of one.

He's an avid skier and his life is falling the fuck apart.

incredible he's i mean not a lot of skiing in greenland yeah idaho's a little better but

yeah

losing the thread a bit like this still has to do with the the ice the ice worms right like

his life is falling apart because him and his wife do not mix they

hate each other She's like, I'm sick of your skiing shit.

Yes.

I'm sick of your skiing.

You always talk about the piste.

You always talk about the fucking...

What's the thing skiers do after they ski?

They get drunk in the chalet.

That.

He's always talking about the Apro ski.

He's always talking about fucking

what dickhead snowboarders are.

And it's like, we live in Idaho.

You work on a nuclear reactor.

Hyman Rick Ovest keeps stealing shit out of our house.

Well, he hates her so much, he takes a job at a Texaco station just to stay out of the house.

back before no fault divorce was instituted and the like mysterious death rate among men dropped by like a third and this was one of the other options besides getting murdered was just get a second job stay out of the house all the time both of them independently pay a living wage you own six houses that no one now will be able to afford even in idaho yes the big The big thing with him is other than his marriage just being a wreck, he is a moody asshole at work.

And probably, probably mad because he's not skiing.

Yeah, exactly.

And he's judged unfit for promotion.

So he gets to stay as a base-level reactor operator for the rest of his fucking career, which means when he goes out of the army, the best chance he has is getting a low-level position.

No big bucks for him.

I mean, here's the thing.

That is Homer Simpson as a career trajectory.

And he seemed happy.

Yeah.

That's because Homer Simpson had a union.

That's true.

That is true.

He had a union and he loved his wife.

These are the two pillars of happiness.

Yes.

And he got to strangle his kid all the time.

We're not adding that as a third pillar of happiness.

I mean, it's the 50s.

It's possible here, too.

Getting strangled by your ski-obsessed dad and all of a sudden you're just this like poor boomer who has a bunch of inexplicable alpine trauma.

Yeah, he went up the mountain and he was, I saw Flanders, stupid, sexy Flanders.

Years later, as Hyman Rickover is finally forced to retire at the age of 90 or whatever, they're clearing out his offense.

And then they're like, why does he go to skis?

So, god damn it.

It's like the last bit of Citizen Kane.

They've got the sled with rosebud on it, but it's not his sled.

I would like to think that

it was like a green golf ball situation.

No one knows what happened to the salt shakers or the ties.

They all disappeared.

When he died in 89, I wonder if he was buried with them.

Why does this coffin rattle so much?

Maybe he kind of like, maybe nuclear power is kind of eldritch and unholy after all, and he was feeding a kind of like malevolent presence in his desk drawer.

It's just like, in order to, you you know, the devil's bargain there is

we'll give you the nuclear navy, but you have to keep feeding us salt shakers, which for some reason we like.

He didn't even want to do it.

He was horrified.

He was so embarrassed by it, but he had to do it.

And people don't even know the kind of the sacrifices that he went through.

Well, you know, it's kept the nuclear navy safe ever since then.

So I don't even know if it was a malevolent presence.

It's a duality.

You know how there's a totally ambivalent devil?

Yeah.

You know how there's something like inherently so like evil and traumatic about being, for instance, president that everybody ages like 20 years for every year in the job.

Part of the reason why is because as soon as you get like briefed, as soon as you get like read in on a bunch of classified stuff, like you find out who really killed Kennedy, you find out about like, you know, the Epstein files and all this shit.

But they also find out that, by the way, the US Navy needs like 60 salt shakers a year.

Otherwise, the entire planet's gonna implode.

Yeah.

And the salt shakers you can't buy them.

They have to be like stolen.

They have to be stolen and stolen.

All right.

Well, since we're on the fun fact of Rickover or of him.

I can't stop being on.

I got to tell another story about him because you can't do, well, there isn't your problem with Hyman Rickover.

He wouldn't wear his Navy uniform ever.

And it pissed off everyone.

I don't want to.

I don't want to.

He didn't want

to do that.

This whole drawer full of ties.

Yeah, I got to feed this possibly malevolent nuclear devil it is

it is so prevalent that he didn't that his statue at the naval academy has him in a civilian outfit not in a naval uniform it's incredible it's because he liked blending in with the contractors so he could just

around more

So he could just be the angry, shows up a general dynamics and is like, hey, fuckers, fix my boat.

And they're like, Who's that angry motherfucker that just came in here?

That's also running the program, guys.

I do also note that he's because he's an engineer, like, and he's not like deploying or whatever, he's got like nine metal ribbons as like a like a three-star like flag officer.

So maybe that's why, as well, is being like, I am self-con, I got like ribbon insecurity, you know?

Short king syndrome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Speaking of short kings.

Oh, you know what it is?

Navy uniform doesn't have the pocket space for salt shakers.

No, you got

carrying 50 of those out a week.

Double-breasted jacket.

You're not going into that with a salt shaker and not getting caught.

My lights are just dim.

So if I lose power, simply go on without me.

It's fine.

I got like 50 more minutes of salt shaker bets.

Well, let's go back to the short king statement because that's who we're talking about next: is Richard Legg.

He's the next operator at SL1.

He's a Navy CB, so he's the

exchange student of the group here at SL1.

He's a chief operator, just promoted to chief operator, shift supervisor.

He's 26 years old.

He's also tiny.

He's like 5'4, maybe shorter.

Of course, that number's obscured in everything you read about this, just like this whole fucking thing.

Everything is different.

Also, it's the 50s, so they probably called him Dick.

So Dick Lag.

Yeah, Dick Leg.

Dick Lag.

Dick Lag.

Yeah.

Poor guy.

He is also.

God's just made you a 5'4 angry short guy named Dick Legg.

On the other hand, he has seen fit to get you promoted.

Yeah.

Well, he gets promoted only by like force, like force majeure.

Six guys had to come into the office, hold him down, and sew the extra strike on.

Yeah.

The guy who did, was it, I forget, Sixtus?

No.

The guy who didn't want to be Pope.

Oh, Celestine V.

Yeah.

Celestine V.

I'd love to make Celestine V a recurring figure on this podcast.

Well, the problem with Dick Legg is that he also doesn't give a fuck about his job and he's a jokester.

Just doing the like, yeah, you know, we all know that what we do here isn't that important and a nuclear reactor.

Correct.

Yes.

Different facets of Homer Simpson, all of them.

Well, the funny thing about him is he's caught sleeping in his car regularly during the day.

Did he also hate his wife?

Like,

is this a fuck wives shift that we're dealing with?

He's recently married to a very young

Mormon girl.

She's just like, babe, can we do the soaking thing again?

I'm off the 50s qualudes.

I encased a whole ham in jello.

He takes one look at this.

He's like, I never want to come home again.

I'm going to stay at work overnight.

It's fine.

She's eight months pregnant.

So yeah, he probably doesn't want to be home at all.

Oh my God.

He used to just do it.

Like patriarchy.

Wild.

Still wild.

He used to be wild too.

Yes.

The big thing about Leg, the big known thing about Leg that's important is he's a practical jokester.

So he would regularly go throughout the reactor building and set off alarms just to fuck with his other crewmates.

Doing practical jokes on my heavily pregnant child bride.

Again, everyone born in the 50s has like such a depth of trauma.

As much as we're down on boomers, we don't really understand some of the shit that they went through.

Like in the womb, being like, yeah, my mom didn't know what like a car was.

And then my dad kept like exploding like paper bags directly behind her ear.

He used to do that and then disappear for like 30 hours at a time.

Anyway.

One of my

cigarettes disappeared for two years and then had the gall to show back up.

One of my buddies said that a very probably like handed off rumor that I could not find in any writing was Lake would set off an alarm in the reactor and then slam the door on somebody running through the reactor to go figure out what's going on.

So he's leading

people.

I guess our boy Hyman was right that if you don't exercise like tyrannical rule over your nuclear program, it does become

stupid city, yeah.

The three dumbest men in your 20s you've ever seen, all jerking off at work.

Yeah.

So, what's

important

between these two men is they hate each other.

Yeah, you don't say.

Yeah,

I don't get promoted.

The guy who keeps slamming doors in my face gets promoted.

This could have been a workplace shoot.

This is a nightmare.

