America’s Most Dangerous Grave Resides Just Outside The Nation’s Capital

Spc. Richard Leroy McKinley’s white marble headstone may look like the others in Arlington Cemetery, but his grave serves as a grim reminder of the first fatal nuclear accident in America.

McKinley’s grave is the only radioactive grave in the cemetery. He was laid to rest in a double lead-lined casket and lowered into a 10-foot concrete grave encased in a metal vault with an additional foot of concrete poured atop his casket.

McKinley’s family had to watch the eight-minute veteran’s funeral from 20 feet away.

McKinley was born on December 2, 1933, in Union City, Indiana, but he grew up with his big family in Kenton, Ohio. McKinley enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1951 and served in Korea. He married his hometown sweetheart, Caroline Dick, on June 1, 1956, and they had two children together.

He later enlisted in the United States Army and began serving as an operator at the National Reactor Testing Station in 1961, just outside Idaho Falls, Idaho. Nuclear reactors were built and tested at this site, including an experimental design known as the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One (SL-1).

On January 3, 1961, operators came to work at the reactor station following a 10-day closure for the holidays. Around 9:00 p.m., the alarm rang out after a steam explosion erupted in the SL-1 reactor, killing Army Spc. John Arthur Byrnes and Navy Seabee Richard Carlton Legg.

When first responders arrived an hour and a half later at 10:35 p.m., they found the two men dead on the ground, as well as McKinley, who had miraculously survived the initial explosion. They also encountered dangerously high levels of radiation and rushed McKinley to the hospital.

McKinley tragically died at just 27 years old shortly after being placed in the ambulance, leaving behind his wife and two children.

McKinley’s grave is now safe to visit; it remains the only radioactive burial plot in the cemetery, and his cemetery file reads with a grim warning.

“Victim of nuclear accident,” the file reads. “Body is contaminated with long-life radioactive isotopes. Under no circumstances will the body be removed from this location without prior approval of the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] in consultation with this headquarters.”

We should also remember the servicemen who died too young because of insufficient safety protocols for atomic testing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

Using his own unapproved protocol, Slotin did not place any shims. ... Enrico Fermi reportedly told Slotin and others they would be "dead within a year" if they continued performing the test in that manner. Scientists referred to this flirtation with a nuclear chain reaction as "tickling the dragon's tail", based on a remark by physicist Richard Feynman.

Spoiler Alert: Slotin surveyed Fermi's warning by four months.

And the innocent civilian bystanders that had no knowledge of what they were doing. Marie Curie is an example.

During her pioneering experiments, the dangers of radiation were largely unknown. Curie routinely carried vials of radioactive isotopes in her pockets and handled them with her bare hands. Because of the radioactive residue on her body, Marie Curie was interred in a lead-lined coffin. In 1995, her remains were relocated and entombed in the Panthéon in Paris, France’s national mausoleum, where she rests alongside other French luminaries. Because these materials have extremely long half-lives, this heavy exposure permanently contaminated her personal belongings. Her laboratory notebooks, recipes, and even her cookbooks remain so radioactive that they are still stored in lead-lined boxes at the French National Library, requiring protective gear to be handled. She was hot in the worst kind of way.

wy69

There was an excellent account of this incident in the book “Atomic Accidents
A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters; From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima” by James Mahaffey.

(BTW, the book is amazingly entertaining for such a serious subject! )

In it, he discussed this incident at length, as P8riot mentioned, it is an area of interest to those (such as myself) who have some knowledge and exposure to radioactive isotopes.

In the book, he discusses that some people have speculated that John A. Byrnes, the youngest of the three men, may have been trying to prank the two others by pulling it out faster to get enough emissions to bombard the radiation dectectors and cause them to alarm.

This sounds insane, but this craziness of trying to scare someone by evoking a minute burst of gamma radiation was not unheard of in those days.

One of the pranks people used to play on each other at Los Alamos in the Manhattan project was to manually (using a large flathead screwdriver!!!) separate two halves of a hollow sphere of beryllium around a mass of fissionable material by wedging the flat of the screwdriver between the two halves and gently prying them apart so when the geometry of the sphere changed ever so slightly, it would begin to emit gamma radiation that was enough to trip the radiation detectors and begin emitting the characteristic sound of a geiger counter, which cause some people to nearly crap their pants! Apparently, it was a “trick” more than a few people did to others as a prank to alarm them.

This process was called “Tickling The Dragon”.

This process was discouraged, and there were established ways to do this that did NOT involve the flat head of a screwdriver.

One time, 35 year old Dr. Louis Slotin (a relatively young nuclear physicist) was demonstrating how to do this manually to an associate, bypassing all the safety precautions that would prevent an accident, and when he pried the heavy sphere apart with the screwdriver, the flat head of the screwdriver slipped and the entire upper sphere displaced and a fully critical radioactive event occurred.

There was a blue flash in the room (called Cherenkov Radiation) and Slotin knew exactly what happened and immediately put the two halves back together with his bare hands. He died an agonizing death which took nine days, and his hands and arms, which had severe vascular damage began to die and rot because they could get no blood.

There was speculation that at the SL-1 reactor that day, the young Byrnes wanted to tease the older Navy veteran Seabee Richard C. Legg (who was the team supervisor) by causing the alarm to go off. They speculated it was hard to pull up, so he gave it a good tug, and it came up all the way, with disastrous results.

Pretty grim stuff.

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