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Please also find the script and sources in the description - don't hesitate to use this comment to point out any inaccuracies and I'll be happy to add them to the document.
Kinda hard to forget the place when I live quite close to it (Not gonna say exactly where on the internet for obvious reasons). Though I can't deny that it is currently a mostly unimportant place now and is defintely still in the middle of nowhere. For the few people who are curious it's probably just as common to call it IF (pronounced ai-eff, aka just saying to letters in the accronym) as it is to call it Idaho Falls properly. Though it obviously varies between buisness and private settings.
Really picky detail here but I thought I’d point it out anyway, at 6:05, the symbol used is a Biohazardous Materials symbol, and not a Nuclear Materials symbol. Such an interesting video and I’ve really enjoyed binging your content 😊
I love how you really put into perspective the sheer horror of the situation those firefighters walked into. Many people focus on the atftermath, or the reactor itself, but not the men who are the only ones who know what truly happened.
@@hallquichethe chernobyl hbo show cherry picks and fabricates a lot of details to make drama. It is needlessly biased in multiple different senses of the phrase, and only partially justified in places. It's not very accurate except in the broad strokes.
Fun fact Idaho falls has a garden dedicated to it's sister city, Tokai Mura in Japan, Tokai Mura is known as the nuclear capital of Japan, and the most irradiated human in history Hisashi Ouchi.
Surely sounds sinister, but as a professional who worked there and lived in I.F. for 45 years, I.F. also sits in a garden spot of the world! Premier fly-fishing, multiple rivers of pure water, reservoirs galore, and mountain scenery in EVERY direction!! I.F. is a business city, a recreation city and beautiful place which just happens to be most convenient to the desert area where nuclear research took place!
Speaking of Atomic Town, I highly recommend 'Plutopia' by Kate Brown. A comparative study on two atomic cities: Richland, WA and Ozerk, Russia; both the world's first cities to exclusively produced plutonium. Yet the development and housing of the inhabitant are different based on 'permanent housing' and 'temporary workers' despite sharing equal access to the comfort of consumer goods. Its a fascinating look at both Cold War adversaries approach to their vision of the ideal community while concealing the truth of its purpose.
Are you crazy? Recommending BOOKS? Books to people whose attention span is the worst it has probably ever been in the existence of humans? I am obviously kidding though. Thanks for the recommendation, sounds really good, especially when you are interrested in this kind of topic. Honestly, if I could read, I would probably buy it.
Wow. I've heard the tale of SL-1 many times before, but noone else has touched upon the politics and competition that took place before the disaster. Amazing job mate! P.S. The reason why SL-1 was designed to be controlled by only one control rod is because it was an experiment by the US military into field-deployable nuclear power source, so they were trying to make it as cheap and simple as possible, which is certainly in-character for any military
having been stationed at the Navy's prototype training site not all that far from SL-1, it was always a source of fascination. There were actually 9 control rods in the SL-1 design, 5 of which were described as "cruciform control rods." SL-1 was not truly an "experiment." It was more of a prototype for the Army's nuclear power program--similar to the way the Navy had determined that training personnel for nuclear plant operations was so important, no one could be certified for submarine (or surface ship) operation until they made it through a 6 month classroom training course and THEN actually "qualified" at a prototype site. There were a series of Army "portable" reactors actually deployed in the 1960s, but to my knowledge only the SL-1 site in Idaho and the first Army reactor in Fort Belvoir, Virginia were training prototypes. These reactors ended up on a mountain in Wyoming (Sundance), an army base in Alaska, "Camp Century" in Greenland, McMurdo Station in Antarctica, and on an old Liberty ship at the Panama Canal. The US Military is now considering getting back into this with the next generation of micro reactors. We'll see!
The social issues of the operators were played up to distract from the fact that the SL-1 design and operations were substandard. They wanted to deflect blame on the operators instead of the design of the reactor. The reactor design was flawed which resulted in flawed operational methods. There, 100% of the blame resides when one uses a root cause failure analysis approach.
@@misham6547the difference between capitalism vs communism. Sure an argument can be made it was done cheaply under capitalism, under communism, it wouldnt of happened at all. And it didnt as history shows
As an kid living just ten miles from Idaho Falls, I'm honestly surprised I've never heard this story as much of my family works at the site. Very good work!