This is like page minus three of the stands.

Well, they hate each other.

One, because you're right.

Leg got promoted, Burns didn't.

But even worse, Burns would go to parties and get wasted.

And Leg was like enough of a military man to be like, what the fuck's wrong with you?

Yeah, we all hate our wives, but you don't have to get drunk about it.

You deal with it like a man by terrorizing them with practical jokes.

Well, there's a party sometime in 1960 where they're both at and they go to blows.

Like they get in a fist fight and Leg like throws Burn out of the house.

Nobody knows why.

Some say it's because Burns was fucking around with a hooker at a military party.

Some say

that it was just Leg being like, dude, you're fucking drunk.

Leave.

Fuck off.

And Burns.

I think he was just satisfying his like desperate need to slam doors in people's faces.

Just opening it, slamming, opening it, slamming, opening, right into the right into the sector.

Like has presumably a whole bunch of like various practical jokes.

He could slam the door in your face, drop a safe on you.

Oh, it says drop and run, doesn't it?

Large comedy mallet hitting you over the head with it.

Large comedy pipe wrench from the reactor.

Oh, good point.

Good point.

Yeah.

Spicy.

So those two fucking hate each other.

That's important.

Third at the site is Richard McKinley.

He's fresh to the Army.

He's a nuclear.

He's in the nuke program because he transferred from the Air Force.

He's 27.

That's important.

He's 27.

He was originally in the Air Force.

He transferred to be an Army nuke for the idea of the experience and becoming.

a commercial operator, but just because he's smart.

Totally normal guy.

Totally normal guy who would have passed the necktie test and they locked him in a reactor room with these two fucking idiots.

Correct.

Wisened old man.

You know,

definitely,

yeah, he is the straight man to

the two,

you know.

We call this the mature student on a group project experience.

Yeah.

So McKinley's like well-liked and everybody loves him and he's only been there for like three weeks and he gets put on shift with these two fucking idiots.

And their goal, the reactor had been shut down for the holiday.

It's been Christmas.

We're January 3rd, 1961.

No radiation today.

It's Christmas.

But why do you need the reactor spinning when nobody's there?

The night before they go on shift, Burns goes to a party and just doesn't seem right.

It's because his wife has thrown him out of the house and he is sleeping on his buddy's couch for the last two days.

The house that he is barely in, by the way.

Correct.

Yes.

Because he already hates his wife.

But she's also taking most of his paycheck, which they regularly get in fights about.

This guy seems like a fucking asshole.

Well, he goes on, he's on shift with Leg as his boss for this shift.

Okay, I do see that part, right?

Because, like,

okay, you're an asshole.

Fine, lots of people are assholes.

You then go to work, and your boss is a bigger, in some ways, asshole, and also a different type of asshole in a way that clashes with you being an asshole.

You're generic asshole, he's Looney Tunes, asshole.

Yeah, yeah, it's just like you, you just like regular 50s misogynist, right?

First thing through the door, you are catching a pie full of shaving foam in the face.

I'm imagining here, like, Burns being sort of a John Fedderman type character, especially with like Leg being shorter.

I don't want to be her.

I don't want to shoot her.

She has to be at the beach.

Yeah.

Do you think Leg was having a good time doing this, or do you think it's worse?

Do you think he was doing the pranks while he was actively miserable just to cheer himself up?

I think it was to survive.

I really

damn.

And then, oh, by the way, the completely normal guy is here.

Like, door opens, bin that's been placed on top of it falls onto Burns's head and he stumbles around trying to get it off.

Totally normal guy, also present.

You just hear a guy yelling into the inside of a bucket about how he's going to come back with a gun and shoot up the place.

And you're just like, I got to get a fucking transfer off the ship.

I miss the fucking Air Force.

It's even funny.

It's even funny if you try to envision why he would have left the Air Force in the 50s.

There's like, as a nuke, as well, it's like, I gotta get out from under these general ripple psychos.

They're gonna get us all killed.

I gotta work with some normal people.

I'm just imagining him, like, Gareth with the newspaper just face buried in it as these two just go at it.

Settle down, children.

It's just like, there's just cobalt just being dropped onto you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And a reminder to everyone listening, these guys are fucking around, screaming at each other with a nuclear reactor in the background.

That's how you know it's good.

And their job tonight is not to just flip some switches and watch some gauges and generally operate this thing.

Their job tonight is to put it back the fuck together.

Oh, Oh, my God.

That seems like a tall order for our beleaguered hero and his two dumbass rivals.

Guy who has been sleeping on a 50s couch, one of the most uncomfortable things I can imagine, thinking about nothing but how much he hates his bitch wife.

Guy versus a guy who is escalating to setting up like bear traps on the floor because all he can think about is how much he hates his bitch wife.

And then one guy who is desperately hoping for a transfer.

Flowing the wall.

Just send me.

This goes out to every single person in this situation who is totally normal and all of your co-workers are assholes.

Like, please accept my regards.

I hope you don't work in a nuclear reactor.

What they have to do, what they have to accomplish this night is as follows.

Perform a reactor pump down.

Reassemble the control rods and install plugs and replace the shield blocks.

Leave the top shield off.

So the big steel block on top.

Leave it off.

Connect the control rod drive motors.

So we're on step three.

Four, electrically and mechanically zero the rods.

So up, down, you know, make sure they set where they're supposed to.

Accomplish control room and plant startup logs.

It's got to be hard to do all of this while your boss is hitting you over the back of the head with a frying pan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Perform cold rod drops.

Check.

The piano is being delivered to this facility for some reason.

Replace the top shield and then accomplish a normal startup all in one night with these fuckers.

Jesus.

With the guy, with, again, Looney Tunes asshole being the guy in shars.

Don't love that.

To put it on the record so I don't get yelled at.

I know Leg was not that Looney Tunes, but for the love of God, it's funnier if he is.

Comedy podcast, comedy podcast.

As far as we know, Hyman Rickova was not feeding a kind of elder demon soul shakers either.

I choose

to disappeared off of having said that.

Like, there's like two guys from the Office of Naval Intelligence at all of that.

Oh, you guys.

Yeah, this is the Eldra Torre unit.

Yeah, Eldra Porr unit.

You guys got to style it.

They're going to disappear you into a hole that Leg painted on the floor.

In this list,

I can't.

You did?

Okay.

Well, it's the Looney Tune shit that's about to happen is funnier now, and I can't get to it.

So they...

get through step one and two and they're on step three which is to cont connect control rod drive motors, which means you have to pick up the control rods, lift them four inches, and then reattach them to that sideways motor drive.

And you have to do that with all five.

And they're all kind of sticky and finicky.

And the whole time you're thinking, I wish I was at fucking camp fist clench or whatever.

Yeah.

But by the way, every time I say camp fist clench, can we throw up the like hey, Arthur, like fist clench meme?

God damn it.

I'm telling you,

it's so much funnier now that this is a Looney Tune situation.

I'm not going to be able to make it through this.

So what you see on the right is the shield plug.

That's the thing that you put the control rod through so that shit doesn't leak by it because the rod goes up and down through that plug.

This is important later.

You have to take a C-clamp off so the rod doesn't fall all the way into the reactor, lift it up four inches, clamp it again, and then connect the drive motor so it gets put in gear.

Then the drive motor holds it.

That's what they're supposed to do.

And

assuming that Leg's the supervisor, he's making Burns do this, right?

Right.

Right.

Fucking do it, got newbie.

I'm gonna fucking stand here and drink my coffee.

Yeah.

Go lift the 80-pound thing.

Just go do it.

It's the fifth, it's all the 60s.

He's been like greasing up the soles of his shoes yeah remember lift with your back

jerking twisting motion new kid you're gonna want to use like a yeah exactly jerking twisting motion

so it needs to go four inches burns reaches down we assume burns reaches down grabs the rod it's january 3rd 1961 at 9 01 p.m god damn it next slide please oh this looks for boating This looks like the kind of place you'd be taking the hogtide to.

Wes Anderson shots.

You know, it's too

centered in the frame.

At 9.01, an alarm goes off in the reactor testing station's firehouse.

It's the third time this day.

The first two times on first shift before these jackasses showed up was a heat sensor that was faulty.

