A Brief History of: The SL-1 Reactor Accident
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 พ.ย. 2018
- #History #Nuclear
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The SL-1 was an experimental nuclear reactor, and stood for Stationary low power reactor no. one. The idea for the reactor was part of a series of experimental nuclear power plants for use in remote radar outposts in the arctic, where the only power source had been from diesel generators.
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Mistake correction* 9,100 KG*
0:53 *arctic, northern hemisphere (not antarctica as pictured)?
**PROPRIETARY**
Also *casket* with one t
And at 10:00 it's known as '...Operable Unit 5-05' and not "...Operational Unit 5-05'.
and the burried mass in units of meter....
imagine being one of the firefighters sent to investigate and when you look up you just see a guy`s corpse impaled to the ceiling,thats predator movie level shit right there
Welcome to the real world. I've seen worse in the welding industry.
Project Management CW lol. You’ve seen worse than a literal fatal nuclear reactor accident?
@@jtfoog5220 Oh hell yes.
@@projectmanagement2356 I'm morbidly curious now.
They didnt notice him for an hour!
Lead engineer, "I have an idea, lets let's make the the lifting of the control rods manual and open to human error"!
Thunderous applause ensues.
They were made this way as part of the design, it was supposed to be simple, portable, light, few moving components. It's a good design choice let down by poor training.
The layout of the reactor had been altered before the shutdown and the one rod had too much control over the reactivity. The original design was safe and it wouldn't have gone critical like that.
@@ImBarryScottCSS "It's a good design choice"
... no it's not. Considering the immense consequences and the ease of pulling the rod out too much, it's a terrible design. Engineers are trained to consider these things. Clearly they did not.
@Gareth Johnstone which still makes it a terrible design, just intentional
Id honestly nope the fuck outta there
When the boss hears about this, he's gonna hit the roof.
wg davidson Now that was a good one.😂
God I laughed reading this!!
I give this joke a glowing review.
You sir, are a bad person! 🤣🤣🤣
Boo boo hiss hiss
so the fire department knew about radiation risks and carried geiger counters.... but the reactor workers were plunging the reactor like a clogged toilet??? wtf lol
That is the best TL;DR I have ever read.
Oh god, I can imagine it so vividly now. Except instead of shit flying into your face it's the fucking plunger going mach 3... XD
It was safe until the accident occured. I'm just happy the fire dept had Geiger counters unlike the fire dept at Chernobyl 20 years later.
That made me laugh like a maniac. xD
"it's the fucking plunger going mach 3"
My sides XD
I wonder if the impaled guy's injuries were immediately fatal or if he was alive long enough to think "Well, it appears there may be something wrong with the reactor..."
If he was lucky he was probably knocked out or killed instantly.
From what I was told by my sources in the NSA, the guy was impaled to the ceiling and when the rescue crew came in and saw Fred up on the ceiling, they started cracking up and Fred started cracking up and he says, C’mon you guys!! Get me down. I’m beginning to feel like a ceiling fan!! They got him down, packed his intestines back in his stomach and they all went out for a beer.
He was impaled through his groin and exit wound around his lower neck and shoulder back, large number of his organs must been shredded by that super fast rod and he must passed out immediately I would guess,his head hit the top of confinement 💥😩
I think anything capable of pinning me to the cieling would kill me in inpact
@@user-ln2kz3fh2u Yeah, I agree with you and Marek, he would have hit the ceiling very fast, it would have been like hitting the ground after a long fall.
I had always heard there was a guy that got impaled to the ceiling. I assumed it was an urban legend. That's brutal.
I think I'd rather have gone out like Legg (i.e. impaled to the ceiling) than McKinley. Slow, agonising death by radiation? No thank you.
How many guys does it take to screw in a control rod lol
TheLongDark it wouldn’t have been a slow death. The force of the explosion would have killed him possibly before he even made it to the ceiling. When tires explode next to people it normally kills them instantly from the force.
TheLongDark that is an epic game btw
@@N.I.R.A.T.I.A.S. Totally agree but odds are the dude that somehow managed to survive was probably unconscious after the event till death. So all that radiation poisoning he probably (HOPEFULLY) never felt and just died. Cause man, being quickly impaled to death sounds brutal, but far more merciful in the long run compared to being showed in lethal levels of radioactive steam and water... Like, FUCK THAT!
So, they were essentially trying to make an Ikea reactor?
