Atomic accidents, p.59
Atomic Accidents, page 59
Steiner, Joseph, 23
Stetter, Georg, 52
Stewart, Clarence Arville, 301-302
Strauss, Lewis L., 81
strontium compound, 25
supercriticality
Arzamas incident, 70-71
Chelyabinsk incident, 281
Chernobyl disaster, 365
explanation of, 51, 61, 255
Idaho Chemical Processing Plant, 150-152
JCO accident, 276
Los Alamos accident, 255
Mayak accident, 270-271
NRTS testing, 131, 146
Omega Site accident, 56-61
plutonium fires, 247
SL-1 incident, 138
Wood River Junction accident, 263-264
Superphénix, 222-223
Suslov, A. P., 271
Svitenko, Leonard, 317-321
T
Tadlock, Sevier, 44-45
Teller, Dr. Edward, 145, 168-169, 356
Tempest, The, 157
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 45, 113, 333, 340-341
Tesla, Nikola, 4-6
thermal breeder reactor, 192-194, 219
Thermal Tunnel, 32
thermonuclear devices
bomb safety, 290-296
development of, 111
Faro incident, 307, 311, 314, 324
“Ivy Mike” device, 76-77, 170-172
Mars Bluff incident, 304-313
Palomares incident, 315-316
Thule incident, 316-317
Tybee Island incident, 300-304
Thornburgh, Richard, 354
Three Mile Island (TMI) disaster
meltdown, 102, 205, 326-327, 342-350, 352, 355-356
reactor construction, 342-344, 380
reactor schematic, 342
TMI-1, 342-343, 348, 356
TMI-2, 342, 342-343, 346-356, 352
Thule incident, 314-323
Tibbets, Paul W., 38
Tohoku Earthquake, 391-401, 421. See also Fukushima Daiichi plant
“Tokyo Rose,” 38-39
Tomsk-7 Reprocessing Plant, 265
Toptunov, Leonid, 361, 363-365, 369
train accidents, x-xxi
Travis, Robert F., 299
Tregub, Yuri, 363, 364
TRIGA, 145
tritium, 31, 76-79
Truman, Harry S, 75, 236, 237
tsunami disaster, 392-402
tsunami protection, 387
tsunami warnings, 389
Tullock, Walter, 309-312
Tumerman, Leo, 281-282
Tuohy, Tom, 167, 176
“Two decades of Dissidence,” 280
two-electrode tube, 6
Tybee Island incident, 300-304
U
Ukraine, 102, 357, 374-375
underwater reactor, 424
United Kingdom accidents, 173-188
United Kingdom testing, 153-188
United Nuclear Corporation, 257
United Nuclear Fuels Recovery Plant, 257-264
Untermyer, Samuel, II, 129-133, 380
uranium, mining, 12-13, 27, 45-46, 115, 237
uranium ore, 7, 12-13
uranium oxide, 31, 47-53, 84, 105, 148, 272-274
uranmaschine, 52
US Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History, 286, 287
V
Vandegriff, Bob, 242-243
Voigt, O., 381
von Ardenne, Manfred, 52
von Halban, Hans, 84, 90
von Lénárd, Phillipp, 6
von Neumann, Johnny, 74
von Sochocky, Sabin A., 29
W
Walker, James J. “Jimmy,” 24
Walton, Ernest Thomas Sinton, 90
Wassaw Sound incident, 301-304
waste-disposal problem, 148, 193, 220, 256-257, 418-422
Watson-Munro, Charles, 90
Wells, Lee, 193
Wendt, George, 20
Westinghouse, George, 5
White Sands Missile Range accident, 68
Wigner Energy, 169
Wigner Growth, 164-165, 169
Wilbur, Mike, 214-215
Windscale reactor accident, 173-183
Windscale reactors, 160-161, 162, 163, 163-187
Winn, Robert H., 23
Wood River Junction facility, 257-264
Woolard, Leland W., 301
Wuergassen Nuclear Power Plant incident, 381-382
X
X-10 reactor, 62, 119, 157-161, 163, 165
x-ray beams, 5-8, 16
x-ray machines, 16
Y
Y-12 site, 45-46
Yokata, Kazuma, 390
Yokokawa, Yutaka, 274-277
Yoshitake, George, 156
You Are Responsible!, 279
Z
Zero Energy Experimental Pile (ZEEP), 90-94, 91, 101, 106
Zewe, Bill, 343-348, 350
Zinn, Walter, 114-119, 129-134, 207
Illustration Credits
Illustration credits are listed in the order the images appear in the art inserts
Tho-Radia ad (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Rama)
Undark ad (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Daghlian mock-up (Courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives)
Slotin mock-up (Courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives)
Slotin setup table (Courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives)
The Castle Bravo bomb (Courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives)
NRX reactor, Chalk River, 1955, after rebuild (Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada)