So these poor fucked fucker firemen, sorry, these poor firemen have to run out to their truck and go out into six-degree weather, drive 10 minutes.

And this is like an old fire truck where, like, you have two guys hanging on the back, freezing their dick off.

Yeah.

That's six degrees Fahrenheit, I would assume.

Pretty warm.

Pretty warm in the bunker gear, at least, you'd hope.

Yeah.

What hopes?

It's American numbers.

So it's six degrees Fahrenheit.

They're freezing.

Negative 1 million Celsius.

It's colder than like the surface of Pluto.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they've had this happen twice.

It's the third time.

They're like, oh, God fucking damn it.

It's SL1 again.

They drive out there.

They arrive at the reactor.

There's like a guard house in front of it.

And there's no one to let them in.

So they have to get like a security guy to come over and let them in instead of the operators.

They pull up to the reactor, get out, grab their gear, and they walk into the office.

control room and there's no one there

but they notice everyone's jacket is still there and everyone's cars outside

oh boy the cups of coffee sitting on the control stand are still hot

and the radiation alarms

unsolved mysteries presented by well there's your problem

with the radiation alarms going off oh boy and they and it's for the whole building

so they assume something might be wrong so they go back out and get a geiger counter standard standard tools for the station

yeah they walk back into the building and start walking towards the reactor building, the silo we talked about earlier.

Get about halfway there,

and the Geiger counter pegs at 200

Rinkin.

Not good, not good.

Straight to it.

And you're thinking suddenly about how much time you've just spent in that building.

Correct.

But they think it's a false.

Positive.

They think the

meter just went to halo.

Please.

So they go back out to the fire truck.

They come come back in again with a new meter.

This time they're wearing their Scott air packs so that just in case, right?

Right, of course.

They get closer to the reactor building, it goes straight to 200 again.

They're like, wait a minute, fuck this.

Yeah.

You're not going in there.

So they have

how to clean own diarrhea out of bunker gear pants.

You're still in the suit.

It's fine.

They leave, and at 9.17, the health physicist for the site arrives.

The health physicist is the more intense knowledge on radiation.

He knows, for instance, that you don't need to go and get a second Geiger counter before you start running.

Well, he brings the third one.

Its high level is 500 Rankins, and they start walking towards the building, towards the silo.

They walk halfway up the stairs, and it pegs at 500 Rankins.

Nope.

Fucking God.

He didn't tell me that the 200 Rankin was off-scale high.

I didn't know that piece of information.

That also makes me think differently about these firefighters.

Yeah, not great, not terrible.

They still haven't found the operators, so they decide to press on and just try and get in and out as quickly as they can.

Hopefully, finding

these guys.

I mean, at this point, they're like fucking sizzling for heat.

It doesn't matter.

At this point, they become Tom fucking Brady.

Next slide, please.

They turn the corner at the top of the stairs and look in, and this is what they see.

Those big blocks are the concrete blocks that they were supposed to put on top of the reactor when they were done.

Clearly, that didn't happen.

No.

They immediately booked the fuck out when they see this.

Yep.

Fucking explosively what I would do.

And it 10.

You know what?

Just like get a helicopter to dump 500 tons of gravel on top of it and call it a day.

Never go back to Idaho.

No one goes back to Idaho.

Whole state's over.

Just take the star off the flag.

Yeah, state's closed.

But there's three military men in there.

You have to go get them.

We're not the U.S.

Marines.

We do absolutely 200% leave a man behind.

Two,

500 tons of gravel.

Sorry, it's taping on top of it.

I don't care.

Top gear rolls.

It's also the 50s, so YOLO, we're going to go back and get them.

Oh, my God.

At 10:30, the lead health physicist for SL1 shows up.

His name's Ed Valerio.

Or sorry.

He gets in his car, drives out with Paul Duckworth, the operations supervisor from Combustion Engineering.

They don't air packs with the firefighters and go to inspect the facility again.

At this point, everyone, their mother, has no idea what happened, and they don't believe anything nuclear happened.

This is just an industrial accident in theory.

So they're assuming they need to find these guys, get them out.

They'll probably be fine.

Let's go.

I don't know how you come to that conclusion at this point, but I'm glad that their response is: let's stay out of the building.

Reactors are inherently safe.

These reactors will not explode.

That's the thought process.

They get to the top of the stairs.

They find McKinley still alive.

But

he's massive.

His landing field goals states away.

Yeah.

He has a massive facial injury and his left hand is essentially blown clean off.

But he's still.

You can block this.

This is one hand.

You can block it.

This is the normal guy as well.

This is terrible.

This is heartbreaking.

This is the guy who just

wanted to go to work and

his two co-workers are fucking around and he gets his fucking hand blown off.

He gets his face stoved in.

He gets massively irradiated.

Like, I know that's kind of an average workday for a lot of people in the 50s, but like, Jesus Christ.

Well, he's like moaning and like trying to crawl away towards the towards the door.

They find him.

They rush out, go get three other men.

rush back with a stretcher and throw him on it.

While they're doing this, somebody sees Burns on the other side of the reactor, runs over to him, checks his pulse, dead, runs back

and helps the guys with the stretcher.

When they go to exit,

their Scott air pack.

Hold on, hold on.

There's one other guy.

Where the fuck is leg?

Is he just like the perfect Wiley Coyote silhouette on the wall?

Hold that thought.

Oh, hold that thought.

Yeah.

Their air packs start to fail, so they can't, they start like holding their breaths.

This is a nightmare.

Some guys, one guy's, uh, because of the air pack, it starts fogging up his glasses.

Oh, no.

So, on their way out the door, what it does is holding the dogs with big glasses as he's just like gasping for air and dying.

Correct.

There was a coffee can holding the door open.

What?

And

on their way out the door.

Holding the what?

You have to get out of here in like an emergency situation.

But first,

you must navigate the recently deceased Richard Legg's maze of pranks.

This is the most anyone has been like posthumously owned by like a dead prankster since the Middle Saw movies.

You're trying to rush this like horrifically injured guy out and every single one of you steps on a different rake that he has placed there for this purpose

banners falling from the ceiling just saying got you again

just like dead guys falling like raindrops

now for my greatest prank yet vaporizes himself

they didn't think you could do that with one of these reactors but he figured it out

We'll get there.

Just the level of complacency.

Radiation does not need your fear brackets.

Yes, it does, but it does demand your respect.

And holding open the door to the fucking reactor room with a cat, with like a Kenko coffee cat.

It demands both your respect and your tie.

Yeah, it demands your respect, your tie,

your salt shaker, and a little bit of poop to come out of you.

Okay.

All right.

So they trip over the coffee can, they fall down the stairs.

Just like

barely conscious, incredibly irradiated, missing a hand, being stretched out.

You're like, can this day get any worse?

And then you get thrown down

the stairs.

Maybe you see a catfish on the way out.

Who's to say?

And then the bin like, perched on top of the door falls on you.

So, yeah.

So,

because we don't know it's they don't know it's Mckinley yet.

They just know it's one of the guys that's still alive.

This

becomes a mess later.

Oh, God.

Okay.

But they take him down the stairs, they fall down the stairs, and then they throw him in one of the one of the many employees that are here now.

They throw him in the back of his panel van because they need to take him to the hospital because he's fucking dying, right?

Nobody is thinking about what this man is about to do.

Don't love that.

So they throw him in the panel van.

They start up.

And the next slide, please.

Yes.

As soon as soon as they get the van started, the ambulance shows up.

So they take him out of the panel van.

And they just bonk his hand on the door frame a bunch of times.

Yep.

They throw him in the ambulance

where a nurse is in the back of the ambulance because it's 50s uh they throw him in the back of the ambulance the nurse checks his vitals and says she hears him like hardly breathing but he's breathing close the ambulance door off it goes to go to idaho falls hospital oh this guy's not making it out huh director of safety ways making it in yeah director of safety wayne bills leaves church choir practice because he's heard about the incident and redlines his studipaker to go pick up the AEC doctor, John Spickard.

Ow, fucking just kicking the ass of your Studebaker out on like a dirt, like desert road.

Fantastic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then Bill, of course, redlines it all the way to the SL1.

They get to the gate at the edge of the site and they see the ambulance coming and they flag it down.