Your family is not supposed to share stories from the site off site. Being a nuclear potato myself I learn more through video historians than local shares. Well other than the drunken table talk that comes with all the plausible deniability of did the Sun Valley billionaire class really hire local indigenous performers to play "cowboys and Indians" with their kids in a mock western set made by local contactors or ..... I dunno I hope some future video sets the record correctly. I heard it at a local bar circa 2019
@@RussetPotato i mean op didnt say anything about their family saying anything lol? The nuclear site employees like 15% of the town so it's hard not to hear abt jt
This story sounds like the screenplay of a 1950's movie (black and white of course). Parties, beautiful women, personal animosity, unstable characters and some poor bugger pinned to the ceiling! It's amazing how cavalier the attitude was to safety back then, even in the development of peaceful applications.
Surely there is a case that he copys lemino. This video style is eerily similar to the JFK one that Lemino just made, especially with all the narration of witnesses
Imo they are very different. This videoncan be watched casually, whilst still being interesting. But Lemminos Videos are more like movies that pull you in, and you cant just watch them anywhere. Both great in their own right
I find the accident explanation to be far more plausible than the "I'm gonna kill us all" explanation. Just because they were assholes doesn't mean they'd be crazy enough to set off a nuclear accident.
I have grown up in Idaho Falls and still live and go to school here! A ton of people work at the site but I never really knew the history behind it. Thank you for some insight into this little city!
Crazy how cavalier people had around nuclear power back then. If you want an indepth video about the actual reactor then watch Plainly Difficult. His breakdown of it is really good
Fascinating! My parents lived there in the 60s & then went to Hawthorne NV, where the AFB was doing secret pane tests. They were just trying to find a nice quiet town lol. I am fascinated by IdahoFalls, as it seems to have way more going on than is normal for a 20k town. Internet celebs, internet scammers, murder, millionaire secret santa, cultists, major MLMs, and a huge Mormon population that absolutely does not explain this particular oddness. But they certainly do have a backstory, maybe that's the root lol...
Idaho Falls! My great uncle worked at the laboratory. He and his family lived there for a while, but they moved before the accident occurred. His wife, my aunt Betty Joy, was incredibly sensitive to the radiation - when I asked my mom what cancers did my great aunt have, she laughed and said, “What cancers *didn’t* she have?” I remember Aunt Betty Joy as a fragile old lady that resembled a bird. But she was a tough old bird, and she lived to 89.
I live in this town and the first town to actually get powered my nuclear energy by the SL-1. Arco, Idaho. Midway point from challis and Idaho falls, or Boise to Idaho falls
Idaho Falls, ID is not the first Atomic city, It was Arco, ID. About 50 minutes west of Idaho falls on the other side of the INL site. Arco was the very first city to be powered by nuclear power, being run off of the BORAX-III reactor in 1955.
I’m from Idaho, and Arco is known as the first city powered by nuclear energy. It’s even taught in schools here. So, the story of Idaho Falls being the first is a strange to me. But the headquarters and offices being in Idaho Falls makes sense.
That is an interesting area. I checked it out a little when I was up in Yellowstone and Craters of the Moon last year. There's a small rest stop on one of the roads passing through the site that has some interesting history boards about the testing and the original reactor.
Great video, Its always great to learn about the early days of nuclear and how many things have changed since then. Another thing that I was suprised wasnt touched on was how common untrained operators were in those days. Back when the AEC was buying up farm land they were struggling to find qualified and trained individuals that were willing to move out to south-eastern Idaho, as a result a lot of the farmers sons were offered high paying and pretty important jobs and a large portion of them were trained as reactor operators even though they never had any university training and a lot of them had little to no schooling. A large section of the workforce back then was really underqualified to be operating such devices so its suprising that this was the only disaster that happened out there and it was relatively tame. Also theory #2 is almost certainly the most likely cause, they were withdrawing the control rod to attach it to a new automatic control system, but as stated in the video with 300 pulls only 250 of them occured without any sticking, over 50+ times the control rod stuck in the reactor when it was attempting to be withdrawn and considering this was done in the dead of winter most people are confident it was simply him yanking the control rod too hard. Ofcourse that doesnt really get the media going as much so most of the reporting was done taking the personality conflict angle rather than the more likely scenario of it being a design flaw. A design flaw like that in such a critical component nowadays would be unheard of (I hope)
My Grandpa died mysteriously around age 40 after working at the experimental test reactor but my family never put it together he could be exposed to anything that would sshorten his life like that, not in USA#1!
It is a crazy story. I lived in Idaho my whole life so I can say the Atomic Age is a core part of Idaho though it started to lessen in the 80s once fear mongering began around anything atomic. I hope to see the Atomic Age come back to Idaho. It really is a great State here, somewhat isolated from the US at large and often only feels the problems of national issues if its a large economic one.
