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

Manner man or manor!!!

Spell check comedy !!

PS The IPhone keyboard stinks…

According to Richard Feynman in his book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”, this was indeed something people did as a prank.

I didn’t mention the “Demon” core incidents and I did specify Slotin was demonstrating the process to people and bypassed the safety precautions.

“Tickling The Dragon” was the “prank” I was referring to, but Slotkin was doing the equivalent of “tickling the dragon” by bypassing the safety procedures, even if he wasn’t doing it as a prank.

The PDF posted is left wing, anti-military screed.

To be fair, the Army just started removal of the reactor carcass two years ago. I visited the site a few time while Active Duty USAF - just another building with a fence - and a lot of warning signs.

It was a prototype, another was on the Greenland ice cap secret ‘missile base’. Read mo9re here -

https://www.arcticfocus.org/stories/the-us-army-tried-portable-nuclear-power-at-remote-bases-60-years-ago-it-didnt-go-well/

https://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/Exhibits/Nuclear-Power-Program/Experimental/

He was pinned to the ceiling by a control rod.

ChatGPT:

He is the worker whose body was hurled upward and impaled by the control rod, ending up pinned near the ceiling of the reactor building. This detail is often repeated because it is one of the most violent and unusual fatalities in the history of nuclear power.

Thanks. Byrnes' write-up says "Since the bodies were contaminated with life-long radio-active isotopes, each were buried in a lead-lined coffin, buried extra-deep, and covered with many feet of concrete as their bodies were radioactive. The graves are to stay undisturbed unless prior approval of the Atomic Energy Commission. After a two-year investigation, it was determined that there would never be one single control rod used to employ in an atomic pile; modern ones have scores of rods. The incident was not determined an accident or an act of sabotage."

So it sounds like all three men received a similar interment.

But now you did it! You sent me down a Memorial Day History Rathole!...

"The incident was not determined an accident or an act of sabotage." -- But what does that leave? Abject stupidity? Poor training? But wouldn't stupidity or lack of training be classified "accident"? Away I go...

Of note:

"After a two-year investigation, it was determined that there would never be one single control rod used to employ in an atomic pile" -- so, tragically, some good came of their deaths. But how could the designers have NOT foreseen that?

"Failure Modes & Effects Analysis (FMEA)" was conceived, developed, and first used by the US Military in the late 1940s. FMEA was one of the first systematic techniques for failure analysis. It was formally established in the United States military via Military Procedure MIL-P-1629, titled "Procedures for Performing a Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis", dated November 9, 1949. It was developed as a reliability evaluation technique to determine the effect of system and equipment failures, classifying them according to their impact on mission success and personnel, equipment, and safety. The immediate trigger was practical: the US Military developed the technique specifically to reduce sources of variation and failures caused by variation in munition production. But that did not get translated to nuclear physics until much later!

There were two Los Alamos Lab criticality deaths years before the Idaho deaths:

Daghlian, 1945 — died after dropping a neutron reflector onto the demon core, causing a prompt criticality excursion
Slotin, 1946 — demonstrating a criticality experiment, lowering a beryllium dome over the core. The screwdriver he was using to maintain a gap slipped, and the dome dropped, fully covering the core for an instant — bouncing too many neutrons back at it.

The Los Alamos scientists knew well the risks of what they were doing — the trick was finding how far you could go before a dangerous reaction was triggered. They even had an informal nickname for it: "tickling the dragon's tail," knowing that if they roused the beast, they would be burned. Crucially, after these accidents, new protocols meant an end to hands-on criticality experiments, with scientists forced to use remote control methods. So the physics community had already learned — at fatal cost — that a single human action could cause an instantaneous criticality excursion. That lesson was baked into nuclear physics culture by 1946, fifteen years before SL-1.

So Why Didn't That Knowledge Protect the SL-1 Crew?

There were multiple interlocking failures that go far beyond FMEA:

