The stirring motor coasted to a stop, and the deep, funnel-shaped maelstrom in the mixer vessel relaxed to a momentarily flat surface, before the mixture started another furious boil. The radiation caught Smith in the back as he was hurrying through the doorway. Fortunately for Holthaus, Smith’s body shielded him from the neutrons and he only got a 60-rad dose. Smith at least was not standing directly over the mixer, but he got a serious 100-rad blast of mixed radiation, head to toe.
In its spinning configuration, the uranium-water mixture was a good configuration only when there was a great deal of excess reactivity (uranium) in the mixer. It boiled away the excess until the contents went barely subcritical and the reaction stopped. Holthaus then removed the empty bottle, which was a non-productive void in the would-be reactor, and he stopped the spinning. The surface area of the geometric shape in the mixer went down as the stuff stopped spinning, and the lack of a bottle-shaped void made it complete. The mixture once again went supercritical.[175] The two men were unaware of it, as they were both looking down into the stairwell when it happened, and the alarm was still blaring from the first criticality. Feeling a little strange, they returned to the ground floor, turned off the alarm, and took half an hour draining the mixer.
At the hospital, Anna and Chickie were cautioned to stand at the foot of the bed. Peabody was radioactive, conscious, lucid, and restless. He was given a sedative. “Somebody put a bottle of uranium where it wasn’t supposed to be,” he told them. By Sunday morning he was starting to slip away. His left hand, the one that had held the front of the bottle, was swelling up, and his wedding band had to be sawed off. He drifted off into a coma, and that evening, 49 hours after he saw the blue flash, Robert Peabody died. His exposure had been 10,000 rads, or enough to kill him ten times.
Smith and Holthaus survived with no lasting effects, but they had to give up the silver coins in their pockets, which had been partly activated into radioactive silver isotopes by the neutron bombardment and were quickly decaying into stable cadmium. They were saved only by the distance between them and the supercriticality event and not by any cautious prescience. The walls on the third floor were decontaminated, and production resumed by February 1965. Contracts gradually dwindled away, and the plant closed for good in 1980. Robert Peabody was the first civilian to die from acute radiation exposure in the United States. So far, he was also the only one.
Impressed by the flash-bang end to World War II, the Soviet Union was quick to replicate the nuclear materials production facilities used by the United States. The U.S., in an unprecedented show of openness and generosity, published the final report for the atomic bomb development project, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, or The Smyth Report, in hardback three days after the Empire of Japan surrendered. It included a map of the Hanford Works, a detailed photo, and an explanation as to how we manufactured the synthetic fissile nuclide plutonium-239. It was available to anyone in the world with $1.25 to invest, and many copies were bought for use by Soviet scientists and engineers, eager to get started.[176]
The robust Soviet building program produced the Tomsk-7 Reprocessing Plant, the Novosibirsk Chemical Concentration Camp, the Siberian Chemical Combine, and, most impressive of all, the Mayak Production Association, covering 35 square miles of flat wilderness.
The production reactors and plutonium extraction plants were built and running by 1948, and the site was treated as the deepest military secret in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Not trusting anyone with anything, the Soviet government was careful not to divulge what was going on at Mayak, particularly to the thousands of people who worked there. This policy resulted in a lack of essential knowledge among the workers, and studies have blamed this for the 19 severe radiation accidents at the site occurring from 1948 through 1958. Among the 59 people who suffered from the effects of radiation exposure, six men and one woman died in criticality accidents. Since the cluster of accidents in those early years of nuclear weapons production, there have been 26 more accidents at Mayak that we know of.
Mayak was an irritating black hole in the intelligence community. It was literally a blank spot on the map of the Soviet Union, and it seemed important to know what was going on there. On May 1, 1960, an outstanding jet pilot named Francis Gary Powers flew a Lockheed U-2 spy plane 70,000 feet above Mayak. It was a covert CIA mission, the existence of which would be vehemently denied by the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The specially built airplane carried a terrain-recording high-resolution camera in its belly, clicking off frame after frame as Powers guided it over the plutonium plant.[177]
Unfortunately for Powers, Eisenhower, and the CIA reconnaissance-photo analysts, the Soviets sent up everything they had against the U-2 flying over their most secret installation. An entire battery of eight S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missiles to blow it up, a MiG-19 fighter jet to shoot it down, and a Sukhoi Su-9 interceptor just to ram into it were deployed in anger. The first S-75 blew up somewhere behind the U-2. It did not hit the plane, but the U-2 was fragile, built only to take pictures and not to withstand roughhousing. The shock wave from the missile destructing in air folded up the U-2 like a wadded piece of junk mail. A second missile shot down the MiG-19, another one caused the Su-9 to auger in, and the remaining five missiles were simply wasted.