NRX reactor, ports to the core (Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada)
NRU reactor, Chalk River, under construction (Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada)
BORAX-I (Courtesy of Idaho National Laboratory)
SL-1 accident (Courtesy of Idaho National Laboratory)
SL-1 poster (Courtesy of Idaho National Laboratory)
Reactor refueling face, Oak Ridge (Photo courtesy of the author)
Windscale, tight shot from the rear (Copyright © Nuclear Decommissioning Authority)
Windscale, wider shot (Copyright © Nuclear Decommissioning Authority)
Windscale Unit 1, aerial shot (Copyright © Daily Mail/Rex/Alamy)
Santa Susana Field Laboratory (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Damaged fuel rod, SRE (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Americium extraction hood, Hanford (Courtesy of AP Photo)
Room 180, Building 771 (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
HEPA filter room, Building 771 (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Workers evaluating radiation at JCO, 1999 (Courtesy of AP Photo/JCO Co.)
H-bomb being unloaded from B-52 (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
President Carter at TMI, April 1, 1979 (Copyright © ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy)
Chernobyl-4, aerial shot after smoke has cleared (Copyright © Igor Kostin/Sygma/Corbis)
Chernobyl-4 burning (Courtesy of Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images)
The author running the SPDS at Hatch (Photo courtesy of the author)
The next three photos are all of the inside of a BWR/4 (Photos courtesy of the author)
Diagram of Mark I containment (Courtesy of United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
The Fukushima plant, March 24, 2011 (Courtesy of Air Photo Service/EPA/Landov)
All interior images first appeared in Nuclear Power by James Mahaffey, published by Facts on File, and have been modified by originating artist Bobbi McCutcheon, for this book.
Acknowledgments
Writing Atomic Accidents was a complicated project with several opportunities to blunder per page, and I am grateful to everyone who helped me through it, particularly my three long-term friends with PhDs in physics, Don Harmer, Doug Wrege, and Monte Davis. Monte’s wife, Nancy, a natural-born editor without mercy, alone found over 1,000 misspellings, wrong words, and typos, and she re-inserted most of the hyphens she had taken out of Atomic Awakening. Deepest thanks to Chris Rowe, retired from the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, and Kamara Sams, in Environmental Communications at the Boeing Company, for setting me straight about the Sodium Reactor Experiment and SSFL. I appreciate Jarmok Kivinen for his inside look at Finland during the Chernobyl-4 disaster. I offer a shout-out to all who participate in the American Nuclear Society Social Media for providing me with more material on Fukushima than I could possibly use, and to the entire crew at the Georgia Tech Research Institute who participated in project A-3026 thirty years ago. Sincere thanks to my superb editor at Pegasus Books, Jessica Case, to Suzie Tibor, photograph researcher, Bobbi McCutcheon, line-drawing artist, Phil Gaskill, eagle-eyed proofreader, to Maria Fernandez for the beautiful layout, and to the world’s best literary agent, Jodie Rhodes. Writing this book would not have been possible without my wife and my muse, Carolyn Mahaffey, and the quiet encouragement from Turtle and Lance.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 2014 James Mahaffey
Pegasus Books LLC
80 Broad Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10004
www.pegasusbooks.us
Distributed by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Pegasus Books is an independent publisher of a diverse catalog of works including history, philosophy, biography and memoir, literary fiction, and noir titles. They strive to reach readers nationwide who share their conviction that good literature is essential to the health of our cultural life.