Kerbüm
J_Squatch yes
Sadly an Eagle Scout would figure out how and basically do the same but less immediate death and more mystery
J_Squatch they were trying to make a dollar store reactor that was 1£ from the dollar store
@@drunkencowboi7934 Actually the boyscout's "reactor" never went critical nor was it safe. In fact people like me had to dispose and clean up that disaster. Also his was supposed to be a breeder reactor which was successfully built decades before David Hahn built his; where do you think he got his ideas?
"impaled to the ceiling" brutal!
Still better then being bathed in radioactive steam and water, only to slowly die hours later from it all. The dude impaled probably didn't feel much after he realized his mistake and had his life probably flash in front of his eyes, or maybe that was the super critical ionized light... Yea but seriously, FUCK that shit.
A horrific way of dying
Metal...
A friend of mine in gradschool did a report on this accident. His sources I'd have to ask, but he calculated some staggering numbers for radiation doses the men endured. The most frightening thing though, was the neutron flux the men experience was so intense the sub-atomic neutrons were punching macroscopic holes in the veins of the lone surviving person's brain. So every time his heart pumped his brain just hemorrhaged more.
That’s horror movie material, good lord.
Jesus
Something worth noting is that Byres (the man who pulled the rod and caused the incident) was 22, Legg (the man who was impaled) was 26 and Mckinley (the one who didn't die instantly) was 27. These guys were working in a nuclear reactor in their twenties. Who knows what they might have gone on to do later in life. What a shame.
A couple of corrections:
1. Control rods do not contain fissionable material, they attenuate neutrons, so to say that a control rod "went critical" is nonsense. As the rod is removed, fewer neutrons are attenuated which leads to more fission events and more power.
2. "Critical" is the normal state of a functioning nuclear reactor. In order for a reactor to generate power, it first needs to be critical.
3. The reactor actually went supercritical, or "prompt critical" when the control rod was removed too far too quickly. It is insane to me to think that the design of this reactor allowed, let alone required, manual removal of any control rods. That's an engineering mistake on scale with some of the insanely stupid design issues that plagued Chernobyl.
@John Goblikon is my spirit animal settle down.
Not quite as bad a design as Chernobyl having the moderator and control rod joined together as 1 rod but yeah not a good design
@Michael Jones Some of us care about accuracy when it comes to disseminating information on the internet.
@Michael Jones your a looser.. now just fuck off troll
Can you imagine the times they had to pull on those stuck rods without pulling them too far?
The reactor designers failed to make it "Soldier Proof."
Does such a thing exist?
Drop by either the "Forgotten Weapons" or "C&Rsenal" blogs/pages and that phrase will come up now and then about military weapons through the years. If you are a fan of mechanical precision, STAY AWAY from the "InRange" mud tests, unless you want to find out if Ye Olde AK-47 can survive gobs of mud and still function. Another way of making something "soldier proof" is to keep "Murphy's Law" from happening.
there is no such thing, variations include Marine proof and Sailor Proof, speaking as a sailor, you could lock a sailor in a featureless empty room with 2 steel ball bearings, he would find a way to break one lose the other.
We've always referred to directions that prevent "things that create safety briefings" as Army Proof as well. While a lot of people might consider the Air Force as the branch full of "smart people", believe me when I say that we've had some pretty dumb people also. No one is safe from safety briefings.
Two screws blocking control rod from going all the way out. Two screws. Two small pieces of steel... We are having jokes about Chernobyl... But at least there that was communism policy fault (to hide all faults of their "great" reactor design). Here? Only idiocy...
Richard: Byrnes, just lift the rod 10 centimeters, right?
John: *YEET*
Fred C. Scroll
YOU USE COMMIE UNITS
@@airraid9614 It's not commie units you un-intelligent ape. It is used all over the world. not only your small minded world of United States of America and Russia.
Marta Lechwar
I am an American (and jokingly follow the stereotype) and we use imperial units and it’s a joke to call metric commie units in some regions
Key word SOME
So take a joke
@@Muxerius r/woosh
@@Muxerius I thought it was funny and I still agree that we burger folk should have not backed off on converting all the way to metric in the 70's
Damn, I'm getting old. I get enthused when a TH-cam vid mentions a former employer of mine- Combustion Engineering Inc. And yes- I worked in their nuclear power department.
Brian Garrow Homer fucking Simpson lol
@@TheRealCaptainFreedom I built them. Homer ran them.
@@briangarrow448 interesting mind talking a bit about what you did?
We won't be happy till we blow ourselves to fk. Lead coffins. Burial site. Mojavi dessert site. All radioactive fk ups. Insanity. When we can match both einstein relativity theories we will have a chance. U till then don't touch
Oh wow you're pretty cool.