Powers bailed out and was immediately captured. His plane was spread out over square miles, but it was gathered up and glued back together as evidence of espionage on the part of the Eisenhower administration. The cover story that it was a weather plane that had strayed off course did not work, and peace talks between Premier Khrushchev and President Eisenhower were cancelled. Powers was eventually repatriated in a prisoner exchange in Berlin, Germany, with the Soviets getting back their ace spy, Rudolf Abel.[178] Mayak remained a mystery until 1992, when the Soviet Union fell apart and true glasnost, or openness, spilled it all.
Of the many ghastly accidents at Mayak, one stands out as unusual and worth a detailed look. Mayak was run under war footing, as were the atomic bomb labs in the United States during World War II, and most workers were undertrained. Carelessness and minimal safety considerations led to many problems, but in this case the participants were nuclear experts near the top of the food chain, and they knew exactly what they were doing.
On December 10, 1968, the night-shift supervisor and a couple of highly placed plant operators conspired to set up an experiment in the basement of the plutonium extraction building. It was an unauthorized research project, breaking the rules and protocols, but they wanted to investigate the purification properties of some organic compounds. They were sure that they would get points for coming up with something better than kerosene and tributyl phosphate as the extraction solvent.
175
At a glance, this incident bears a close resemblance to the fatal accident at Los Alamos detailed in the previous sketch. The two are different in subtle ways, but both are examples of how an unexpected concentration of fissile material can be dangerous if it is shaped just the wrong way. At Los Alamos, the tank containing a benign mass of plutonium was made critical by powerful mixing action that first stirred the water beneath the oily solution. For just a second, before the oil and water were able to mix, the funnel in the water caused by the stirring forced the oily plutonium solution to assume a shape with less surface-to-volume ratio, which reduced the non-productive escape of stray neutrons, and the mass went supercritical. In the case of Wood River Junction, a solution of sodium carbonate (washing soda) was already turning slowly at the bottom of the tank before Peabody poured in the uranium dissolved in water. Going from the high-surface-area bottle to the low-surface-area mixing tank is what made the uranium-235 go supercritical. The change in shape made such a huge difference, it did not matter that the uranium solution was diluted when it hit what was already in the tank. In both cases, the plutonium criticality and the uranium criticality, there are always a few stray neutrons bouncing around from spontaneous fissions in the fissile material. Unless there is a critical mass for the given shape, spontaneous fission leads to nothing.
176
The first edition did not have the photographs, but there were at least eight editions, and the helpful photos were added. There were over 170,000 copies of the U.S. edition alone, and it was on the
177
This was actually the second flight over Mayak. The first had been made in April, with the camera running as the plane flew over a 300-kilometer line from Kyshtym to Pionerski in the East Ural Mountains. The reason for these expeditions will become clear at the end of this chapter.
178
Powers returned home to a cold reception. The CIA was upset because he had not hit the self-destruct button in the U-2, nor had he injected himself with the suicide needle, hidden in a coin. He got a job as a test pilot for Lockheed, and later as a news helicopter pilot. He died in 1977 when covering brush fires in Santa Barbara County when his helicopter ran out of fuel. Although he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner back in the USSR, Rudolf Abel (Willie Fisher) failed to recruit or even identify a single Soviet agent in his eight-year deployment in New York City. His cover began to unravel in 1953 when his assistant, a Finnish alcoholic, accidentally spent a nickel containing a microphotograph of a coded message. A newsboy dropped the nickel, and the hollowed-out coin split in half, revealing the strange film negative inside. It was downhill from there, and Abel was captured in 1957.