Its interesting learning about this after working on a job in Idaho Falls this week. I've driven past the facility a couple of times to various jobsites across Idaho and Montana. I believe they will be updating their facility after the massive success of the Livermore National Laboratory, who created a nuclear reaction that achieved "Net Energy" which means they created more energy than they used to initiate it. Fingers crossed I can work on that project and learn more about this little bit of history. Great work on this video! Definitely going to be subscribing so I can tune in on my longer drives.
As a line haul driver who used Interstate 15 From Canada to San Diego, Los Angeles and Yuma i have bad memories of the winter slog from Lima MT to Idaho Falls in the winter in the middle of the night, it was Always comforting to see Idaho Falls coming into view as a safe haven for rest and fuel
I almost died hitting a landslide up on Lolo pass in the middle of a storm I absolutely respect you truckers driving out there except when the trucks were filled with TNT headed to the mines and driving like they were on speed or something 🤯
I'd be remiss if I didn't suggest to you the story of the McCluskey Room, which is the forever sealed-off Americium Reclamation facility attached to the plutonium finishing plant at the Hanford site in Washington State. A horrifying event with a bittersweet ending.
When I went through the Navy’s nuclear training program, the “best” prototype stories came from guys (I was in one of the last classes to go through before women were admitted into the program) who had gone through Idaho Falls!
Drove through that area in Idaho, it's pretty eerie, it's like a weird small desert hwy that a Deth claw would come running out of. Plus there was a dust storm happening when we were going through.
My dad has worked at INL (what this site is now called) for like 20 years now, he trained in one of the reactors there that is sadly being torn down in the coming years. I've been to multiple family days up there and it is really a cool place. They do a decent amount of other stuff there aswell as training navy men on the reactors that will be put intk the aircraft carriers and subs that they will be serving on. The reactors ate meant to mimick what it will be like on the ship so the building is built to be a replica of the ship with pipes and large pieces of what would be the enigine going through the room and conplete with bulkhead doors that you have to duck through and everything.
11:33 “Pocatello parties often excluded women…” Particularly hilarious that a potential factor to the choice of locale for a new atomic energy testing grounds could’ve been based off of which district was able to “bring the hoes”, so to speak. Science is an art.
I grew up in Pocatello and still live in Idaho. I was definitely aware of the INEL, but I never knew what actually happened there! Great video, nice to see my humble little state get some attention 😊
I loved your little wordplay on “nuclear families”. That was a nice touch. By the way, I really hope your channel takes off! Your content is truly top notch, and I love your narration. I’m an American, but am somewhat of an Anglophile, and I’ve always been drawn to British produced documentaries. People like David Starkey, Lucy Worsley, Suzannah Lipscomb, etc. And thanks to RU-vid, I’ve been introduced to 'Time Team'; a show which ran for 20 years and we neither hide nor hair of it here in the States. I guess they thought we were a bunch of rubes and wouldn’t be interested in our own history.😉😆
Im from Arco and I heard this story alot as a kid, I was literally just telling my inlaws (they're from Poky) they never heard of this story. Then this awesome channel and just as great video get recommended to me! Cant wait to show this to them to fill in the holes from what I could remember. A few bits of info that may clear up things from other comments: Arco may have lost the bid for the HQ but was the first as we say "city" lit by atomic power (for 15 minutes) The site has gone by many names and you can age people by what they call it but it went from INEEL>INEL>INL No the area was not desolated after this event. The site employees many people under even more contractors. A pastime of Arco schoolchildren is leaving offerings to the local irradiated cryptids, in hope that they will visit justice upon the Idaho Falls chamber of commerce, in retribution for robbing their future of growing up in a prosperous Arco! Also check out the beautiful scenery at the Craters of the Moon!
My grandfather who passed away from liver cancer in 2005 was a navy guard for this experiment! It’s super cool learning about it and I always wish I could ask him about it
I love how back then every time the military would mess up theyd blame the victim and say hes gay. Same thing happened when the gun exploded on a us destroyer.
I grew up in the Idaho Falls area, and I never learned about SL-1 until later. I also never knew about the competition for being the headquarters of the site. That was very interesting!
There's quite the amount of towns in the US that have been abandoned due to environmental disasters and toxic spills alongside mining. This is one that's been obscure on my radar.
not abandoned, infact INL (what the site is currently called) is now going through a hiring scheme hiring up to 2000+ new employees + building a bunch of new reactors and Idaho Falls is going through some of the quickest growth in america growing approximately 4% each year
INL is a very large employer in the region and idaho falls is still extremely successful. It's the 4th largest city in idaho behind the big 3 which all are over 100,000
Check out Rocky Flats in Arvada, Colorado. It was a plutonium trigger plant. The cleanup was a joke. Furthermore, the surrounding area was never cleaned.