The rod went up his groin and exited through his shoulder... 😱
Imagine how you might stand over something like that, to pull upward as hard as possible. It would be centered right under a man using his legs at full strength. Then it breaks free ....
EEEEK
Lumen Lopes nut shot.. ouch
@@josephastier7421 he was standing on a balcony above them though, he wasn't the one pulling on the rod.
@@suzbone Oh, I did not know that.
"Oh wait, you said CENTImeters. Sorry, missed the prefix."
"The rod became critical."
The reactor went critical because the control rod was removed. Control rods don't go critical, reactors do.
critical just means it's operating at full capacity.
@@John-yy1oy No.
@@John-yy1oy Criticality in nuclear fission refers to the system producing electric and operating safely. Criticality in context of nuclear power is a desired state to be in as strange as that sounds.
@@SpLiC3 criticality refers to a fissile material's condition, when the energy output is constant (only one neutron expelled in a fission event creates another fission event, or a chain reaction). If more than one neutron from a "parent" fission event create fission events, that's called over-criticality, and that's the principle of an atomic bomb.
@@bogdan_n www.thebalance.com/what-is-criticality-in-a-nuclear-power-plant-1182619 Here is a concise overview. I think the focus of the comments here is just the terminology the presenter used and a technical hiccup on saying the control rods went critical. As you note as long as it is controlled you are fine. Uncontrollable super criticality, that is a horse of a different colour hehe.
When you pull out too far.
Tanner Robinson Spag all over her babymaker.
better to soak it in cider
Yeah that's a problem little boys have.
Lmfao 😂
Pulling out too far is a problem. However the rapid reinsertion is the killer of dreams and maker of nightmares. Peyronie's Disease is a bitch
Terrible accident. I had to undergo hazmat response training for my job, and the SL-1 accident was used as an example of a nuclear reactor accident that would require local resources. The control rod design was always an issue with these small reactors since there was no way to restart a cold reactor without someone manually withdrawing a fuel rod by hand. The need for portability precluded any kind of machinery to do the job. Then reactor only contain 40 of the normal 59 fuel rods since the reactor was only being used for power and not to test providing steam for space heating. as part of the specs for the reactor. The fewer control rods meant the withdrawal of the control rod would make the reactor critical much faster, and that's just what happened.
As to why Byrne decided to withdraw the control rod as far as he did, we will never know. The best guess, minus the suicide idea, is the rod was stuck and, in the process of yanking on it. it came free faster than assumed and caused the accident. The Army CID and Atomic Energy Commission investigators along with the Idaho State Police spent quite a bit of time investigating all aspects of the three men's lives as well as lives of their families. Byrnes' wife was having an affair with another man, prompting the divorce case. It was not with Richard McKinley however. Could it have been suicide on the part of Byrnes? It's possible, but the stuck fuel rod, something that happened six times in the previous year, seems a lot more likely of an explanation. My training was mostly that if I saw steam coming from a reactor building, get back in my vehicle and hightail it out of there.
Yeah , I think the stuck control rod theory is MUCH more likely than any suicide/murder plot, the control rod had to be withdrawn a certain distance , and then clamped in position, as part of the procedure, it seems very likely that the rod was stuck and was given a good yank to free it, causing it to withdraw too far (it only needed to be withdrawn an extra few inches to cause the reactor to go critical).
By the time the guy would have realised he had pulled the rod out too far it would have been too late, the reactor went critical almost immediately due to it's configuration with only 40 fuel rods and the rest is unfortunate history.
At least we learned some lessons about reactor design from this incident, but there is a good argument that the reactor should have been shut down once they knew control rods were getting jammed, it was an accident waiting to happen.
Occam's razor.
@@paulelephant9521 it was said that the centre fuel rod was less likely to be stuck than the others. Maybe he expected it to be stuck, but it came out freely...
If it is so critical, why not provide a fixture for the process to prevent the rod being withdrawn too far.
Reminds me of how the Navy tried to blame the turret explosion on the USS Iowa on a sailor by saying it was a sex-driven murder-suicide plot. Our puritanical country...
@@s.sestric9929 It was somewhat similar in that original thought was that Byrne and McKinley were having a gay love affair and the Mckinney broke up with Byrne, thereby leading to the murder suicide. That line of inquiry was abandoned pretty quickly as was the story of the affair with between Byrne's wife and McKinley. It is a sign of how we think as a society but, after 27 years as a police officer investigating such cases, the first suspects in a murder are the spouse or significant other, regardless of adultery or sexual orientation. We followed that line of investigation first because it turns out to be true in a surprisingly large number of cases.