FIND OUT MORE AT
www.pegasusbooks.us
FOLLOW US:
@pegasus_books and Facebook.com/PegasusBooks
Pegasus Books is one of a select group of
publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
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@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents
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Stetter, Georg, 52
Stewart, Clarence Arville, 301-302
Strauss, Lewis L., 81
strontium compound, 25
supercriticality
Arzamas incident, 70-71
Chelyabinsk incident, 281
Chernobyl disaster, 365
explanation of, 51, 61, 255
Idaho Chemical Processing Plant, 150-152
JCO accident, 276
Los Alamos accident, 255
Mayak accident, 270-271
NRTS testing, 131, 146
Omega Site accident, 56-61
plutonium fires, 247
SL-1 incident, 138
Wood River Junction accident, 263-264
Superphénix, 222-223
Suslov, A. P., 271
Svitenko, Leonard, 317-321
T
Tadlock, Sevier, 44-45
Teller, Dr. Edward, 145, 168-169, 356
Tempest, The, 157
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 45, 113, 333, 340-341
Tesla, Nikola, 4-6
thermal breeder reactor, 192-194, 219
Thermal Tunnel, 32
thermonuclear devices
bomb safety, 290-296
development of, 111
Faro incident, 307, 311, 314, 324
“Ivy Mike” device, 76-77, 170-172
Mars Bluff incident, 304-313
Palomares incident, 315-316
Thule incident, 316-317
Tybee Island incident, 300-304
Thornburgh, Richard, 354
Three Mile Island (TMI) disaster
meltdown, 102, 205, 326-327, 342-350, 352, 355-356
reactor construction, 342-344, 380
reactor schematic, 342
TMI-1, 342-343, 348, 356
TMI-2, 342, 342-343, 346-356, 352
Thule incident, 314-323
Tibbets, Paul W., 38
Tohoku Earthquake, 391-401, 421. See also Fukushima Daiichi plant
“Tokyo Rose,” 38-39
Tomsk-7 Reprocessing Plant, 265
Toptunov, Leonid, 361, 363-365, 369
train accidents, x-xxi
Travis, Robert F., 299
Tregub, Yuri, 363, 364
TRIGA, 145
tritium, 31, 76-79
Truman, Harry S, 75, 236, 237
tsunami disaster, 392-402
tsunami protection, 387
tsunami warnings, 389
Tullock, Walter, 309-312
Tumerman, Leo, 281-282
Tuohy, Tom, 167, 176
“Two decades of Dissidence,” 280
two-electrode tube, 6
Tybee Island incident, 300-304
U
Ukraine, 102, 357, 374-375
underwater reactor, 424
United Kingdom accidents, 173-188
United Kingdom testing, 153-188
United Nuclear Corporation, 257
United Nuclear Fuels Recovery Plant, 257-264
Untermyer, Samuel, II, 129-133, 380
uranium, mining, 12-13, 27, 45-46, 115, 237
uranium ore, 7, 12-13
uranium oxide, 31, 47-53, 84, 105, 148, 272-274
uranmaschine, 52
US Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History, 286, 287
V
Vandegriff, Bob, 242-243
Voigt, O., 381
von Ardenne, Manfred, 52
von Halban, Hans, 84, 90
von Lénárd, Phillipp, 6
von Neumann, Johnny, 74
von Sochocky, Sabin A., 29
W
Walker, James J. “Jimmy,” 24
Walton, Ernest Thomas Sinton, 90
Wassaw Sound incident, 301-304
waste-disposal problem, 148, 193, 220, 256-257, 418-422
Watson-Munro, Charles, 90
Wells, Lee, 193
Wendt, George, 20
Westinghouse, George, 5
White Sands Missile Range accident, 68
Wigner Energy, 169
Wigner Growth, 164-165, 169
Wilbur, Mike, 214-215
Windscale reactor accident, 173-183
Windscale reactors, 160-161, 162, 163, 163-187
Winn, Robert H., 23
Wood River Junction facility, 257-264
Woolard, Leland W., 301
Wuergassen Nuclear Power Plant incident, 381-382
X
X-10 reactor, 62, 119, 157-161, 163, 165
x-ray beams, 5-8, 16
x-ray machines, 16
Y
Y-12 site, 45-46
Yokata, Kazuma, 390
Yokokawa, Yutaka, 274-277
Yoshitake, George, 156
You Are Responsible!, 279
Z
Zero Energy Experimental Pile (ZEEP), 90-94, 91, 101, 106
Zewe, Bill, 343-348, 350
Zinn, Walter, 114-119, 129-134, 207
Illustration Credits
Illustration credits are listed in the order the images appear in the art inserts
Tho-Radia ad (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Rama)
Undark ad (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Daghlian mock-up (Courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives)
Slotin mock-up (Courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives)
Slotin setup table (Courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives)
The Castle Bravo bomb (Courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives)
NRX reactor, Chalk River, 1955, after rebuild (Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada)
