S3 E1: Close To Home

The alarm bells went off at 9.01 p.m. Deep in the Idaho desert, the men sitting inside the warmth of fire station number one no doubt rolled their eyes. The alert came from a small nuclear test reactor known as SL-1. It sat isolated eight miles down the road, and this would be the firefighters' third trip there today. Twice already. They had responded to false alarms from a faulty fire detector at the small reactor. Now it was dark and bitterly cold below zero on this frigid January night.

So the idea of suiting up just to go reset the fire alarm was not very appealing. But that was a job, and off they went, anticipating a quick trip. Nine minutes later, the firemen arrived at the gate. It was locked. And normally, one of the three men working at the SL-1 reactor would buzz them in, but no one answered the phone. This was the first clue that something was off.

The next one came when they got inside and saw a warning light blinking on the control panel of the reactor, but couldn't find any of the men who were supposed to be working. They saw three coats, three lunchboxes. They checked the log, three people working. But nobody was in the office area. And so they started going up the stairway, the access to the reactor itself, an enclosed stairway on the outside of the silo. And that's when their meters started going up. Their Geiger counters.

The readings on the firefighters' radiation detectors redlined, suggesting dangerously high levels of radiation. So high that they thought their equipment was broken. They went back down and grabbed another device from their truck and headed back up the... to the reactor room. And again,

The detector maxed out when they were only halfway up, which meant something had gone horribly wrong with the reactor. The firefighters raced up the rest of the stairs and peered through the window of the reactor room door to see twisted metal and debris. all covered in water that had once been cooling the reactor's core. They couldn't go in. The radiation levels were through the roof. But they did see that out of the three men, they saw one body.

One obviously dead and one that was still alive, still breathing. Two men accounted for, but they didn't see the third man, and they couldn't take the time to look, either. They'd already been exposed to too much radiation. and the damaged reactor was spewing out more. They hurried back down the stairs to come up with a rescue plan and discovered that a growing crowd had assembled outside the building. Health physicists and nurses, government officials and military men.

When there's a problem at a nuclear reactor, the news travels fast. Everyone wanted to know what had happened, but the first order of business was to rescue the man the firefighters had seen breathing inside the lethally radioactive reactor room. It meant loading the injured man onto a stretcher, hauling him down the stairs, and getting him into a makeshift ambulance, all without getting overexposed to dangerous radioactive particles.

Two of the rescuers' respirators failed, forcing them to breathe in the contaminated air. But they managed to get the man outside. So they were waiting for the doctor to determine how do we treat the patient, and while waiting, he did die. Flying concrete and steel do a hell of a lot of damage. If not hit by the debris, it would not have been pleasant for him. I'd guess only a couple days before he would have died from radiation exposure.

The responders also managed to recover the second man's body. But the third man remained missing. That is, until someone looked up. One of them was impaled to the ceiling with a control rod that was ejected from the core, and it spread radiation everywhere, destroyed the plant, and pretty much destroyed the armies. nuclear power program along with it. In a matter of seconds, a quiet, cold January night became radioactively hot. It forced us to reconsider our plans for an atomic future.

and reckon with some of the questions we might have preferred to ignore. I'm Laura Krantz. Welcome to the third season of Wild Thing, Going Nuclear. A series about the power of the universe contained in the tiny little package of the atom. You and I are living in the atomic age. The endless debate over harnessing that power. The mysteries of the universe.

and whether we humans are responsible enough to mess with it. Of benefit or of destruction. Of good or of evil. The SL-1 nuclear reactor meltdown took place in 1961. at the National Reactor Testing Station, the NRTS, in the harsh, high desert of Idaho just 45 miles west of the town of Idaho Falls, where I grew up.

All of this happened years before I was born. My father was a sophomore at Idaho Falls High School at the time, and Jim Francis, who later became my favorite high school history teacher and a member of the Idaho Falls City Council, was himself a freshman. and his father worked at the NRTS. He was there in 61, and I don't know if he was one of the ones that was...

Got all dressed up and was in for a few seconds and then had to get out. But he was definitely part of the people on the scene at that time. It was the first and one of the deadliest nuclear incidents in U.S. history. And yet I didn't learn about it until I was an adult. In fact, most of the people I grew up with hadn't heard about it either. You'd think that an event like that would have had a lasting effect, given that it happened just down the road and three men died. But in truth...

Their deaths came at a time when the U.S. was pursuing technology, which was seen as the key to a better future. And for the citizens of the nearby towns, including Idaho Falls, the risks associated with that technology seemed acceptable. So the deaths of those three men may have been seen as tragic, but for the greater good. And I think that was very much a prevailing view of a lot of the people who lived in southeast Idaho.

Susan Stacey is a historian in Boise, Idaho, and the author of Proving the Principle, a History of the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, 1949-1999. The site was isolated in the desert for a reason. Accidents were a possibility, and how tragic, but it's part of progress. And so the story of SL1 kind of faded away. It certainly doesn't have the same name recognition as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima.

I really don't know that I would have thought much more about it if it weren't for the fact that now, 60 years later, my hometown, Idaho Falls, is exploring the possibility of using nuclear power. In fact, a lot of places across the nation are. And it made me wonder how far we've come. No doubt our technology has improved. But are we more responsible when it comes to wielding it? This season of Wild Thing is supported solely by First Light Capital Group.

Founded by female entrepreneur Alba Tull, First Light Capital Group is an innovative investment firm that strives to generate outstanding financial returns and change how the industry fosters talent and diversity. First Light has a dual-pronged mission.

First, it trades public equities, private equities, and debt using its proprietary data-informed investment process. And second, Through a separate seed fund, it seeks to cultivate the next generation of female entrepreneurs by providing women-led businesses in the technology and biotechnology sectors with the capital, infrastructure support, and mentorship needed to take their companies to the next level.

To learn more about First Light Capital Group, please visit firstlightcapitalgroup.com. The Snake River Plain, where the SL1 disaster took place, stretches 400 miles across the southern part of Idaho. If you look at a topographical map of the state, it kind of looks like a wide smile, a flat arc of land sandwiched between more mountainous terrain, with the ribbon of the Snake River cutting through it.

Lava rock and volcanic calderas and cones stud the eastern side of the plain. It looks a lot like parts of Yellowstone because, well, it once was Yellowstone. Yellowstone hotspot traced its way. from the west towards the east, but before it got to Yellowstone, it was producing the same kind of effects, lava production, volcanic activity, all across southern Idaho.

Provided you can get your hands on some water, that volcanic soil does produce excellent potatoes. To be honest, I think they're the finest spuds known to civilization. As a landscape, though... It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea, although I've always found the black lava and dusty green sagebrush against the piercing blue sky to be quite pretty.

This stark and seemingly barren desert was also the ancestral winter home for the Shoshone and Bannock Native Americans. Humans have used the land for thousands of years, but nobody ever really lived on this desert. Don Miley is the now-retired tour director at the Idaho National Laboratory. It was always just referred to, well, by Europeans as the Arco Desert.

and it truly is a desert environment. Rainfall and snowmelt yearly is nine and a half inches out here with an evaporation rate of 30 inches. Attempts to farm this area fell flat. Too dry in the summer, too cold in the winter. Even the indigenous people using this land didn't live there year-round.

And so, in the 1950s, when the government wanted a place to experiment with nuclear reactors, the Arco Desert provided the kind of location they were looking for, where if something went sideways, not too many people would get hurt. So this swath of uninhabited land became home to the National Reactor Testing Station, which eventually became the Idaho National Laboratory and, coming full circle, is now home to the National Reactor Innovation Center.

Rather than try and keep track of that alphabet soup of names and acronyms, most people refer to it as the site. Which, honestly, sounds like a pretty ominous name. You know, like a CIA black site or the Trinity test site. I'm assured by scientists there, though, that it's just a generic name that stuck.

There are several different contractors out here all doing experiments or doing certain kinds of things for the Atomic Energy Commission, and so I think the people in town just always refer to it as, you know, the site. For decades, the site has been home to top-notch scientists doing cutting-edge research and, in a hilarious twist of irony, a lot of U.S. Navy sailors. Probably not the port of call they had in mind when they enlisted.

But despite being hundreds of miles from the ocean, the site was the birthplace of the nuclear navy, which we'll explore more in later episodes. As a kid, I regularly saw swabbies in their white bell-bottomed pants and Dixie Cup hats waiting for the big yellow and silver government buses that would shuttle them 50 miles out into the desert every morning and bring them back every night. And they weren't the only ones catching a ride to the site.

The government has had these facilities out in the desert since the end of World War II. Small compounds scattered over hundreds of acres where scientists and engineers experiment with different types of reactors and the materials that go in them. It has also been one of the largest, if not the largest, employer in Idaho Falls. Just about everybody in town knows somebody who works there. And the history and the economy of the town are pretty tied up with the site.