Living in this area it has since the accident been considered a love triangle story. A member of my family worked there and said the guy stuck in the ceiling by a control rod was super gruesome to see. The amount of radioactivity in his body was almost enough to stop decomposition of his corpse. You could get a lethal dose of radioactivity just by standing by his body for a few seconds.
Utter nonsense.
Ok. He wasnt on the ceiling long enough for decomposition in the first place. And how long did this "family member" live? Cuz as far as I understand, the fire crew were given 60 seconds at a time to work. And no mention of their livelihoods after being in direct contact. Their lifespan probably wasnt long.. And no one within a mile would have gone without being effected.
No its true one of the men cheated on his white with an employee
good lord, could you imagine being one of the firefighters and discovering that body on the ceiling? jesus that's horrifying
“Uh, so, Chief, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Good news is I found the third guy...”
@@theclockworksolution8521 shut up
At least it was presumably in one piece. I've worked car and plane accidents where you couldn't identify where one body ended and another began, or even how ma y people were involved. Shits hardcore.
@@RT-qd8yl In my career offshore, I once worked on a crew where one member found another's body hanging in a compressor building. It was a suicide, as he was facing arrest upon returning to land (multiple felony charges). The man whom found the body was really affected by this, and I'm sure it sitill haunts him today.
Yeah, wearing a complete hazmat suit and then puking into your facemask when you realized what you were seeing...
Impaled vertically through the body and pinned to the ceiling by a shield plug from an exploding nuclear reactor is definitely getting added to my "Most Metal ways to die" list
Being pinned to the ceiling is horror movie levels imagery
Better than dying of radiation exposure
I've worked with heavy and/or temperamental equipment before, it's not hard to picture how the rod could be accidentally pulled out too far during manual extraction.
... to think, something as simple as a ratcheting puller rigged as an overhead crane might have been enough to prevent the accident.
"the core is gone, I saw it with my own eyes"
"he's in shock get him out of here"
On the topic of disasters you could look into the Eschede rail disaster. I've always found it a fascinating event. There has been a decent amount of interest surrounding it in the past but no good content covering has come out for it in quite a while.
Thanks got the suggestion I'll have a look
something measuring a few cubic meters, but not weighing more than 9,1 Kg?...something's wrong there.
I assumed they were planning to make it out of expanded polystyrene, or clouds.
Buggs Thinking cotton candy.
Make a 10,000 kilo reactor, attach a rigid airship with 9,991 kilos of lift, so the remaining weight would be 9 kilos.
Wait, nuclear powered airships!!!! Maybe even entire floating nuclear powered cities!!! Why hasn't this been done?
Oh yeah the Nazis lost the war. Nevermind.
@@morrighanwermarn-arnburg7333 - Not Nazis. Germans starts a World War II, and World War I. Wehrmaht it was German army.
@@OblivionLPS. the "Wehrmacht" was the army but the political party in power that was RUNNING the military was the Nationalist Socialist Worker's Union under Adolf Hitler, at least that's the case for world war 2. However, nobody said anything about WWI, m8.
"This is designed for 9 rods, but we're only going to use 5..."
If I remember correctly from my lectures, the control rod was only supposed to be withdrawn about 3", yet instead was withdrawn about 20+". The resulting power surge was gigantic. 3 MW was the design and it got up to 20,000 MW in the same time it takes to blink.
Well, that's probably not good
It's a tad on the unsettling side, yes...
It isn't good. It was able to so quickly have an excursion due to how highly enriched (over 90%) the fuel was. With that mixture, it takes the fuel mere fractions of a second to multiply in power many times. Modern commercial nuclear reactors use enrichments of 3-5%, as a comparison. So instead it takes minutes to multiply in power, making it vastly more controllable.
I don't mean to sound smart, why not a stop to keep rod from coming out to far? its like the physicists and engineers didn't talk shop, if I knew you could die from pulling the rod out to far, I would design it different. they made it to simple. I bet they never did that again?
@Pinochet Pilot #666 don't you mean slow neutrons
11:28 "Accidental withdraw" Yep, that is gonna be messy.
Maybe why the divorce also
I find it so interesting how few people know of SL-1. My father told me of this accident when I was a child and I always felt so sad for the families of the three men. Especially the man who was impaled in the ceiling.
I have watched several of your nuclear accident videos and have been impressed. I have been in the nuclear industry since 1971. I have been working in Nuclear Criticality Safety for about 25 years and have taught Criticality Safety to workers for many years. Keep up the good work.