The reason.

is because director of safety Wayne Bills has realized that this man is so radioactive that no hospital should have him in it.

Oh boy oh no

they take her they pull out their geiger counter which they have the high-end geiger counter and it reads 400 rinkins well it's gone down 100 so they didn't doing good grab the nurse and throw her out of the ambulance

jump in check him for a pulse and hear nothing so the nurse heard his last breaths

which must have been a relief for him at that point because like

kidding they grab the driver then pull him out of the ambulance, and go,

This thing is so hot that we cannot take it back to the back to the hospital.

We can't take it back to the garage, and we can't do it.

We got to dig like a we got to make like a new access road, and this ambulance stays here forever.

Somebody's dumping 500 tons of gravel on it.

Yeah, they give the driver a lead blanket, throw him back in the seat, have him turn right and drive into the desert a half mile i serve the soviet union yep by he then this ambulance they say they see the lights go out and then the man jump out the side and start running

and then they leave the ambulance it is now sitting now in the six degree cold indefinitely what's what's the what's the half-life of the like fuel that they're using in this reactor because if you wait like a thousand years or whatever mint condition ambulance oh yeah yeah you got to scrape the guy out the back of it but like otherwise,

spoiler, like a putty knife, yeah.

Spoiler, once all this is said and done, they actually decontaminate this ambulance and use it for another 12 years.

No, they don't.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah, anything with fleet vehicles, you're like, this thing has seen things I don't even want to know about.

Australian

ambulance is the worst, the worst for the

limo, it'll buff out.

It'll buff out.

Yeah,

I want to hear some ambulance safety thirds.

If you can do that without compromising like patient confidentiality, WTY people.

Or we got that message, crashing your ambulance.

FYI, this whole thing is just a safety third for anybody.

I come back with a whole episode safety third again.

So,

but yeah, they decontaminate the ambulance as a training to practice doing decontamination.

and get the skills and procedures on how to do it.

So it just runs for another 10 years, but we have to move on.

Yes.

Do not change the slide.

Do not read ahead.

I wouldn't trust that ambulance.

I'd be like, you missed one bolt or something that you didn't unscrew, and that's currently giving everyone who rides in this ambulance turbo cancer.

So Leg has still not been found yet.

At 10.38 p.m., four men enter the silo with their only job to find Leg.

Don't thrust him over the coffee can on your way out.

They have 60 seconds to get in and out.

The guy's banging the big pipe, like,

you know they do that later on wake up oh my god they're okay they are given flashlights and they go into the reactor building and start swarming it two minutes after they get in they come back into the control room ashen and shaken well probably

twice as long in there as they should have done yeah well it takes a minute to get from the reactor to control room they get back to their their waypoint in this mission one of their flashlights had grazed the ceiling while they were in just moving around trying to find him.

And they found a bundle of rags stuck to the ceiling by a shield plug and control rod.

Once they all focused on it, they realized it was Leg.

Next slide, please.

This is a horror film.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah, don't love that.

We're going to have to slap a graphic content warning on this one.

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

The good news is I can't even tell this is a guy.

So So

I was trying to cut out really good prank.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was about to say he died as he lived.

About to do some shit, the likes of which you have never seen before.

The prestige, Masterwind.

I tried to cut most of the graphics out, but you can't miss that for this story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It could get a lot worse with the autopsies, but we're going to skip that because I don't know.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I'm morbid enough that I might look those up in my own time.

But like, you do, you know, if you want links after this, I can send them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Please do.

I love, uh, I love, I love gore, I guess.

I'm not sure why.

I don't know what's wrong with me.

I'll also cite my sources at the end so people can go dig.

Yep.

So they find Leg, and everybody gets the fuck out of the reactor and leaves for the last time because now there is no point to risk radiation at all.

500 tons of gravel.

Fucking dead.

Yeah.

But there's a problem.

If you look in the diagram, he is directly above the reactor.

There is concern that if he has enough fissile material stuck in him, or

because a person is mostly water, if he falls and moderates the reactor, it will heat up again and go off again.

This guy was so fucking good at pranks.

He almost pulled another one off after he died.

So you can't just fucking leave him.

And also, it's a feeling of peace.

You can't leave your brethren behind.

Question mark, question mark.

He was an asshole, but he was our asshole.

Yes.

One of our assholes.

The other guy's dead.

So one of our assholes is missing.

So before we.

Me when I eat too much Taco Bell.

That's someone's missing from the bridge of the spaceship from Space

right?

So before we talk about getting him out of there, we have to talk about what the fuck happened.

And this is where we have to talk about what prompt criticality is versus regular criticality.

Criticality.

Regular criticality is what we talked about with moderation, where you have...

general decay going through.

You're trying to increase that to a point where you get heat, enough heat to run something.

Simple way of explaining it.

Not going for for scientific accuracy here.

Prompt criticality is less the slow reaction and more comparable to a nuclear bomb.

Last night, the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin nuclear power plant achieved its target for the generation of electricity under the five-year plan in 0.001 microseconds.

Correct.

Yes.

You're shotgunning neutrons out.

neutrons out and it's guaranteed no matter how fast how slow whatever they are going to hit others which will then cause the process over and over again in a series faster than you can blink.

The reactor had gone prompt critical in four milliseconds.

Water boiled in the bottom, or sorry, the fuel boiled in the bottom, which then caused the water above it to boil and then push upwards and water hammer the top of the pressure vessel.

Yeah, you mean in terms of like the fuel, the fuel itself, like the uranium turned into a gas.

Correct.

Effectively.

Oh.

And I just have to read this verbatim.

The slug of water was propelled at 150 feet per second, 109 miles per hour, about with the average pressure around 500 pounds per square inch.

That then hit the top of the vessel and made the entire reactor vessel, the whole tube, jump upwards at 27 feet per second or about 18 miles per hour.

But we have the shield plugs in the top so the control rods can go up and down.

They are shot out of the top at 85 feet per second or about 57 miles per hour.

And for his finest trick, Dick Legg is hit by one of these and killed instantly.

Correct.

He's standing above it when it happens.

I mean, at least you probably don't know anything about it.

I'll take that over the like agonizing radiation death where they're throwing me in and out of different

Yes.

And dropping me down the stairs.

Yeah.

So, so, of course, all the shield plugs and control rods just went up until they hit something.

The

whole vessel jumped all the way up nine feet, hit the crane above it, and then fell back into the hole.

So, we know that the reactor went prompt critical because a brass screw on McKinley's lighter and then the watch band on burns had both turned to radioactive copper 64.

So that means the only way this could have happened is if that reactor went full on and irradiated everything around it.

Before that, though, before they discovered that in the investigation, no one believed that this reactor had detonated itself.

We'll get to it in the next slide, but there's more than one theory about what actually happened.

We know that it went critical and blew itself to pieces.

Right.

The picture on the left is what's left of the core.

All those like cruciform things with the paddles and which have just been busted wide open.

Correct.

And turned to turn to scrap.

That's all aluminum, too.

So you can imagine all that just like shredded.

You know, it's not like it's steel that would just want to just kind of blew apart.

So next slide.

A radioactive pipe bomb.

Pretty much.

Yeah.

So what happened?

What caused this to happen?

Instead of control rod number nine, the center one being lifted four inches and attached to the drive mechanism, it's calculated that it was lifted 20 inches.

You remember the reactor was two feet tall.

Yes.

It's grab and yoink too hard.

Somehow, correct.

The theories that start were...

industrial accident first, then immediately people thought it was sabotage because Cold War.

So during the investigation, they they do chemical analysis to find any kind of explosives and can't find it.

That rules that out instantly.

I have a theory.

I have a theory, which is so burns is pulling out the thing and Leg is behind him, just blowing out into the paper bag.

Well, about that.

Oh, my God.

The theory that starts going around in the space is that it's a murder-suicide with two explanations the first that is the one that spread the most on like bullshit YouTube videos and even in the reports in the 60s was that Leg was cheating on or cheating with Burns's wife or Burns was cheating with Leg's wife so they

super prank

killed each other

I was gonna say yeah

Or the other one is that Burns was fucking hated Leg, fucking hated his wife.

Plausible.