NRX reactor, ports to the core (Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada)
NRU reactor, Chalk River, under construction (Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada)
BORAX-I (Courtesy of Idaho National Laboratory)
SL-1 accident (Courtesy of Idaho National Laboratory)
SL-1 poster (Courtesy of Idaho National Laboratory)
Reactor refueling face, Oak Ridge (Photo courtesy of the author)
Windscale, tight shot from the rear (Copyright © Nuclear Decommissioning Authority)
Windscale, wider shot (Copyright © Nuclear Decommissioning Authority)
Windscale Unit 1, aerial shot (Copyright © Daily Mail/Rex/Alamy)
Santa Susana Field Laboratory (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Damaged fuel rod, SRE (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Americium extraction hood, Hanford (Courtesy of AP Photo)
Room 180, Building 771 (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
HEPA filter room, Building 771 (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Workers evaluating radiation at JCO, 1999 (Courtesy of AP Photo/JCO Co.)
H-bomb being unloaded from B-52 (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
President Carter at TMI, April 1, 1979 (Copyright © ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy)
Chernobyl-4, aerial shot after smoke has cleared (Copyright © Igor Kostin/Sygma/Corbis)
Chernobyl-4 burning (Courtesy of Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images)
The author running the SPDS at Hatch (Photo courtesy of the author)
The next three photos are all of the inside of a BWR/4 (Photos courtesy of the author)
Diagram of Mark I containment (Courtesy of United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
The Fukushima plant, March 24, 2011 (Courtesy of Air Photo Service/EPA/Landov)
All interior images first appeared in Nuclear Power by James Mahaffey, published by Facts on File, and have been modified by originating artist Bobbi McCutcheon, for this book.
Acknowledgments
Writing Atomic Accidents was a complicated project with several opportunities to blunder per page, and I am grateful to everyone who helped me through it, particularly my three long-term friends with PhDs in physics, Don Harmer, Doug Wrege, and Monte Davis. Monte’s wife, Nancy, a natural-born editor without mercy, alone found over 1,000 misspellings, wrong words, and typos, and she re-inserted most of the hyphens she had taken out of Atomic Awakening. Deepest thanks to Chris Rowe, retired from the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, and Kamara Sams, in Environmental Communications at the Boeing Company, for setting me straight about the Sodium Reactor Experiment and SSFL. I appreciate Jarmok Kivinen for his inside look at Finland during the Chernobyl-4 disaster. I offer a shout-out to all who participate in the American Nuclear Society Social Media for providing me with more material on Fukushima than I could possibly use, and to the entire crew at the Georgia Tech Research Institute who participated in project A-3026 thirty years ago. Sincere thanks to my superb editor at Pegasus Books, Jessica Case, to Suzie Tibor, photograph researcher, Bobbi McCutcheon, line-drawing artist, Phil Gaskill, eagle-eyed proofreader, to Maria Fernandez for the beautiful layout, and to the world’s best literary agent, Jodie Rhodes. Writing this book would not have been possible without my wife and my muse, Carolyn Mahaffey, and the quiet encouragement from Turtle and Lance.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 2014 James Mahaffey
Pegasus Books LLC
80 Broad Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10004
www.pegasusbooks.us
Distributed by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Pegasus Books is an independent publisher of a diverse catalog of works including history, philosophy, biography and memoir, literary fiction, and noir titles. They strive to reach readers nationwide who share their conviction that good literature is essential to the health of our cultural life.
FIND OUT MORE AT
www.pegasusbooks.us
FOLLOW US:
@pegasus_books and Facebook.com/PegasusBooks
Pegasus Books is one of a select group of
publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents
