SL-1: America's First Nuclear Disaster

The next in my [HALF-LIFE HISTORIES] series. Enjoy our deepest dive yet. Thanks for watching.

How could you work with experimental nuclear reactor, and think "ah, faulty control rod, nothing out of the ordinary". Same goes for any other nuclear technology, how could you just ignore those!

great story, couldn't be told better. Thanks Kyle!

It's important to note that if anything is going right at a nuclear plant it's because the control rods are involved.

After seeing so many different accidents and "malfunctions" through all of these videos... it occurs to me so much of it is negligence, or frugality. Higher ups not caring about proper protocol, or wanting things done cheaper. Workers not knowing what they should be doing, reporting issues, or again neglect.

So it appears the biggest issues with nuclear power, as is the case with so many other things in life... is humans.

I know this sounds like a miniscule thing, but it's actually got some serious implications; Richard Legg was a Construction Electrician, not an Electricians Mate.

As a Construction Electrician, Legg was a Seabee, or an enlisted member of the US Navy's Construction Force. That means that Legg was familiar with land based electrical grids, and most likely knew nothing about shipboard power systems. His training covered everything from the power plant down the line to the light switch, and his prior experience was most likely on construction sites and performing maintenance for the buildings on military bases.

One of the reasons this is important is because one of the only applications of the SLR type reactors was PM-3A, or "Nukey Poo," the reactor that powered McMurdo station on Antarctica. While it was in service, it was operated by Construction Electricians of the US Navy, guys who had the same training and experience as Legg.

Pov, you're a nuclear engineer working at the least loved nuclear power plant in the continental United States and the 'grunt' in charge of manually lifting the center control rod says: "To hell with it all."

Thank you.
Brilliant Presentation.
Intriguing
Jeri
Engineer
New Zealand.

I've lived in Idaho not 20 miles away from Idaho falls and around 60 away from the INL and I never knew about this. Very interesting!

If you go in the INL tour they said their had never been an accident their. Untill I raised my hand and said what about the sl1 incident? He quickly moved on. Nuclear energy people are always lieing

Women are not worth it guys. They never are

What i think is even more horrible is, that the control rod that killed byrnes moved so fast that it folded him in half

Thanks for keeping reality real. History seems to keep changing these days.

MF there's a lot of people thinking that their Radiation detector is broken on a fcking nuclear site, have some common sense

Wow, from what is told about Legg's bad reputation, he should never have been put in charge of a nuclear reactor.

So1 looks a bit like Sol...

I'm not the only one, right?

What happens when we let the army play with navy's toys

Its obviously the wifes fault.

I remember having to study this incident for the first time in Navy nuke school, i was horrified then (although we didnt talk about the potential love triangle aspect at all obv). this and all your other videos are doing a great job at explaining nuclear related information exceptionally well, thank you.

Is this the same voice as infographics show?

My brother would always say “Murphies such a bitch for making his law”

Radiation is like god recontextualizing hellish horrors for man’s eyes.

Did the facts tell you to exit stage left?

why the fuck did they even build a reactor without mechanical control via motors of the control rods

"Alright, who let Carl play with the nuclear reactor"

Always funny to think that they risk the whole world for some boiling water. ^^

Heavy water vs regular water. One is used to control reaction and the other is used to steam.

Shouldn't your fuel rods glow blue, not green?

Legg was a setup

Isn't saying that was a Design someone signed off on.
I still say nuclear is completely safe without human interaction

That's one of the same design flaws as the Chernobyl one; using water as a moderator. Problem is if the water doesn't flow fast enough for those voids to be replaced causing the voids to build up and losing water to the point that it loses its ability to moderate the reaction.

The fact that you could pull the rod out that far to cause criticality without some kind of lock or limiter is unbelievable from an engineering point of view.

This is why I don't buy any military grade equipment.

So his wife calling for a divorce distacted him

I went to the SL-1 site today. Well, as close as I could get anyway. Fillmore Blvd has a gate at Highway 20 that is chained shut. The site is just bare land today, but I figured I'd check it out anyway. There is a memorial plaque at the EBR-1 museum 9 miles west of the SL-1 site, but the actual site has no signs or markers at all.

Really interesting!

Here's something I don't want anywhere close to anything radioactive (beyond bananas*): my bare hands.
Or any part of exposed my skin, really, but I kinda feel like unprotected hands especially are just asking for shit to go a number of funky shapes.



fun fact: the SCP (3521, one of my personal favorites) that is supposed to kill you via banana induced radiation actually kills you with the amount of bananas it spawns (several tens of millions of unpeeled bananas) which I like to classify as a *safe dosage per serving.

There's also a great book called Idaho Falls, that goes into great detail about this

Imagine your jobs demands a regular maintenance task that puts you LITERALLY within inches of a brutal death.

yeaht his sounds like a dude that had enough of life.

As a maintenance electrician around the same age as these guys, I'm really glad we have strict safety procedures and my work can't cause a massive radioactive explosion. I can't imagine the stakes being this high, a lot of people get comfortable with danger in a maintenance setting but luckily I'm just as cautious of electricity as I was in the beginning, if not more after seeing some arc flashes that vaporize copper lol

HBO should get in on this!

Imagine getting a phone call at work being asked for a divorce and her taking half your money that you're currently out there working for and then you die. Hell of a final couple hours.

This story is infinitely more horrifying than the Three Mile Island accident, and yet look at which one was completely forgotten by the public and which one caused mass hysteria still felt to this day

we really don´t learn.

great documentary !!

Your graphic shows a reactor buried in the ground, but the SL-1 was only "shielded" with a steel building, fully above ground!