Fucking hated his job plausible and decided just to fucking kill himself in the hardest way possible but why would you do that with something that you believe to be inherently safe right so yeah there's an explanation for that there's a mix in the reports that people either thought that this won't explode but if you pull the rod out it will just irradiate the piss out of you but That's a horrible way to die.

Like, it's the general.

Okay, yeah.

He's just like, I don't know what that does.

Sure, whatever.

Yeah.

It's like, it's probably fine.

You're in the military in the 50s in Idaho.

You have a gun, and everyone around you is using theirs to kill themselves with.

Like, you did, like,

it's just like the prestige where the guy thought that drowning was painless.

It's like nuclear physicists, like health physicists having to be like, no, no, no, no, no, actually, extremely painful to die of radiation sickness.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's like what gets spread around.

Is it's a murder-suicide.

I forgot to mention up earlier that at seven o'clock the night of the incident, Burns's wife called to ask for a divorce.

And the last thing they talked about was dividing up his paycheck after the divorce.

Let me, let me, let me just call my famously like buddy rich level fly off the hand or husband

at work at the nuclear reactor to tell him that I'm going to divorce him.

And I think he, I think his boss just like shook his hand, but he had one of those electric buzzes.

Truly, this will go well.

Yeah.

Just hanging up that phone call, like,

that's

it's got a flower.

So that's the theory that gets spread around.

Likely bullshit, because why, right?

Like, also, Leg's wife is pregnant.

So why would Burns?

Yeah, it doesn't

heavily Mormon as well.

I think.

Yeah.

Lightly pregnant, heavily Mormon.

Yeah, no,

I do buy interpersonal beef of just like this guy just tied my shoelaces together or whatever for the last time.

Either as he was doing the thing or he's like, fuck it, I'll irradiate everybody.

I don't give a fuck.

That's that's what if you want to believe that Burns did it to try and kill himself, but they all believe these reactors were safe, that's probably what it was.

Was fuck it, I'm raid.

I fucking hate legs, so he can die with me.

We'll just vaporize each other.

And do that to Paul McKinley?

I never like to

libel the dead necessarily.

And whenever we do the

USS Iowa turret explosion, we'll talk some more about that.

Assuming we haven't done it already and I've forgotten it.

So,

like,

yeah, no, I'm buying like

practical joke potentially gone horribly wrong in the funniest way.

Yeah.

Well, about that.

Um, the next theory we need to talk about is oops, which is the rod got stuck and it's 84 pounds.

So you're trying to lift a like unhandled 84 pound like vertical weight just like manually.

I'm doing a kind of jerk off motion here.

Yep.

So like

because the radiation leaks out as you lift it, you get stronger and stronger.

Eventually you're doing Aaron Rodgers.

You're doing weighted squats with the control rods.

So the thought is it got stuck.

He yoinked on it too hard, went up to 20 inches, off it went.

Just like, whoop.

And the second it does that, you just, it does a comedy sound effect and then blows your boss's head off and throws him into the ceiling.

Yeah.

And you're like, man, I don't even necessarily like that guy that much.

And then milliseconds later, you are shredded by aluminium strap.

Yeah.

So we get to the

I have a personal theory I need to say first.

Listening to Todd Tucker talk about this, who wrote, essentially wrote the book on this accident after all the accident reports.

He believes Leg was who was on the control rod.

And because of where his body ends up with control rods or shield plug seven going through him, because he would have had to be standing on top of the reactor, right?

Yeah.

So he he has a theory that it was leg lifting the rod and that it just got stuck because of the poor maintenance on this reactor that's an easy that's a simple explanation for this right

my belief is if it was burns and again this is after reading all the reports and all the reports argue themselves so there's not really the final answer was not really direct we don't know we'll we'll never know We'll never know because the only guys that know got blown to hell.

Should have asked mckinley in the ambulance be like what did those two assholes do and while he's kind of like agonily breathing he's just like prank gone wrong

it's just a prank

bro

gon' sexual

yeah yeah yeah let like just sticks this little tiny iphone microphone in uh in burn's face

I'm just like, what's your body count?

About to be three high.

So what i believe is burn burns was having like the worst night of his fucking life he's ordered to do this it gets stuck and he has like a fit of rage you know because who wouldn't at this point and that's when he jerks it and it comes up and off it

hate when i jerk it and i kill

yep kill three people and irradiate most of iowa idaho

who's

if it's leg

there's one more theory and let me finish saying it before we start.

Jesus.

Okay.

Leg was a practical jokester.

We know this.

And McKinley is a new trainee on site.

One thing that has been suggested, other than leg just pulling it, getting stuck, and then pulling harder, is that you could bounce the control rod up and down past the four inches and make the Geiger counter chirp harder every time.

Oh, my God.

Freaking out your trainee.

So there's a theory that he's bouncing the control rod, making the Geiger counter whirr, and pissing off McKinley, who's the straight man in

our timeline.

Like, oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

It gets stuck and then gotcha.

Exposed.

So his last

words were, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop,

whoop, whoop, whoop,

even, even more more horrible than for that guy to be the longest living witness and to die in like agony to be like, my boss was doing an asshole prank on me and fucked it up so bad that it took me hours to die.

And also, we irradiated like half-eyed house.

Yeah,

if life's the joke and death is the punchline, I don't think this one worked pretty good.

So, this is where we get into there's arguments in all the reports about how it happened because you have combustion engineering in the army not wanting them to take the blame and nuclear power not to be besmirched.

So that's where you get like theories of like

maybe it was the murder suicide.

Maybe it was the fucking around with their wives.

They investigate all this.

You have GE come in as a second investigator.

or third, sorry.

They investigate all this, still have like a lot of reason to not blame nuclear power and blame it on these guys fucking up.

But then Admiral Rickover sends a guy in.

Oh, man.

Dying.

Because

he's not happy with the other reports that have gone public.

Rickover's guy's report is still classified.

Interesting.

But after interviews, it's surmised that it was the poor reactor condition is why this fucked up.

Something got

a bunch of official-looking guys to copy documents and steal all the salt shakers.

I don't like the sheer amount of photocopier burn we got going on here.

The lunchroom had a salt shaker up, probably, so you had to go get it.

Had.

So the reports argue that the rods never got stuck.

The rods always got stuck.

In the appendix of one of them, it says the main rod got stuck seven times recently and then once needed to be moved with a pipe wrench.

That's where we get the beating the fucking rod in with the pipe wrench.

Hard to get it out that way as well.

Well, you just pull one of the others out, bake the rest with it.

So we'll never know.

The three guys that know got blown to hell or heaven.

Clearly not burned.

Unclear.

I like to believe in universalism.

I think.

I think Dick Burns or whatever is in heaven.

He's just an asshole there, too.

Yeah.

Leg is pranking angels in heaven now.

Doing the paperback thing right behind some cherubim.

So you can't, is that the kind that's like a bunch of rings with eyes?

I don't know, man.

Because that would be difficult on that one.

I guess if you get inside the rings, but that seems like an invasion of personal space.

Yeah, it's heaven.

What do you care?

It's a good point.

Can we move on to the next slide, please?

Of course, go for it.

All right.

So we know what happened.

We know how it happened to an extent.

Now we have to clean this shit up.

Oh, boy.

Reactor cleanup detail.

Leg's final practical joke comes up.

Grand finale.

I'd like to see you retrieve my mangled body.

After four days of planning, Leg's body, which was by far the most contaminated, was retrieved.

They would sing guys up for 60 seconds, get pictures or video, and come back down to get a general idea of how they're going to do this.

They jerry-rigged the stretcher on the right on a crane to slide under him.

How the fuck do you take pictures and video on film?

It's going to get like irradiated to fuck itself.

Well, why do you think everything's so grainy?

Yeah, no kidding.

They had to get a welder inside of a lead-shielded box attached to a crane to be able to like make this all work.

Of course.

And on January 9th, in relays of two at a time, they put the stretcher in the door underneath leg, and then two men at a time with 65 seconds each poke at him with 10-foot-long sharp hooks and attempt to pull his body free.

Oh, God.

Without dropping it into the reactor.

Right.

When they get it out,

they dump it into a lead cask because it's

going to going to slam dunk this guy's body into a sarcophagus.

Did they get him in one piece?

As far as everything I've read, they got what was left of him in one piece.