Institutional Silos — the Weapons World vs. the Reactor World. The criticality knowledge lived in the weapons physics community at Los Alamos. The SL-1 was designed by Argonne National Laboratory for the Army's power reactor program — a different institution, a different mission, a different culture. The weapons physicists who viscerally understood prompt criticality were not the engineers designing compact Army reactors for remote radar stations. The knowledge existed, but it did not travel across organizational boundaries in any formalized way.
The Design Was Driven by Cost and Simplicity, Not Safety Physics. More control rods would effectively have reduced the reactivity worth of any individual rod. Since the addition of more control rods would have increased costs, it is easy to imagine the decision to go with a minimum number based on something other than safety. This is the core of it: the people making the design tradeoff likely did know that concentrating reactivity in one rod was dangerous — but cost and the Army's portability requirements won. That is not a failure of FMEA. It is a failure of engineering ethics and safety governance.
The Critical Parameter Was Never Even Calculated. Prior to the accident, no one had computed the prompt criticality rod withdrawal distance. The complex and irregular arrangement of burnable boron strips made modeling the SL-1 core particularly difficult, and calculations for predicting criticality were based on greatly over-simplified computations. This is extraordinary: the designers of a nuclear reactor never calculated the distance one of its control rods had to be pulled to cause a catastrophic runaway. The Los Alamos physicists would have been horrified.
The Operators Were Dangerously Junior and Undertrained. The Army Nuclear Power Program used very junior personnel with minimal training — this previous approach was recognized as inadequate for the complexity of nuclear operations only after the accident. The operators handling the SL-1 were young enlisted men and a Navy Seabee — not nuclear physicists. The institutional memory of "what happens when you go prompt critical" was not transmitted to them in any meaningful way.
Known Warning Signs Were Suppressed. The SL-1's history of frequent control rod sticking was downplayed and ruled out as a cause of the accident long before the damaged core was closely examined. Management was actively filtering out safety signals.

What FMEA covered in 1961	What FMEA missed at SL-1
Hardware component failures	Human actions as failure modes
Individual part malfunctions	System-level emergent behavior
Known failure mechanisms	Uncalculated physical limits
Mechanical reliability	Design philosophy risks
Documented hazards	Institutionally suppressed warnings

James Reason created the "Swiss Cheese Model," one of the most elegant and useful mental models ever produced by safety science. We often hear of it today in aviation accident context by "Captain Steeeve, "Hoover," and others. Reason visualized every complex system as having multiple layers of defense — procedures, training, equipment design, supervision, regulatory oversight. Each layer has holes in it (latent failures, bad assumptions, tribal knowledge, design flaws). Most of the time the holes don't align across layers and disasters are stopped or degraded. But occasionally — through a specific combination of circumstances, chance, timing, and triggering events — the holes line up perfectly and a trajectory of failure passes clean through every defensive layer simultaneously.

What makes it so powerful as a framework is what it implies about blame. When the cheese holes line up:

It wasn't just the operator who pulled the rod too far
It wasn't just the designer who concentrated 80% of reactivity in one rod
It wasn't just the manager who suppressed the sticking rod reports
It wasn't just the regulator who never required the criticality calculation

It was all of them, simultaneously, on that one night. SL-1 is almost a textbook Swiss Cheese diagram:

Layer 1 — Physics knowledge not transferred from Los Alamos ✅ hole
Layer 2 — Critical parameter never calculated ✅ hole
Layer 3 — Single rod design never challenged ✅ hole
Layer 4 — Sticking rod history suppressed ✅ hole
Layer 5 — Junior operators undertrained ✅ hole
Layer 6 — No interlock to prevent over-withdrawal ✅ hole

Every layer failed simultaneously on January 3, 1961.

I spent a lot of time in plants and control rooms, so all that is a personal journey.

OK, that's it. I'm outta here! Time for some sunshine and hiking. Somber Memorial Day!

I just finished reading the book, American Prometheus, which is what a lot folks consider to be the best biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Los Alamos Lab. There was no mention of the Slotin incident in the book.

I’m not surprised, it was the accidental death of one man in that gigantic project.

I have never been a big fan of Oppenheimer he was a Leftist at best, but he had the talent that was needed for the project, and General Groves made the right decision about rolling the dice with him even with the potential security risk.

But he was a Leftist. He hung around with Leftists. He had the same points of view those Leftists had, and he became a cause celebre for Leftists.

But he did do his job in WWII. So I give him credit for that.

I didn’t even notice. I type with half an eye while I’m doing other things.

Well OK, if you say so.

We don’t need to be at odds here. There is enough going around on this forum to last another 20 years. I will concede that I must have it wrong.

Not important to me.

Many years ago, a friend of mine who was a nuclear physics grad student explained that his tribe tended to be especially geeky and with a fondness for practical jokes. That was his explanation for the accident.

“You beat me to the story about the Curies!”

I’m retired. I have plenty of time to look crap up. There were others also:

he Chernobyl Disaster (1986): The first responders who died from acute radiation sickness absorbed lethal amounts of radiation. Because their bodies emitted dangerous levels of radiation, they were buried in welded lead caskets. This prevented radioactive particles from contaminating the environment as their bodies decayed.

