Chapter 4. The instant of Sam Untermyer’s BORAX–I explosion, a controlled test of the very worst that could happen to a boiling water reactor. The experiment did not disappoint, as it sent the contents of the reactor vessel flying. This is a still from the 16mm movie that was made of the test. The movie camera stopped functioning soon after this frame was exposed, as its power cable was blown away in the explosion.
Chapter 4. Early in the analysis of the SL-1 explosion incident, a water sample was needed from the coolant spill on the reactor-room floor. Under normal circumstances, this was a simple task, but in this case the inside of the building was contaminated with highly radioactive fission products, and extraordinary measures were necessary. The crane setup shown in the picture is going to sample remotely, through the refueling door.
Chapter 4. The poster made to go on nuclear engineers’ walls. It refers to the explosion of the SL-1 power reactor on January 3, 1961, reminding all engineers that designing a reactor with a single control rod that can increase reactivity to the point of criticality is not an acceptable concept. The view is looking straight down into the SL-1 core with the top removed. The insides are so scrambled, it’s hard to tell what you are looking at. The rods sticking out are connected to three of four peripheral flux-shaping controls. The controls themselves are normally cross-shaped, and here the crosses are flattened. What looks like strips of metal were once vertically mounted fuel assemblies.
I took this picture looking up at the reactor refueling face of the X-10 graphite reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. What appear to be dots on the white wall are plugs. To refuel, a worker pulls out a plug and pushes in a fuel canister using a steel rod. This reactor was built during World War II, and to the postwar world this was what a nuclear reactor looked like.
Chapter 5. A close-up of the back of the back of the two Windscale plutonium production reactors, showing the concrete exhaust stacks. The rectangular building in the foreground is one of two air-blower buildings per reactor, disconnected from the reactor buildings. What look like windows are intake louvers for the air that is blown through the reactor, up the stack, and over the surrounding dairy farms.
Chapter 5. A wider shot of the Windscale reactors, showing the lack of other tall structures in 1957. The landscape filled in with other buildings in the following decades. I was unable to gain permission to include photos of the internal structure of the Windscale reactors, but look on pages 11 through 13 in a lecture slide show from the University of Manchester, available on the Internet here: http://web.up.ac.za/sitefiles/file/44/2063/Nuclear_Graphite_Course/A-GraphiteCoreDesignAir&Magnox.pdf. Or search on “graphite core design air & magnox” for the PDF file. The photo on page 13 of the slide show was taken looking straight into an open port on the core face. You are looking through the 5-foot-thick concrete shield, across the air void, and at an aluminum “charge pan.” There are five holes. Four are for fuel, and the center hole is for isotope-production cartridges. The fire started, as is clearly described in a plant worker’s deposition, in an isotope cartridge and not in the graphite or the fuel, as has been long assumed.
Chapter 5. This aerial shot of Windscale Unit 1 shows the two air-blower buildings and the air-filter assembly at the top of the exhaust stack. A label identifying the fire hoses entering the building has been blanked out.
Chapter 6. The Sodium Reactor Experiment building and auxiliary buildings at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Simi Hills, California, about 50 miles north of Los Angeles. The reactor is located in the middle of the floor of the tall building on the right. The smaller building with a peaked roof in front of the reactor building is the helium control station, and behind it with a flat roof is the air-blast heat exchanger. The steam generator is in the maze of pipes across the road, on the left.
Chapter 6. The bottom of a heat-damaged fuel rod in channel 55 in the Sodium Reactor Experiment at Santa Susana. The stainless steel tube containing a column of uranium fuel slugs has melted away, allowing fuel to drop into the bottom of the reactor core. The stainless steel wire that spirals around the tube is to prevent it from touching other tubes in a fuel element cluster. The location guide and orifice plate at the bottom of the rod are completely gone.
Chapter 7. Americium extraction hood WT-2 in the 242-Z Building, Americium Recovery Process, at the Hanford site in southeastern Washington. Behind the long vertical window at the top left was the resin column that exploded, blowing out the glass in it and the diamond-shaped window below it. Harold McCluskey, the “Atomic Man,” was standing on the step-stool at the far left.
Chapter 7. Room 180 in Building 771 at the Rocky Flats atomic bomb plant in Colorado. This is where the fire started on September 11, 1957, in the glove box, middle left in the picture. Gloves have been turned inside out and are hanging down.
Chapter 7. This is the second floor in Building 771 at Rocky Flats, with HEPA filters in racks from floor to ceiling. They were supposed to keep radioactive dust from escaping the workspaces and being blown into the environment by the ventilation fans. In the fire of 1957, two men opened the door to see if the filters were on fire, and the rush of fresh air caused the plutonium dust that had built up in the room for years to ignite quite suddenly. The explosion destroyed the filter banks, and radioactive dust started going up the exhaust stack.
Chapter 7. Inside the Fuel Conversion Test Building at the JCO plant in Tokaimura, Japan, in 1999. Workers are suited up and evaluating the radiation lingering just after the criticality in Precipitation Tank B had been brought under control. They are looking at the desk at which Yutaka Yokodawa was sitting, doing paperwork, when Tank B became a nuclear reactor out of control. Tank B is located just out of the frame on the right.
Chapter 8. An MK-28FI thermonuclear weapon being unloaded from a B-52H strategic bomber by a crew of three at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, in 1984.
Chapter 9. The control room at TMI-2 near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on April 1, 1979. President Jimmy Carter with his wife, Rosalynn, are being briefed by James R. Floyd, supervisor of TMI-2 operations, who is the only one not wearing anti-contamination booties. Harold R. Denton, director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is standing in the foreground. Hidden behind Denton is Richard L. Thornburgh, governor of Pennsylvania. Carter demonstrated his knowledge by asking the right questions concerning the buildup of hydrogen in the containment building.