We learned about this in Nuke school while in the Navy. The lesson they wanted us to learn from it was this: Don't let the Army play with glowing rocks.
... And yet the supervisor in this particular incident was a sailor.
My father worked at this site when this happened. He was off shift when it happened. Thank God...
Shit man please keep doing nuclear history, love your production style. The zoom transitions are great
When he said "Arctic," he showed a picture of Antarctica.
Gene Kopf That was what I noticed first, and people claim we Americans don't know geography.
John Klar oh I definitely don’t know geography 😂
First thing I noticed too, but... I'm Swedish.
How could he!! This is just unacceptable
Since he was reading the Wikipedia article that I wrote, I'll tell you what happened. The page says, accurately, "arctic regions," and he showed one such. The Army put one at the South Pole using a different design.
One the biggest misconceptions is that Mr. Legg was impaled by a control rod, as evidenced by many of the comments below. Quote from the official accident report, "the No. 7 shield plug assembly impaled the #3 crew member and pinned him to the bottom of the fan floor a distance of approximately 13 feet above the reactor head." The report also goes on to state that when photographs were taken of the reactor room shortly after the accident, control rod #9, the one that had been pulled, was found laying across the top of the reactor vessel lid. If Legg was impaled by the control rod, it wouldn't have been laying on top of the vessel lid, it would have been found stuck in the ceiling. Reading is fundamental.
PD should pin this comment, so many people in the comments are making this mistake..
@@xiphosura413 we're going off the video. There's a pointy rod drawn, so we infer it was..a rod. But yeah, he should definitely add that to the pinned comment, to clear things up.
My family comes from that region of Idaho (both parents grew up in Pocatello) and we have always heard the affair story when it has come up. But that’s just the speculation that I have heard in the surrounding towns and from locals who have lived there since the 30s.
That was good. I'd never heard of it before.
It's sad that things like this happen, but the upside is that we can look back, understand the chain of events that led to this disaster and learn from them.
May all who died rest in peace.
That was definitely a gruesome industrial accident. I can just imagine the conversations that they must have had with the people that they recruited to go in and retrieve Legg’s body. Certainly, not just another day at the job.
I live near where this occurred- as you might imagine, I found it a tad ominous when I first heard about it.
This content is so great, I have and will continue to watch and like everything on this channel while I work. It's nice to have something educational to listen to so thank you for all your hard work and I know it's appreciated within the community.
Me, watching for the first time: "Oh, so that guy's above all the action -- knowing what I know about radiation, being the farhest away, I I bet he's going to be the safest - "
Boy was *I* surprised!
Not as surprised as he was 👍
“impaled by one of the shield plugs” ouch radioactive impaling
Plainly Difficult got it wrong, it was actually a control rod assembly.
@@rsrt6910 still a better love story than twillight.
@@rsrt6910 Bamboozled, it was actually a shield plug. The control rod (as you can see in the images of the accident) was found just lying on top of the assembly. He wasn't even standing over the control rod.
Is this Project related to Project Iceworm? Also nuclear harpoon, what a way to go.
talk about a bad day at work
I believe there was a similar incident at Fort Greeley in Alaska. The reactor is still there, but no longer in service.
Wow... not even a mechanical device to prevent control rod over extension and 'sticky' control rods for manual removal? Could anyone not see this was an accident waiting to happen?
David Palmer hindsight is a wonderful thing.....
@@cornellkirk8946 More like safety wasn't considered important. Just take a look at the reckless experimentation using a screwdriver and the 'Demon Core' that let to a criticality accident and death.
David Palmer totally disagree, it wasn’t known about back then. The risks associated, and before you say “well they made an atom bomb in the mid 40s”
Having radioactive material is a long way from having a nuclear bomb.
@@cornellkirk8946 The risks were well known and documented but they still took risks. The 'Demon Core' example I gave, if you looked it up, demonstrated an experiment of placing a sub critical plutonium mass and manually using a screwdriver tip to keep the hemispheres apart. Louis Slotin knew what he was doing was extremely dangerous and he and another scientist paid the ultimate price for not reducing the risks of the hemispheres touching.
They weren't stupid people but they didn't mitigate the risk of a criticality accident.
David Palmer I already know about the ‘demon core’ shite your on about. But if they knew the risks were so great they wouldn’t have been so blasé. You going back to the fucking 1940/50s, for example even Oppenheimer didn’t foresee radiation sickness occurring after the bombing of Hiroshima. Now pipe down moron!