I have lived in Idaho Falls my entire life and I never thought I would see a break down of the history of the city and INL from a high quality video, thank you!
I grew up in Idaho falls but moved while still a kid, I NEVER knew this!!!! My parents literally worked at the site haha. Fascinating man, thank you! New sub here!
I grew up 30 minutes north of IF. Lol in Idaho state history they taught us that Arco was the first atomic powered city. I had no idea IF had anything to do with the INEEL. For reference I've been to Arco twice, I've spent hundreds od days in IF.
Arco was the first to be powered by the site - but Idaho Falls was the headquarters of the facility. That’s what I meant by it being the “first atomic town”. But perhaps poor wording on my part
Whenever I drive by the site I get a sense of wonder. Not only because of the reactors there, but all the top secret military activities that happened there. I've also seen some weiiirrrd stuff out there while hiking. I can help but wonder if it's somehow related to the site. Btw if you go by Arco be sure to stop by Pickle's Place.
I was stationed at INL (once NRTS, once INEL, and I think once INEEL) with the Navy at one of the prototypes out there when the story of SL-1 was still a mainstay of bar room conversations. And congratulations on getting all of the technical details right, as well as many of the theories as to how this happened! But I also have to congratulate you on somehow finding all of this detail on the initial siting of NRTS and how Idaho Falls was selected to be the administrative headquarters. We were always told that it was all Hyman Rickover, who supposedly pushed all of the initial siting based upon what he needed for the USS Nautilus prototype. All of your info on the Navy's gunnery testing site is correct . . . . and many of the buildings where the Navy either built or refurbished 16" gun barrels for the WWII battleships were still standing in Pocatello where I lived. We were told that what became NRTS met Rickover's specific recommendations for distance to the nearest population centers and that the geography was favorable to "trapping" atmospheric contamination in that area in the event of an accident. That could very well have been true, as we would get airborne radiation alarms consistently during temperature inversions at the site. But your detailed descriptions of the government machinations behind the Idaho siting sounds far more realistic. Good job!
The INL! I've done work there before, very neat place! So is EBR-1 across the highway from it. ARCO was actually the first place ever powered by nuclear power 😀
Thank you for covering my home town. For anyone interested, there is a museum outside of Idaho Falls that showcases a nuclear airplane engine. Fallout potatoe edition lol!
There was no redundancy in protocol to prevent this incident. This is why we have redundancy. This is also why we don’t just choose an average person for the job. We try to instill safety in order to acquire somebody who trusts the system fact that there wasn’t any trust in the system so you had to hire somebody who didn’t really care.
All my friends dads worked for EG&G in Idaho Falls. It was easy to tell who worked at the sites vs. the townies. An interesting thing was I used to deliver newspapers for the Post Register when I was a kid, I would see the Navy servicemen waiting for their transport to the reactor sites for training each morning. All piled into a big charter bus each day.
@@joinjen3854 at that time in the 80s you could tell by the nicer cars, houses on the other side of town, and that they had early early shifts. I lived by the Temple and that area only had a few INL engineers but you could tell.
Oh wow! I’ve read stuff about SL-1, but somehow totally forgot where it happened. The backstory on the selection process was very intriguing. Keep up the good work!
The reason and I believe what happened is the second thing you mentioned about leggs removing the rod. However, that is a serious manufacturing problem that could stain there otherwise reputable business. No, instead they found something on the two workers that would hint at a probability of them fighting or some love triangle 🤔 And now there's no way to back that up, because they have covered there tracks well. Bravo? I hope in the future they would refrain from using a cover up. That's what really happened and because of that manufacturing error. That disaster was wiped clean from there hands.
I've heard many stories on this topic. All told completely different. Accept for 2 which suggest the same outcome that you mentioned of the rod being to hard to remove
"The middle of nowhere in South-Eastern Idaho" is exactly what my dad calls it. We live in Blackfoot. There is still a neclear facility there today, though it is all research based, and none of the surounding area is currently powered by it. Rigby Idaho was the first town to be completely powered by nuclear power.
Another theory you didn't bring up was the history of the control rod jamming in the control rod column as the control rod was being moved. The rod could have jammed and in a fit of anger the rod could have been forcibly pull on causing the rod to be accidentally fully extracted.
The unusually high reactivity worth of the center control rod of the reactor was the result of configuring it in a different way from the intended configuration (It wasn't fully loaded with fuel). Past operators were asked if they were aware of the problem, and they all said "Of course! We often talked about what we'd do if we were at a radar station and the Russians came. We'd yank it out!" The most likely scenario is that the operator was trying to "Exercise" the rod in the channel, so that it would move freely in its channel after the reactor had been shut down over Christmas, and accidentally used too much force. The rods never jammed when moving in an upwards direction, and according to the log books the center rod didn't have a history of jamming events.