So it's no surprise that many people want to see this new nuclear project succeed. Jim Francis again. Overall, I think Idaho Falls has been supportive of INL in terms of being a community largely accepting of atomic power and nuclear power. If all goes according to plan, Idaho Falls is on track to begin using energy from a nuclear reactor in 2030. It's the first time the city will actually benefit from the nuclear reactors that have been its neighbors for decades.

But this isn't Homer Simpson's nuclear power plant. No giant cooling towers dominating the landscape. No antiquated knobs and dials. This is the next generation of reactors. Smaller. Modernized. Modular. more efficient, which, advocates hope, will completely change the American energy landscape and help us fight climate change. The planet doesn't have time for us to wait another 20 years.

We really have to solve this problem in the next 10 years if we're going to have an impact. And nuclear is the pathway forward. And I'll be honest, I think it's... the bridge to get us to a carbon-free future. But for reasons we'll explore in detail in this series, nuclear energy has long been a divisive topic, even in Idaho Falls, as Jim Francis points out.

We have people that are not totally enthralled with it, and we have some that are totally enthralled with it. And those that aren't enthralled often have reasonable doubts. For Jim, the biggest concern is financial. I think that's one of the problems that we can see on the big scale nuclear plants is they are not proving to be financially totally viable. And I have this ambivalent feeling.

of hoping it can work, but not being able personally as a member of the power board and the city council to continue the commitment. Because the risk, financial risk, is becoming too great. Tammy Thatcher, a local resident, is more concerned about health. So my mother's family, my grandfather, settled in the area.

halfway between the chem plant where they reprocessed navy fuel and experiment fuel and test area north where they did open air engine tests there releasing a lot of radionuclides and my grandmother did die of a cancer that could be related to radiation exposure. The Shoshone and Bannock tribes, whose lands border the site, have concerns about protecting the environment. You know, everything's good until it's not. And if there were emissions, this is...

this is the cleanup we'd be looking at. And it actually pains me to think about what could be impacted out here because this water, these streams, you know, the animals, you know. And others fear that nuclear energy might pose a threat to public safety. In part, that's because atomic power is so closely associated with one of the most horrifying events in modern American history. encountered the idea of nuclear fission first with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There was always this cloud kind of hanging over their head that the root of this possible benefit is war and destruction and death. That's Dr. Sarah Roby. She specializes in nuclear history and American cultural history. And she's talking about the first use of nuclear weapons during World War II, which left behind not only the immediate physical devastation, but also long-lasting radiation.

Something that's invisible to us and potentially deadly. You can't see it. You can't taste it. You can't hear it. You can't feel it without, you know, sensitive instrumentation that most people don't just have in their house. It's frightening because it holds the potential to do so much harm, but there's nothing you can do about it at an individual scale. In too high a dose, radiation can be life-threatening.

Had any of those men survived the explosion at the SL-1 reactor, they would have most certainly died of radiation poisoning. But that doesn't mean all radiation is bad. In fact, we're exposed to radiation every day. Totally. It permeates our environment. I mean, there's ionizing radiation being produced almost everywhere. Food, right?

carbon-14. You know, we exchange with the air carbon-14. You know, there's some milligrams of carbon-14 in your body right now that's radioactive. It's part of your structure. And if radiation has always been around... it raises questions about its role in life on Earth. There's still no scientific consensus on this, but if radiation exposure is at the heart of our fears about nuclear energy, and it's less of a concern than we thought,

we might be more inclined to pursue the nuclear option, harnessing that energy for good, improving lives instead of taking them. This technology might bring us... you know, positive benefit to all of humankind. Oh, well, nuclear medicine might, you know, cure terrible diseases. You know, nuclear electricity might make electricity too cheap to meter.

There's also the hope that embracing a fully nuclear age could mean practically unlimited clean energy. I'm in this field because I believe it's safe, you know, large, reliable power source. That can be one of our primary sources of no emission, carbon-free electricity. And a way to mitigate the effects of climate change. For decades, we've touted nuclear energy as the key to a better future.

And many people feel that now is the moment when we might realize those hopes. I'll be the first to admit that this season will be a little different from the last two. Bigfoot and extraterrestrials have a certain glamour. while atoms and nuclear energy sound like a high school class some of us would rather skip. But bear with me, because both the science of nuclear energy and how we think about it are fascinating.