Literally went on a tangent sifting through lists of radiological incidents from different websites after watching a few of your videos. Found this one in a list, and punched it into Google. Wound up right back on your channel. lol. Imo, you include a perfect amount of detail, while also not becoming boring to your average Joe like me. Great content!
Edit: Oh crap, I've watched this video already sometime in the past on a previous radioactivity tangent of mine.
Is it weird that I enjoy listening to your videos as I'm going to sleep sometimes? Such a soothing voice helps me go to sleep, especially when I can't sleep. I enjoy your videos when I'm awake too though!
Thank for the video.. As a former Navy nuke, I was briefed on the accident as were all students there but I never heard the detail you showed here. The murder-suicide was still going around when I was there 20 years after the accident. The murder-suicide story was the most sensational of the stories but made little sense to me because no one really knew what the effects of a super critical reactor would be. There was no way to predict if the objectives of causing a steam explosion would achieve its goal. I've been by the site many times but could never tell where it was exactly as there is no visible evidence of its existance.
Hey you may have brain dumped this but a super critical reactor just means a power increase. Rickover had already proved the S1W reactor and steamed for 24 hours straight on an actual operating reactor. Prompt Critical is the theory your thinking of.
Very explanatory video ,thanks
Thank you for putting this up.
Awesome videos dude! Nice work. You're always showing something interesting. Mothman would be great to see, I grew up not far from the silver bridge, always gave me the willys.
Control rod gets stuck, army grunt pulls on it hard, it frees suddenly and pulls out way past 10cm, kaboom
Would it be possible to do a video on the tokaimura nuclear accident
Love the video! It’s always cool to watch these!
In 1980, I did a speech in high school speech class (and later, Speech & Debate Team) on this topic and it was met with shocked disbelief. This was nicely researched and presented.
This is a very good presentation of this accident, one of the best I've seen. Most go into way too much focus on the "Murder/Suicide" angle... which is pretty stupid to imagine as a motivation for this accident. Of interesting note regarding the recovery of Petty Officer Legg: The reactor was completely exposed during the recovery of his body and there was a genuine concern about accidentally dropping something else into the reactor (especially the control rod Legg was impaled upon) and causing a second explosion. The practice for the procedure of recovering Legg had as much to do with preventing that from happening as it did with recovering his corpse. Additionally, the operator of the boom had no way of looking into the facility and had to be guided by signals from a director, with binoculars, who was looking into the facility from on top of a lift hundreds of feet away. The fact that they were able to successfully perform this bizarre ballet at all is pretty amazing.
would the control rod going back in not moderate the reactor further? what's the problem there?
@@OrbitalSaucer -- The concern was that anything striking the reactor head could further dislodge elements inside it and cause a second critical mass. The control rod was simply the most likely thing to fall as they felt confident about recovery of Petty Officer Legg"s body, but were unsure about what the rod would do as he was removed from it. In addition... it's highly unlikely that the rod would perfectly fall back into it's position within the reactor head, which would be the only place where it would do any good as far as moderating the reactor. It's also unlikely that it would have been able to go all the way back in even if it had landed perfectly, as the explosion more than likely moved the fuel (and other elements of the reactor's construction) too much for any chance at reinserting the rods.
Bloody hell, how many people have been pinned to ceilings in explosions??? I was trying to find the animation of a similar incident in Japan when I stumbled upon this.
Always nice to hear bits of nuclear history I managed to miss elsewhere.
Very interesting channel. Grossly underrated
In comic books the guy impaled would become Reactor Breaker Hulk...sadly in real life it just turned into an episode of Metalocalypse.
I have a suggestion for you. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory- Sodium Reactor Accident.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Great video as always, thanks for the interesting content!
Takes me back to my younger days working on reactors for the Navy. Fun stuff!
It's only a 3.6 roentgen
Change my mind
-Anatoly Dyatlov
The core is open. I saw it!
Reiner mit ei, bidde! Your delusional. Get him out of here
@@subzeroheataow3542 *vomits on desk*
Not good, not terrible.
You are clearly delusional, get him out of here
An article I read about this in an old magazine from the 1960's stated that The design of the control rods was inadequate so boron 'poison strips' were attached to their sides to increase neutron absorption. That made the clearances to the sides of the square fuel rods' containers very tight. In the reactor vessel's environment of heat, pressure, and radiation the boron strips would swell and flake off, causing the rods to stick. A picture of flaked off pieces of boron, retrieved from earlier servicing, was in the article.
What the men who died were doing was reconnecting the control rods to their drives, after the drives had been removed, serviced, then reinstalled. The design allowed the rods to drop far enough into the vessel that they had to be raised by hand quite a ways to connect them to their drives.