Okay.

It's the worst carnival game ever.

Yeah, that doesn't get into the detail.

I don't think the autopsies will ever be declassified, but I'm sure he didn't come down cleanly.

Probably not.

He wasn't rotting.

All the bacteria is long dead.

There's a reason they called him leg and not legs.

I want to talk about the autopsy, but I can't do it.

No, why not?

Why not?

Talk about the autopsy.

I'm going to be nauseous.

All right.

You know, knock yourself out.

Knock yourself out, scooter.

I got it.

I got it.

Just

we support your welfare.

Just mute yourself for a bit and go play like Bellatro or something.

I want to hear about.

I have a medical interest.

I want to hear about the autopsy.

All right.

I'll warn when we get to the part that I'll give you a countdown on it, I guess.

So they take them all to the chemical plant at the site and they rig up an autopsy room.

They had Burns and McKinley, which they still didn't know if McKinley was leg or McKinley yet.

They had Burns and McKinley in on ice in stainless steel tanks, and then they bring Leg in in the leg cask.

The autopsies were performed by Clarence Lushbaugh, which is who performed the first autopsy of an irradiated man, which was Cecil Kelly, which happened at Los Alamos, who safety-thirded himself by a plutonium purification tank.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've read about this.

Yeah, yeah.

You got to be careful with those barrels.

Turned a switch on, died.

But Lushbaugh is famous for being a body snatcher.

He would take parts of his autopsies and send them around for other scientists to look at without permission.

How fake pranksters look when a real prankster comes up.

So we're going to talk about the autopsy so give us like five minutes i'm good

i'm here all right so they identify leg once they get him in on a they had two saw horses and a stainless steel sheet i just what kind of throw them over like you're like

flower you're correct yeah

and then they have

they have medical instruments on 10-foot poles that were like well tack welded onto the end of these poles so like a scalpel some some I don't know the terms, but stuff to pull

you're not gonna be precise with that scalpel

on a pole,

and then the dog catcher wire loop thing that to grab onto parts and pull them and pull them out of the way.

They identify leg because he has a navy sea beast tattoo.

So the first time they realize it's leg,

the mass has the CB tattoo.

So then they know that McKinley is the guy that got his face blown off.

Burns is discovered to be dead by getting impacted by a flat, something flat.

So he got blown away from the reactor, impacted, and a rib broke off and pierced his heart.

Ah, Jesus.

McKinley was had his face destroyed and his arm blown off because he might have been behind something.

And that's why.

So it just catches him in the like face and hand or whatever.

Yeah, sure.

And that's why he was likely still still alive, but unable to be identified.

Leg obviously was,

I'm not saying it the way it is in the autop in what I read.

Obviously, had whole go through body.

Sort of an unrecognizable mass of flesh.

So just becoming like one of those, uh, like a guy out of the cocktail, got one of those cocktail cords.

Yeah.

I'm really trying here.

The important thing is they also try and prep the bodies bodies to be less radioactive, but any part that was like McKinley's hand, legs, head, anything that was hyper-radioactive, they had to saw off the bodies with the hatchets.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

They would then take those and put them in a lead-line cave at the autopsy site, eventually barreling them up and burying them.

as radioactive waste with the rest of the reactor.

Incredible.

Most of the of the

command chain in the science side of this wanted the bodies buried off-site with other radioactive waste, never to leave the testing site.

But because it's the military and because the families wanted the bodies back, they opted to cut all the most radioactive parts off the bodies, put them in Batesville mono seal caskets.

I really, I like the

brand name there.

Yeah.

I I gotta shout out my hometown.

I have to.

I googled Batesville Mono Sil Casket, and the first thing is an eBay listing for the key to one of those.

So if anybody wants to do any grave robbing of like extremely radioactive dead bodies,

I guess that's easier to find than the casket itself.

Yeah, I was about to say,

what does an extremely radioactive body get on the open market these days?

Depends who you sell it to.

I had to shout out my hometown because we're the city of death.

They build caskets and the beds that like hospice uses across the street from each other.

Just to get you used to the feeling before you

use the rest of their project line?

You will spend the end of your life in a Batesville product.

I like a shroud burial personally.

I don't know that I need to be in a box.

I would get claustrophobic.

So speaking of boxing.

it comes in comes in four different colors: India Star, Huntington Green, Star Quartz, and stuff.

Oh, Huntington Green.

The Yemi, too.

It looks really nice.

So, speaking of boxes.

Are we that old?

We're looking at caskets.

And I'm a trans woman who lives in Britain.

I got to get ahead of this shit while I can.

If you got the money, spend it now, right?

Only going to get more expensive.

That's true.

Yeah.

Might as well buy the plot while you're at it.

Just make sure it's got room.

So boxes.

They put these guys in the boxes and fly them to their hometowns to be buried.

Burns, I don't have the names of the towns handy because I didn't want to talk about it, but oh well, fuck it.

Burns has flown to Michigan and the Atomic Energy Commission goes with each of the caskets to make sure like nobody's getting too close or fucking fucking around with them.

These people are too good at football

at this point.

Even from beyond the grave, we got to have someone with them.

Burns's funeral, they want to see the casket.

They don't want to just put it in the vault.

They want to see it.

And the Atomic Eric G Commission's like, no.

They're like for five minutes.

And they're like,

so for the funeral, they raise the casket out of the concrete vault and the radiation level pegs during his service

so i can just imagine like two guys in black suits just like grabbing their collars starting to sweat as this eulogy making the like hurry it up uh kind of gesture at the priest like yeah short short version um

uh veil of tears amen so he's buried uh leg is buried in new york kind of the same situation nothing of note that i remember and McKinley is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

That's the least they could fucking do for the guy.

I was about to say, yeah, as the only normal person there.

On January, I'm reading straight from the book here.

On January 31st, 1961, this letter was sent to Arlington National Cemetery from the...

AEC to Superintendent Arlington National Cemetery.

Radioactive remains of SP-4 Richard McKinley were interred at Arlington National Cemetery on January 25th, 1961.

It is desired that the following remark be placed on the permanent record: record of interment.

Victim of nuclear accident, body is contaminated with long-life radioisotopes.

Under no circumstances will the body be moved from this location without prior approval by the Atomic Energy Commission with consultation from this headquarters.

He's there forever.

There forever at the tomb of the incomplete soldier.

I'm sorry.

Fucking liar.

So we all cope with the bleakness of our own ways here.

Yeah, yeah, it's true.

His grave's not like any differently marked than any of the others at Arlington.

It's not like they put a trifle oil or anything on it.

This is weirdly warm under your feet, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But what's funny.

I didn't know it's got like underfoil heating here.

and i didn't realize this when i visited arlington because i went to see his body or his grave

yeah

that was a

shuffle and then some breathing apparatus yeah that's my key for sale there i already used it

no i went to see the the grave just to see see it because i like atomic shit um and what's funny and it was pointed out inside the this book is you can see from rickover's grave, McKinley's grave.

Yeah, Rickover's epitaph just says I should have done it my way.

Well, it's the book reads, the irreductible laws of radiation and shielding, however, make it necessarily true that some infinitesimal amount of radiation still streams from McKinley's shattered body, crosses Sheridan Drive, and illuminates ever so slightly the grave of Admiral Rickover.

That's incredible.

A fitting end for them both.

You can tell Rickover is grave because there's just a patch of brown there.

The earth has been salted.

Nothing will ever go again, of course.

All right.

Next slide, please.

I'll make this one short.

I'm sorry.

It's fine.

It's literally fine.

I'm having a time in my life.

This has been good.

So, General Electric's named the prime contractor for cleanup.

It's 1961 and the, or sorry, it's the end of 1961 going into 1962.

and president kennedy has just canceled the aircraft nuclear propulsion project oswald was right

now this is this is the real truth as an air force guy got him so so general electric has like 500 people at the testing site and nothing for them to do so it works out because now they can just send him next door oh being in the military sucks so bad

you want to clean up this horrible thing that happened yeah you all just got volunteered to dismantle the most radioactive grain silo ever made yeah do you want to keep your job or not

listen there's only a little bit of gore still left in there

there might be a jolly buzzer or a whoopee cushion too you gotta watch out for those

so g goes in starts this starts the process of cutting into the building so they can get the reactor body out.