And this is a story that has intrigued me for a long time, not least because of my own connection to it. I've been in close proximity to nuclear science for a good chunk of my life. I grew up practically next door to the site where reactor tests are ongoing. I went to college down the road from Hanford, Washington, one of the Cold War's big plutonium production facilities. And I now live in Denver, not far from another defunct plutonium site, Rocky Flats.

But I didn't ever have much of a handle on what nuclear science actually is. What is nuclear energy? How is it different from nuclear weapons? What are the benefits and the drawbacks? I mean, I'll be perfectly honest here, before embarking on this journey, I had only the most general idea of what atoms were, let alone how we cracked them open. In fact, most of my familiarity with the idea of nuclear energy.

and maybe yours too, came from stories of those big three nuclear disasters I mentioned before. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. These names conjure up images of nuclear fallout, dystopian landscapes, wastelands of irradiated humans and animals and plants. They illustrate. sometimes with cinematic license, the worst-case scenarios, and feed into our deepest fear about the dangers of nuclear energy. But history shows that we've long had visions of a utopian society.

running on clean energy, powered by the atom, and moving civilization forward into a bright future. Both the worst and the best possible outcomes leave us endlessly fascinated. And I'm not just talking about policy papers and energy assessments. There's an enormous catalog of books, movies, comics, and television shows that draw on all things atomic. From Star Trek to The Simpsons.

And from Spider-Man to the China Syndrome, pop culture remains fixated on both the potential and the perils of the nuclear age. Good or bad? Should we or shouldn't we? A risk worth taking? Or one best avoided? The debate has gone on for decades, and I'm not sure there's a clear answer. There's a huge amount of information out there on this topic, and there's no way that I can cover it all. But I wanted to explore a wide range of perspectives.

I spoke with people who have shifted from anti-nuclear to pro-nuclear. No, I started out as opposing nuclear power. What changed me was when I began working on my book on the development of the atomic bomb. And I got to meet... scientists, many of them Nobel laureates, many of them good and decent human beings. And people who once worked with nuclear reactors, but now wonder if they're actually such a good idea.

I was very pro-nuclear power when I was in that world. But the game changer with the differences like with nuclear power is like some of these problems never go away. Like if there's a disaster with the nuclear power plant. you're going to be stuck with the problems for thousands of years. With every person I interviewed for this podcast, my opinion changed.

One minute, I was convinced we truly could have an unlimited supply of clean energy and get climate change under control. The next, I was worrying about nuclear waste and the possibility of another accident like SL1. Because while it's unlikely we'd see that kind of meltdown that killed those three men in 1961, accidents do happen, despite our best intentions. Every question I asked led to a handful of others, like a nuclear chain reaction.

which you'll learn all about in the next episode. In all of my research, though, one thing was clear. We have a well-documented history with nuclear power and a lot of uncertainty about its future. This season on Wild Thing, we'll use science, philosophy, history, and culture to explore the idea of nuclear energy. We'll examine the real risks and potential rewards and spend some time in the gray areas, too.

Out of fear of disaster, are we missing out on a better future? You know, I feel like if we're going to kind of make a lot of progress on climate change, we're going to have to figure out how we're going to build a lot more nuclear power plants. Or in pursuing nuclear power. Are we making an existential mistake? Climate change is very frightening. It's very real. But if you have enough nuclear to make a difference to climate change, you'll be ruining not just one generation of lives.

You're wiping out humanity. We may have unlocked the potential of the atom, but given our nature and our history with it, are we really responsible enough to use it? Over the course of this series, we'll be exploring what went wrong at SL1 and whether something like that could happen again. And as we think about our future with nuclear energy, it won't just be about the scientific elements, but also about the human ones. Ready? Enjoying Wild Thing? Want more?

Premium subscribers get each episode early and exclusive access to all bonus episodes, not to mention the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from supporting the show. For more information, go to wildthingpodcast.com. That's Wild Thing Podcast, all one word. You'll also find out more about this season, including how to get Wild Thing t-shirts and stickers.

Also, please consider leaving us a review wherever you get your podcasts and definitely tell your friends. All of this really helps get the word out about the show and makes future seasons more likely. This podcast is a production of Foxtopus Inc. with generous support. from First Light Capital. Wild Thing is edited by Alicia Lincoln with sound mixing and music from Louis Weeks. Our executive producer is Scott Carney and I'm your host and creator, Laura Krantz.