Thus the simplest and most likely scenario is that Byrnes had difficulty raising the rod then gave it a hard yank which worked too well. The stuck rod snapped free and none of them would've had long enough to get anywhere near to starting to think "Oh $h!t!".
The article also stated that a world wide search was done for reactors that could go critical by pulling a single control rod. Only one was found, in Iceland. A safety stop was installed.
That would make the root cause a poor design followed by disregard of problems that had happened often enough that someone should have had a clue about figuring out something to mitigate them. Apparently nobody involved with the reactor, and knew about the sticking rods, and that pulling the main rod all the way out could cause a disaster - had the logical thinking capability to understand the need for a safety stop at least on the main rod.
Thank you very much for explaining this more thoroughly from the magazine. Nuclear incidents like this gives me nightmares.
This is the best youtube I've seen on this accident.
Hey Plainly, could you cover the PEPCON Disaster from 1988? My Uncle worked there and during the day of the incident he luckily was sick... we love your videos and a episode on this would be really awesome! Thanks for all the great fun!
lol power for stations in the arctic. - proceeds to show a graphic of Antarctica
Nuclear reactors have been used in Antarctica at our research station there. It's still there, pushed off into the ocean as trash.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station#Nuclear_power_1962%E2%80%931972
Dude, I don't know how your channel is so small. You make super high quality content that deserves a lot more attention. Seeing as this was in my recommended, here's hoping there's plenty more
What's more, it's plainly difficult material being covered. Even more of an accomplishment, in my book.
Maybe it isn't one of the most dangerous nuclear accidents you have covered, but it's certainly the most gruesome.
Great stuff chap - keep 'em coming!
Have you read about the Tokaimura criticality incident? Two workers were exposed to fatal doses of radiation, but not enough to kill them ouright and they lived through months of excruciating pain and horror before dying. I recall it being said the doctors were trying to keep them alive as long as possible to study the effects of radiation on the body.
Good lord what a nightmare. I couldn’t imagine being those rescue workers. It’s amazing how many of this type of accident occurred in the earlier days of nuclear power.
I have a suggestion for an episode for you- the DuPont phosgene incident. I remember reading about it and it’s fascinating- and truly tragic.
Gotta admit you have a way of explaining things. TH-cam hasn't been giving me your notifications recently but loved seeing it even tho it was a bit late!
You find pronouncing Röntgens plainly difficult.
"Impaled to the ceiling by part of an exploding nuclear reactor" is not a way I ever imagined dying but holy shit new fear unlocked
Nice video! I drive by the site several times a month on the way to Idaho Falls. The power poles are still there, but the road is blocked of, which is a good idea of course.
I really like your editing style! It fits your topics well.
Thank you!
The interesting thing about this is that at first, they could only find two of the men and assumed the third man had sabotaged the reactor and fled.
Imagine the phone call to the supervisors: “well the good news is, we were able to get that control rod unstuck…”
I like your selection of map. It really gives a sense of environmental structure. Also, shows where Hanford site fallout shadow would fall.
Brilliant vid. I'm new to channel so apologies if you've covered this already but how about the 'demon core' or Cecil Kelley criticality accidents?
@Pinochet Pilot #666 I don't see why nuclear physicists with PhDs should be Darwined out of the gene pool.
@Pinochet Pilot #666 Yeah, after reading about it a little more, and the line that Fermi said "Slotkin would be dead within a year" I see why.
Yeeeeees, thanks :D *edit, and wow, this is the best sl-1 video i've seen. First i've heard of the corrosion problem, good stuff.
These meltdowns always get heated
Your transitions are soothing
Please everyone. Stop moaning over the British pronunciations. Our American pronunciations also grind on the Brits
`Thanks for the back up man!!
deafs is just saying deaths wrong
Robert Dawson british accents dont bother me. hes just saying things completely wrong, like people from boston in the us do
Oh yeah. And if there's one thing that's worse that Yanks and their mangling of the Queen's English, it's what they do to our place names here Down Under.
... but... but... he said it all wrong. How are people going to know what he means if he pronounces it funny? They'll laugh when they aren't supposed to and then they'll get all distracted, and write dissertations on word etymology instead of focusing on the subject at hand, and then everyone will get crazy offended at everybody else. And then some gormless git, or Pikey pillock, or barmy _"blunder from down-under"_ will come along and call somebody a "yank" and then everyone will *_really_* start throwing the insults around... It'll be pure pandemonium. All the worst parts of the bible, coming true, right before our very eyes...
... and nobody wants that.