They have the 60 second time limit.

You go in, you cut, you get the fuck out, you're done for three months.

I gotta be honest.

I'm not doing shit in those 60 seconds.

I'm gonna pretend to do, I'm gonna pretend to work.

I'm gonna be like, okay, I'm done.

Because like, I'm in there for they're not checking.

They're not, what are they gonna do?

Send me back in?

Be like, oh, it doesn't count.

You didn't do it.

Like, fuck you.

I was in there for 30 seconds.

I didn't hear any grinding, motherfucker.

My kid's gonna have horns because of you.

fuck off

yeah i go in there and i spend the first 30 seconds looking at the gauge on the acetylene torch and trying to remember if this is a setting that's fine or one that causes it to instantly blow up does this

does this don't worry about that

yeah once it says that you're dead anyway don't worry about that

yeah you know what it says like measure three or four times cut you know well maybe cut like once so they they have 500 people taking turns to go in out the building to get this.

They cut away, get into where they can get a crane to lift the vessel, and they pull it, they pull it out, but there's a problem.

There's nowhere big enough on the test site to take this thing, except for the hangar from the aircraft nuclear program at test area north, which is 20 miles, 35 miles away.

So they have to put it in this truck with this vessel in the picture, remove 45 power lines, and drive the tractor trailer with a convoy of like 50 cars, cops.

The scariest psychos early 1960s America had ever produced, which is a fucking, that's a, that's stiff competition.

Up a high, yeah, up a highway at 10 miles per hour to take it into the hot shop.

Once they get the reactor out of the building,

it's much easier.

They can go in, scrub, cut.

take stuff down without as much of a time limit.

They bury everything from the silo 1600 feet northeast of where it was sitting.

But they keep the control building and all the auxiliary buildings until 1993.

Yeah, just in case you need them.

Omi never throws anything away.

Well, what they did was use it as practice for decontamination to learn how to make a site usable again.

So they.

All right, kids, let's get into this highly contaminated radioactive site.

We're going to do some decontamination.

Let's spray it that with hot water.

It's fine.

Break out the purple stuff.

That's what they did.

And then they painted over the walls inside the building to just hold the radiation in.

I'm not joking.

Lead paint's a hell of a thing.

Lead paint.

Yeah.

I was going to say.

Yeah.

Landlord special.

It works.

Anywhere the soil was too hot, they'd just pave over with asphalt.

And it lasts that way till 1993, where they finally decide to decommission these buildings.

Northrop or Lockheed Martin, sorry, gets in to do the decommissioning, gets paid infinitesimal money, buries all this shit with the rest of the shit 1,600 feet away.

And then sometime in the 2000s, the Superfund site that SL1 becomes is not good enough to be just left as a burial ground.

So they have to do a cleanup again, move everything out of the burial site and into essentially a radiation landfill.

further into the Idaho, the Idaho facility.

So this was a general contractor's wet fucking dream.

Oh, yeah.

What a set.

You make so much money off of this.

So much goddamn money.

So SL1's gone.

Has the Army learned its lesson?

Probably not.

Next slide, please.

Hell no, they didn't learn their lesson.

So Camp Sentry's reactor is already running and SL1 was where they trained people to send them to Camp Sentry.

Because Camp Sentry was relatively the same as SL1, it had the same problem.

The central control rod had way more capability of starting the reactor up.

So they put an interlock on the central control rod that no one can touch without the base commander there.

Just putting a big sign on it that says, do not kill everyone.

Yeah.

So they run the Camp Sentry reactor till 1963 and then decide, fuck this.

It's not worth it.

and take it out.

And they take it out back and shoot it essentially.

Ship it back home.

I don't know where it's buried, but it gets disposed of.

In March 1962, the Fort Greeley, Alaska reactor comes online.

It's an alcohol reactor, so it's a pressurized water reactor.

It's fine.

It works for a while.

They decide it's not worth it.

and go back to coal power.

Also in 1962, a PM3 reactor is sent to Antarctica to McMurdo Station.

They used it for heating and operating

the base down there for the Navy.

It lasts a few years, gets decommissioned.

And in 1967, the MH-1A Sturgis, a converted Liberty ship, had a 10-megawatt reactor installed for the Panama Canal Zone.

Wow.

Hey, do you mind if we just run this nuclear reactor inside part of your country?

Well, by the way, it doesn't matter because we own it.

Yeah.

It starts to suck.

Yeah.

It was Jay that pointed out, I think, that they put the reactor on a Liberty ship known for breaking in half.

We've talked about those ships.

So it was just moored at a dock, so it should be fine, but should.

It lasted.

It lasted.

Go ahead.

Sorry.

Yeah, weld some, you know.

you know, weld some beams on the side.

It'll be fine.

It lasted a few years, but then they decided it's probably not a good idea to have a nuclear reactor in a contested part of the country.

So they pulled it out.

And then because they didn't have anywhere else to send it, they scrapped it.

Oh, well.

And so the Army's nuclear program ended.

They never deployed SL-1 clones to the Dew line because the Adew line was outdated.

But when it started, they didn't deploy them up north any more than they needed to.

They had one station in Wyoming that I didn't list here.

The whole thing was a waste of time.

Pretty much.

It was there for like two years.

The United States Army is still the world's number one consumer of diesel fuel.

Well, I mean, good news.

The Army Futures Command is mooting.

What if we just, what if we, what if we got back into the nuke business?

What if we had a very small, very reliable nuclear reactor we could use for remote installations?

Wouldn't that be handy?

Now, far be it from me to speculate as to what installations they might be talking about, but they are talking about it.

So this can all happen again.

And the only thing stopping us from this happening again is woke, right?

Because

the current dismantling of woke is going to create another situation where men hate their bitch wives.

Because under woke, men, you know, love their wives, whereas this.

Yes.

This is the kind of like, you know, the patriarchal thing where you hate your bitch wife, you don't want her to divorce you, you are sleeping in your car, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And as we increase the divorcedness of America in a kind of malignant, like fault-required sort of way, this is more likely to happen again.

You two can join the army and become a stupid nuclear science bitch.

The only way to make this safe is to make it so that the relationships are very positive and very chill, and everybody takes it seriously, and everybody is a scientist.

You have to have the cadre of the thing be a polycule.

It's the only way, only way it works.

Mandatory.

No exception.

And unfortunately, it's the army, so that absolutely will not happen.

I know.

Bruce, well, see you all again for the works on the Navy.

See you all again for the SL12 episode when

some

MAGA chud soldier gets impaled with the reactor core.

Yeah, I mean, it's the secret of running a good nuclear reactor is some form of of sodomy.

That's true, yeah.

Because

doing this honors the god Uranus,

to whom, you know, uranium is named and after whom Uranian, the first term for gay, was called.

So, this is this is why it's important.

You got to be gay.

You got to radiation, gay science.

You got to, you got to be gay.

Yep.

Roz and I have to just burn coal, I guess.

You can use renewables.

It's fine.

So, before we move on, there is currently a program where they are planning to put a small modular reactor back in Alaska for the Army.

Let's go.

Hopefully, they learned their lesson.

Is the United States Army a lesson-learning institution?

Does it do that?

Ask Pete.

Oh, forget about that.

We had a 90-slide PowerPoint presentation about that.

Well, there's your problem, the U.S.

Army.

Yeah.

So

I wanted to end on the note of at the end of the day, SL1, all the Army reactors were small modular reactors.

They were able to be put anywhere, supposed to be transported, built for a specific use.

And that's all the rage nowadays is building a small modular reactor that we can put anywhere, used to power smaller cities.

It doesn't cost as much.

It's easier to build.

Or you have like a big power plant.

It has like 20 of them.

Yeah.

On racks.

Yeah.

yeah so you can shut one down the rest run and while i was doing this i found this picture i don't i it was like a general picture it didn't say which company this was but it looks familiar about 20 feet tall has a big cap on the top is about the same size as SL1s, and it just rings back to the poster that was spread around after the accident.

Lest we forget.