Hey, I'm the grandson of one of the nuclear submarines' researchers' grandson. (what a mouthful) Just wanted to say that this is a cool video. Fun fact, I got one of those nuclear paint watch, (That is broken) from him. It is a really cool piece of history and, this video was really eye opining for what I didn't know.
Also worth mentioning that there is a town actually called atomic city, its not far from the site and was the first city powered entirely by nuclear power. It was used to house of of the workers from the site and i believe theres still like 100 residents that live there. Im not sure if its powered by the reactors however
Yeah there is hardly anything left of Atomic city nowadays :/. We go thru it to get out to the Big Southern Butte. Besides their raceway (Which is still falling apart) The rest of the town is pretty much composed of a few dilapidated trailer houses. The last business (to my knowledge) there closed a couple years back, it was some kind of a bar im pretty sure.
I had to jump in! The "city" you refer to--Atomic City--was someone's idea of how to best cash in on the National Reactor Testing Station being developed out there in the desert. Whomever it was laid out a few streets, housing sites, and mobile home spots just outside the boundary of the federal land purchase for NRTS and close to the main gate off the road from Idaho Falls. It did, in fact, have a great dive bar which should have done a lot more business than it actually did--given its proximity to the all of those reactors. Maybe people were in such a hurry to get back to Idaho Falls, Pocatello, and Blackfoot they'd just blow by it. However, "Atomic City" wasn't the town you're thinking of that technically received power from one of the grid connected reactors at NRTS. That was almost certainly Arco, Idaho on the west side of what is now INL. There are a few signs bragging about that honor. When I was assigned as a staff instructor for the Navy at the A1W nuclear training prototype at what was then INEL, I was a member of the unofficial "house band" that would play at the bar in Atomic City on Friday nights. A major honor I once listed on my resume!
I travelled through the Atomic City area in the 1970s and 1980. I never saw so many dead jackrabbits in my life! The road was carpeted for miles with their bodies and fur.
Really nicely told story. The 2 strands are, as stated up front, pretty tenuous - but that doesn’t matter, they’re both fascinating stand-alone. The salacious nature of the stories about the technicians was grating, but also very very very 1950’s. Blame needed to be placed, and who better than the lowest paid, lowest ranked, lowest trained personnel? A brilliant “morality play” for the modern era. I was getting pretty uncomfortable with the way the story was going till the understated “but really the reactor design was pretty shit”… ah huh, yup yuppity yip… So; “who” was to blame? Better question - “what” was to blame. No one had an overall mandate on design safety. Army spec’d the requirement for a light weight, transportable, low tech, low maintenance power plant to operate in arctic regions, to be operated by GI’s - with way way way less training than the Navy’s nuclear schooled engineers. Argonne National Lab at UC designed it. And their idea of safety culture was rooted in early Manhattan Project days when as an after thought someone decided to bring an axe to cut cables (ropes) in case the worlds first nuclear pile out the back of the squash courts started making sparks or fizzy noises… NRTS - they were “only” the facilitators; provided the site and overall infrastructure. I mean they had >20 reactors on site, under different contracts, agencies, etc. basically just a big tech park with each one being a different tenant. The “owners rep” of this reactor was Army, but also naval and airforce personnel were also being trained on its operation, but the actual build and the.n operational responsibility and maintenance was contracted out to a civilian engineering firm - with as extensive as experience in military reactors as then existed, Combustion Engineering Inc. CEI - “Not our fault, it was a dog of a design, we did our best. Blame Argonne!” Argonne - “Not our fault, we were inhibited by the limitations imposed by the Army; we did that and sent it to a TEST facility. Blame Army and the Test Station” Army - “Hey we blow things up. We told the lab our limitations so in the field we wouldn’t need Einstein to run it without making us melt the polar cap” National Reactor Testing Station - “Hey guys, we’re just the landlord, and last we looked we don’t have “safety” in our name” AEC/DOE - “Hmmmm yeah maybe we need to get on that” Congress - “whaddaya mean safety costs money” Everyone in chorus - “We need more cocktail parties and purdy laydeeeees and tax dollars to line our hazmat tuxedos” 60 years later and the same organisational fragmentation still leads to same issues.
You are absolutely making an incredible work i don't know how but the only thing I know that those videos takes a big amount of time and effort to create I don't wish software but i think aftereffects am I right? If so that's mean that it takes money also so thanks for the videos even if those words isn't enough