... wait... what were we talking about?
Rather than moving it up and down to free it... what if it was 'stuck' and they were trying to force it out... then it suddenly gave causing a sudden, and large withdrawal as the operator fell back?
Seems like they really could have used a simple 10 cm long connector to attach the control rod to the actuator without needing to manually lift the rod at all.
Well I guess we’ll never know why they didn’t devise some foolproof way to avoid instantly blowing up a reactor from a single slip of the wrist but personally I like to imagine there was some gruff general in a green army uniform busting through some lab doors at the end of a hallway at the Pentagon:
Scientist: “Sir, we’ve almost completed the reactor design, but it will never be safe to operate, we need at least three more weeks to design and test the safety systems!”
(The general grabs the clipboard out of the scientist’s hands, leans down so his nose is only an inch away from the scientist’s, looking directly into his eyes)
General Magillicutty: “Now you listen to me *mister scientist*, we didn’t have any ‘safety systems’ during double-ya double-ya two at Pearl Harbor when the Japs attacked! *I want my reactor!*”
Scientist: “Well... yes sir, uh, that’s what I mean... if we had better safety systems maybe we could have prevented Japa-“
General Magillicutty: “Now you listen to me *son*! I’m briefing the president a 12 o’clock-you hear me?! That’s twelve hundred *today* and if there aren’t 6 smoldering pounds of 93% enriched uranium on my desk by then, you’ll be manning a radar post in Antarctica by sundown!”
Scientist: “Well if they pull this stick out a few inches too far, the whole thing will blow up.”
General Magillicutty: “WHAT?! WHO WOULD EVER DO THAT? I’ll tell you who - NO ONE! Now I want you eggheads to put that thing in a box with an instruction manual and get it to the desert on the double! Damn it, *I’ve already got three of my best men out there waiting to fire ‘er up!*”
Don't know, but damn if that's the case, then their teaching had been total shit. Seriously if something is stuck and you force it and haven't noticed that in 99,9% of cases you will exaggerate the intended movement. If something like that was been overlooked... Pretty damn unlikely
Used to drive by there about once or twice a week. It's probably about 45~50 miles NW of Idaho Falls on Highway 20. Truly the middle of nowhere.
Great video mate, you get a thumb and a sub from this guy ^^
The reactor was actually at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) which is located about 50-60 miles(ish. Just from memory I don’t exactly remember the distance) north of Idaho falls. Closer to the town of Arco (the first nuclear city). Just a clarification. Otherwise, great video!
Source: I lived in the area for 2 decades.
Thank you! Yes, give Idaho Falls a break! The town is about 38 miles east of where SL-1 was. It was an hour-and-a-half everyday on the bus out from Idaho Falls to get to work at the Naval Reactors site. (In the Navy, our reactors don't pin people to ceilings. Or even to "overheads".) When Doc Rancher, a senior engineer, retired, the staff calculated he had spent over ten years of his life on the bus.
The SL-1 site is/was actually close to Highway 20, not far from the entrance to INL. The reactor was at LAT 43.517952, LON -112.823726. Google Maps: www.google.com/maps/place/43%C2%B031'04.6%22N+112%C2%B049'25.4%22W/@43.5190924,-112.8217614,949m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x0:0x0!7e2!8m2!3d43.5179519!4d-112.8237265
Detailed maps are at semspub.epa.gov/work/10/100040782.pdf
When this happened it wasn't called INL 👍.
It's also not far from the remains of EBR-1 and the experimental jet engines
You had one job... One..
I was drawn in by the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ but stayed for the well researched story. Subbed👍
Well done, very informative.
May I suggest a topic:
Building no.5 @ Andreyeva bay.
I'm still waiting for this channel to blow up to 700,000 subs in a month
I feel like this should be made into a movie. A dramatisation of the events leading up to, through, and cleanup could easily fill an hour and a half to two hour movie. It'd beat the hell out of movies about emojis and Disney reboots that seem to be flooding the market.
I've been binging your videos for a few days now, not sure if you've done this, but is there a way you can explain the different levels of radiation or the units associated with them? love your videos!
When I was stationed at Fort Greely, Alaska, in the late 1960's they had a reactor on base. It was called the SM-1A. It was supposed to be tied in to the Alaskan electrical grid, but according to the authorities, it was permanently off line. Something about embrittlement in some of the metals. It was near where I worked, a round cylinder with a building, right in the center of the base. It's probably still there. I remember walking in the woods one day, and seeing a radioactive warning sign on a small creek warning about radioactive water. I backed up and got the heck out of there!