By May 1953 BORAX–I was loaded with fuel, filled with water, and ready to go. Over the next 14 months, Untermyer and his operating crew would afflict this frail collection of scrounged parts with every torture imaginable. Over 200 experiments were performed, subjecting the system to all the operator errors and component failures they could think of. Tourists riding by on Highway 20/26 would report a geyser to the authorities. That would be Untermyer seeing how far he could throw a plume of water if the thing went uncontrollably supercritical. The record, I think, was 150 feet straight up. Under all conditions, the system performed exactly as predicted, shutting itself down automatically while allowing no harm to the machinery. The self-regulating feature worked right on the money.
By July 21, 1954, they had done everything to the reactor that their fertile minds could conjure, and it was time to shut her down and vacate the site. As one last experiment, Untermyer wanted to blow out the control with compressed air and see how the thing would react in a fast transient, with the reactivity taken from stable criticality to prompt supercriticality as quickly as possible.[105] Although there was no conceivable physical situation in which this would normally occur, it would give them an upper boundary of reactor mayhem to work with. It would also be a fine spectacle to watch, a steam explosion in keeping with the Bill Crush trainwreck spectacle in Waco, 1896, only without the public being able to watch. They would, however, film it in slow motion, so that it could be watched and studied, over and over. Extra fuel was loaded, and the central control rod was beefed up.
The wind was blowing in the wrong direction. Thinking that it could waft fission products over someone else’s reactor experiment, the site meteorologist canceled the test. The crowd of important guests, expecting a train-wreck, went away disappointed. The next day at 7:50 a.m., the smoke bombs ringing the site were sending fumes straight up. It was time. The drivers cranked up the emergency evacuation buses, and the State Patrol stood prepared to close down the highway. The visitors, having returned with renewed anticipation of a good show, were standing in rapt attention at the official Observation Post, growing quiet, spitting out gum, and polishing the dust off eyeglasses.
The crew was worried. Would the explosion be big enough to excite the crowd? Would the control rod hang in the guides and spoil the transient?[106] Harold Lichtenberger, the physicist sitting at the controls, promised to give it his all.
Lichtenberger hit the EJECT CONTROLS button. KABOOM! Up she went with the force equivalent of 70 pounds of high explosive in the reactor vessel. A total energy release of 80 megajoules had been expected. They got 135 megajoules instead, and this inaccurate prediction instantly qualified the test as a nuclear accident. The little reactor that usually shed energy at the rate of 1 watt ramped up to 19 billion watts with a minimum period of 2.6 milliseconds. In all other tests of explosive steaming, the thing would send up a geyser of water droplets, sparkling in the western sun. This time the core melted instantly and homogenized into a vertical column of black smoke. A shock wave rippled through the floor of the control trailer.
Walter Zinn, standing in the control trailer, shouted “Harold, you’d better put the rods back in!”
“I don’t think it will do any good,” Lichtenberger shouted back. “There’s one flying through the air!”
In fact, the entire control mechanism, bolted to the top of the reactor vessel and weighing 2,200 pounds, was thrown 30 feet up in the air. Zinn watched as a sheet of plywood flew spinning across the desert like a Frisbee. BORAX–I was totally destroyed. Pieces were found 200 feet away, and all that was left of the reactor was the bottom plate of the vessel with some twisted fuel remnants lying on top of it. The slow-motion movies were fogged by unexpectedly high radiation, and the power to the cameras failed as the wiring was carried away in the blast, but there was enough footage to show the plume of debris as it shot upward. Pieces of fuel were shown catching fire in the air as they tumbled upward. A control rod could be seen rocketing away at the upper left and eventually the control chassis re-entered the frame from above. In the first few seconds of the film they watched something that always seemed a feature of a prompt fission runaway: the blue flash. It lasted only two milliseconds, but it lit up the top of the reactor assembly as if it had been struck with a bolt of lightning.
You could not have asked for a better show, and a fine time was had by all. Untermyer had pushed a boiling-water reactor as far over the brink of disaster as was possible, and there were no radiation exposures or physical injuries. With this one staged spectacle, Untermyer had brought the AEC, the Argonne Laboratory, the military services, and the NRTS face to face with their collective fear, that a nuclear power reactor out of control could wreak havoc with a nineteenth-century steam explosion. Instead of frightening everybody, it calmed them down to have seen it. The maximum disaster seemed finite and manageable, and it was clear that this accident could never happen again. No normal power reactor control panel would ever be built to pull out the rods at explosive speed, and nobody was crazy enough to jerk out the central control by hand.
The debris was buried on the spot, and plans for BORAX–II were implemented on the same site. In the next few years, BORAX–III, BORAX–IV, and finally BORAX–V, a full fledged commercial-grade power reactor, were built and tested, with further experimentation justifying Untermyer’s dream of an inherently safe, self-controlling nuclear reactor. The good feelings, however, would barely make it into the next decade.
The United States Department of Defense was forming strategies for winning the Cold War, the global stand-off with the Soviet Union in which each side threatened to blow the other to kingdom come. These preparations were forward-looking yet practical, and they seemed somewhat less like science-fiction than the Air Force’s ANP program. Among the plans were the Distant Early Warning System, or “DEW Line,” and Camp Century. The DEW Line would be a set of remote, long-distance radar stations along an arc inside the Arctic Circle, in Alaska and Canada, intended to give a heads-up of several minutes if Soviet nuclear missiles were bearing down on the United States. Camp Century would be an under-ice city in Greenland supporting a hidden array of mobile, medium-range guided missiles, capable of pounding Moscow down to bedrock with thermonuclear warheads.[107] The mission was code-named “Project Iceworm.”
Each of these proposed measures would require electricity for lighting in the months of total darkness and operation of the radars plus space-heating to keep the soldiers from freezing to death. These types of installation, such as outposts in the Antarctic, were usually powered with diesel generators running 24 hours a day, but to give life to a base as large as the proposed Camp Century would take a million barrels of diesel fuel per year, which seemed impractical. Camp Century supported 200 soldiers, one dog, and — brace yourself — two Boy Scouts: Kent Goering of Neldesha, Kansas, and Soren Gregerson of Korsor, Denmark, all existing on a sheet of glacial ice 6,000 feet thick. The base commander, Captain Andre G. Brouma, is credited with the motto, “Another day in which to excel!”
105
I could not at this writing be certain how the central control was blown out of the core. Some accounts say compressed air, but others say it was an explosive charge or a cocked steel spring. The pneumatic cylinder seemed most likely, but other mechanisms are possible.
106
There had been serious talk of burying a case of dynamite under the reactor vessel to ensure a visually satisfying event in case the steam explosion fizzled. I find no record of this ploy being carried out.
107
Although the plans for Camp Century were profiled in the