Engineers in all fields still refer back to sl1 as you can't make it so simple one person can it up no matter what their intentions are it shouldn't be a situation where one person can blow a reactor up or fire the missile or whatever to a hilarious prank

it is on her right but time is a flat circle this is why like these newer reactors are going to have to be incredibly heavily censored, automated, et cetera, because with smaller reactors, there's less in there.

If you can do more with it, there's always the chance.

I just wanted to point out as well that in our nuclear fearing world, everybody's starting to catch on to nuclear reactors, but the SMR guys just seem to name their shit in the least confidence building way.

You have New Scale that's like leading the field in it, but then the Idaho National Laboratory named their SMR the 4S, the super safe, small, and simple reactor.

I thought that started with Toshiba or something.

Me too.

Yeah.

I don't know.

It's a whole, everybody's getting in on it.

Right.

But then there's also TerraPower, which is Bill Gates' company.

TerraPower?

Yeah, TerraPower.

Is that the one that's across the river where New York shipbuilding used to be?

I don't know.

I don't know either.

I'm pretty sure they build like either components for smrs or smrs in there um that's wild yeah well my last the last one's my favorite their website made me laugh the ultra safe nuclear corporation uh-huh

with their micro modular reactor oh oh mmr great radio station

um

ultra safe

so let's hope they take from what we've learned today as well

my uh my my nuclear power corporation's name is raising a lot of questions, which are answered by the name of my nuclear power corporation.

So what have we learned other than don't make it so simple?

No one of the terminalism bad.

Pranks at work are always funny and will never backfire.

Yeah, pranks at work

great idea.

People will love you for it.

You definitely won't piss off other people so much.

that you cause the stupidest nuclear disaster in history.

Don't Don't let your nuclear reactor get into such a bad shape that shit gets stuck in it.

Probably a good idea.

Probably a good one.

Uh, don't put like 20-year-olds in charge of a nuclear reactor.

No.

Yeah.

That was Rick Over.

That was Rick Over's big thing when it came to Three Mile Island because he was brought in as a consultant for that, of course, was that in the shipping port reactor, he always had supervision, somebody that knew the reactor back, forward, and so on.

Where at Three Mile Island, even though they were all Navy nukes, there was no one that was overhead of them, they just kind of flailed.

He was then brought back on to be for to say Three Mile Island one was safe because they wouldn't start it up without his blessing after they after he bashed in their heads with his comments.

That he stole every salt shaker in here.

As he was leaving, they're like, Didn't we have more cooling towers than this?

this?

Where are my pants?

No one in the control room's wearing a tie.

What happened, guys?

Al,

we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

Hello, Justin, November, Yay, Liam, Devin, etc.

Wow.

This story comes to you from the exciting world of piano tuning.

Oh, I saw this one going hype.

Warner Brothers has, of course, made us all very aware of the many things that can go horribly wrong around pianos.

We forgot his leg didn't drop a piano on birds.

Yeah, no, no, I did mention a lot of pianos are being delivered to the uh

we covered it.

Yeah, these instruments can and do, in fact, fall on people, fire their steel springs into walls and floors, and and albeit only partially, implode.

Oh.

But today's story instead comes from the fact that so many people nowadays forget that we piano technicians still exist.

Well, I don't.

And thank you for your service.

Right.

On the day in question, one of my tuning appointments was a grand piano in the front stage in a middle school auditorium.

So far, nothing out of the ordinary.

I signed in, I scanned my ID, the front desk summons the music teacher, who leads me to the piano and promptly runs back to her class.

I get to work.

Some 15 minutes of tuning pass, and the public address system crackles to life.

Working in schools means contending with announcements and the occasional fire drill.

Shelter in place is the command from a calm and unhurried voice.

with not much more explanation.

This seems to be some kind of lockdown drill.

Definitely better than a fire drill.

So I get to stay put and keep working.

A few more minutes pass, and the voice is back on the public address system.

All students are being told to go to the neighboring high school's auditorium.

On command, the sound of hundreds of feet not so enthusiastically marching down the halls.

Rattle the doors of the middle school auditorium.

There's a sort of institutional malaise about the whole thing.

This is obviously, yeah, this is obviously some some sort of drill they make the kids do.

There's no instruction to the staff, teachers, or contractors.

The main office, where I had signed in maybe 25 minutes prior, was less than 50 feet from the auditorium.

So I figured if there was some sort of actual emergency, they could easily open the door and shout.

So I kept working.

The building gradually went quiet again, which is the perfect condition for my work to continue.

I finished up with.

I'm concerned concerned that there's just like a tornado bearing down on this guy.

Like the

tornado bearing down on a heroic piano tuner, like the end of

Sirius Man.

I finish up with the tuning and move on to some minor mechanical adjustments.

And at this, it is at this point that I realize just how quiet the building has gotten.

But my work is nearly done, and I still haven't been given any instruction to go anywhere else.

Autism moment.

I feel like

just as I was finishing up, the side door of the auditorium opened.

Through the big double door walked a local police officer.

Our eyes met with similarly shocked expressions on our faces.

All I could think to say was, oh,

you got to get out of here, man.

You smell gas?

He said, Oh, thank God it's just about to explode.

At least it's not a mass shooting.

Jesus Christ.

Before I could reply, the opposing side door burst open behind me.

Two more police officers marched in.

Are you child's name redacted?

One asked.

Weird thing for a cop to say.

No, I'm the piano tuner, I said.

My hand still inside said instrument.

Visibly tuning piano.

No, I'm the piano.

Who are you and how did you get in here?

I'm a locksmith, and I'm a locksmith.

These three officers were apparently risking their lives to search for a missing child inside a school that was about to explode.

Uh-huh.

Can I grab my tools?

I asked for some reason.

The policeman said, Yeah, I guess.

Just get out of here.

Picks up his tools, spark happens, everyone dies.

No, that's that's why piano tuners' tools are made of beryllium.

Can I just take my control rod with me?

One second.

Oh, shit.

Tuning.

It's weird that they had that on the stage.

Tuning the piano, and one of the keys is the bomb.

Tuning the piano in the experimental nuclear reactor.

Oh, they got out of the morning.

They're trying to train the kids early on nuclear reactors so they're better at it when they go into the Army.

Yeah.

So with my tool bag, that's STEM education right there.

With my tool bag now on my back, I made my way out of the auditorium and towards the exit.

Emerging into the atrium, I was met with a sea of flashing lights.

Sleeping, baby.

A little bit tired, yeah.

Sea of flashing lights shining through the glass of the school's main doors.

An armada of police, fire, and EMS vehicles surrounded the school.

I held the door open for yet more confused police officers entering the school.

As I stepped out and walked back to my car, I smelled it.

And from extensive experience blowing stuff up in my backyard as a teen, I recognized it immediately as burning plastic, not gas.

I had, in fact, smelled it earlier and figured New Jersey just smelled like that.

Since I hadn't had the time to put the various exterior parts back onto the piano,

I had no choice.

Yeah, I had no choice but to sit in my car and eat lunch while the situation blew over rather than have the school staff try and reassemble the piano.

Soon enough, the students were marching back to the school, confirming that, yes, indeed, New Jersey just smells like that.

Regards from Luca Sipola, Chipola, Chipola, Chipola, I don't know, Chipotle, Chipotle.

Yeah, don't mind.

Thank you.

Thank you for sending in safety thirds.

Sending you more safety thirds.

W-ty-y-p-pod at gmail.com.

Buy the shirts.

Keep the safety thirds to about a page in length.

Seriously, please.

Yeah.

By the time we get here, we're all delirious.

We're pranksters and

face people.

I'll tell you what we do.

If we get a few good long ones, we'll just do an all-safety third episode.

That would be the third one we've done.

You're welcome.

Yeah.

All right.

End this.

All right.

That was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

I think we covered all of them.

Scooter, if the people want more scooter, where can they find you?

I'm on Blue Sky and Twitter at Angry Scooter77.

I mostly do train shit.

The whole reason we're talking about reactors is I used to be in procedures and quality assurance for company redacted, but I still write papers on this shit.

So every once in a while, I'll post nuclear shit, but it's mostly me bitching about my job.

Yeah, nice.

If you want more scooter, go charter a private railroad car.

Yes.

It's fun and extremely expensive.

All right.

I think that's it.

Well, do it.

Good night, everybody.

All right.

Good night, everyone.

Hi, everybody.