The Goiania Accident (1987): Following the infamous radioactive contamination disaster in Brazil, victims who succumbed to acute radiation sickness were buried in 1,200-pound lead-lined caskets and lowered into specially prepared concrete graves to prevent local panic and ecological contamination.

At least those are the ones being admitted to. It is difficult to get radiation poisoning just by being in the area. When I was working ABC for the military, I could take up to 200 rads a year without any problems. But that included any medical x-rays, or dental, to be added in. So, had to be aware late in September.

But just for fun, here ya go:

No fruit “absorbs” or shields against ambient radiation in a beneficial way. However, many fruits naturally contain and accumulate trace amounts of radioactive isotopes from the soil and air.

Bananas: Famous for their high potassium content, a tiny fraction of a banana’s potassium is a natural radioactive isotope called potassium-40. Eating one banana exposes you to about 0.1 microsieverts of radiation, a miniscule and harmless amount that has inspired the popular “Banana Equivalent Dose” scale.

Avocados: Like bananas, avocados absorb potassium from the soil, making them another naturally radioactive fruit.

Brazil Nuts: Technically a seed but often consumed like nuts, they absorb natural radium from the soil, making them one of the most naturally radioactive foods you can eat.

Root vegetables: Potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and sweet potatoes absorb notable amounts of uranium and potassium from the dirt they grow in.

Lima beans: Also known as butter beans, they contain roughly 50% more potassium than bananas.

Red meat: Because muscle tissue is high in potassium, red meat exposes the body to natural radiation.Low-sodium salts: Contain higher amounts of potassium chloride compared to regular table salt, making them more radioactive.

Hope this didn’t ruin your diet.

wy69

Red bricks - high in iron content also usually means high in uranite. The iron content has associate iron isotopes which radiate alpha, beta & gamma rays. Then there’s the uranite, i.e. Pitchblende which the Curies processed tons of it to get radium.

So a red brick house like I grew up in is a “hot” house!

I did Mossbauer spectroscopy work at one time!

When hey exhumed her body to move it she was at a level of \(90 \text{ nGy/h}\). To put this dose rate into perspective, typical natural background radiation varies depending on your location, but it generally falls around \(60\text{—}150 \text{ nGy/h}\) globally. So her level of (\(90 \text{ nGy/h}\): \(\sim 0.8 \text{ mSv/year}\) is completely normal and safe)

Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia on July 4, 1934, at the Sancellemoz Sanatorium in Passy, France. This rare bone marrow condition, which prevents the body from producing enough new blood cells, was caused by her decades of prolonged, unprotected exposure to radiation during her pioneering research. She did cut back exposure in her latter years.

wy69

“Tickling the dragon” was yet another procedure entirely. It was a bit insane but they knew what they were doing.

I myself can be a bit inadvertently unthoughtful or careless in operating potentially deadly equipment (like an automobile, for instance), so I have to realize that and try to compensate for it. That doesn't always work. So this is why in 1962. upon graduating with high grades as a B.S. Ceramic Engineer, I (with careful consideration for self and as the father of four) declined the generous beginning salary with Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (KAPL)^{(click here)} (GE, reporting basically to U. S. Navy and Adm. Hyman G. Rickover). whose developing history is now summarized online:

Extract From Wiki:
"In 2006 KAPL achieved full remediation of the S1C Prototype Reactor site located in Windsor, Connecticut. The S1C site remedial action was declared to be complete by the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection in October 2006. KAPL had taken over operation of the S1C Prototype in the 1960s after expiration of the Navy's original contract with Combustion Engineering."

and similarly also from the Connecticut Advanced Nuclear Engineering Laboratory (CANEL)^{(click here)} (Pratt & Whitney, reporting to U. S. Air Force)

Image excerpted:

That opportunity I also put aside after traveling to examine these sites, never to be considered again.

Several years later, after working at another company as a research engineer, then having gone back for the PhD, followed by employment in that capacity, another company offered me w very attractive position guaranteeing employment to retirement age, developing materials for a more reliable trigger for the nuclear bomb, which I also forsook, and took an offer on the research staff of a well-known state university.

Looking back now, I think those decisions I made fifty years ago helped me obtaing longevity faith in my Savior and Redeemer and His spiritual urgings.

Be wise, my FRiends; not all attractive propositions are wise and prudent. Sometimes less appealing ones can be far more beneficial in long-lasting and pragmatic results.

Oh yeah? Twenty feet away during services in a double lined lead casket?

Some suspect suicide or he was an agent for another power, but nothing has been proved. What is known is that he knew better than to yank the control rod out and he did it anyway. WHY???