We should also remember the servicemen who died too young because of insufficient safety protocols for atomic testing.
For some unknown reason Byrnes yanked a control rod all the way out. They weighed about a hundred pounds. Maybe it was stuck? At any rate the reactor went critical in a millisecond and the whole thing blew sky high. Oops
The SL-1 incident was required reading when I was going through Naval Nuclear Power Training back in 1983.
We should also remember the servicemen who died too young because of insufficient safety protocols for atomic testing.
What about the first responders who placed him in the ambulance and the morticians who placed him in the casket, weren’t they exposed to radiation too?
Spc. Richard Leroy McKinley, Army Spc. John Arthur Byrnes and Navy Seabee Richard Carlton Legg were all killed by steam and radiation.
Shouldn’t the graves of Byrnes and Legg be the same as McKinley’s grave?
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.