we didn’t tell them. Site families should know, and non-Site families shouldn’t. Many of them caught on and hosed down their driveways and sidewalks too. One day I was given the chore of hosing down the driveway to remove oil from our leaky car. Within a few minutes, half a dozen driveways on the block were being hosed down. As I worked, I debated whether to tell them or to go through the whole ritual so as not to raise their ire. Then I realized that a call might have come in at the same time I happened to be washing the oil off. I did the whole thing. I he big one, of course, they couldn’t keep quiet. I don’t remember how I got the news. The earliest I remember, the whole town was in a buzz. SL-1 had blown up. People had died. Official assurances started coming in early. The explosion was over and there was no chance of another one. There was no danger. The inner shell around the reactor was broken, but the outer shell was intact. No radiation had escaped into the air, and none would. This was proof of the safety of their work. They were proud of their system, proud of the brave men who worked at The Site, and most of all, proud of the citizens of Idaho, who stood by them in what turned out not to be an emergency after all. They might have been able to downplay the affair and bury it in technical garble within a few days, except for the problem of the missing body. Three people had been working on the pile at the time it went up, but only two bodies had been found. A family friend who lived across the street was on the rescue team, and was the first one into the compound after the explosion. Hadn’t he looked around for the third body? “No,” he grinned. He was a quiet, modest man, considerably embarrassed by his new hero status. He made light of the whole affair to us neighborhood kids. “ No, I just ran in, grabbed the first body I saw, and ran out as fast as I could.” There hadn’t been time to put on a radiation suit. He knew when he took the job there might not be. He shrugged and said that at that level of radiation, it wouldn’t have helped anyway. In the three seconds he was in the compound, he got well over his lifetime quota of radiation exposure. He was immediately % \ I was tied into Sc/ence and Techno/ogy, /nto Universities, Research and the Government. They were tied into cows and potatoes and irrigation canals, into the John Birch Society, the Mormon Church and the Chamber of Commerce. transferred to A.E.C. Headquarters in town so he wouldn’t be exposed to any more. Later he was transferred to Washington D.C., because even Idaho Falls was too hot. The high radiation level continued to hamper the search for the missing body. It would be years before people could go in, even with the heaviest radiation suits. They pushed television cameras in again and again for several days, and could find no body. Meanwhile, they said, they were getting a lot of valuable information on the blast itself and the effects it had on various materials and instruments. I was told at the time that the local media were being cut off from the main news sources. All the interviews, press conferences, off-the-record background talks and hints from “informed sources” were going to the news syndicates and the networks. Local reporters could interview peripheral people, maybe even the widows. But no one with hard information was available. That didn’t matter much to us. The local media were put out by and for the townsfolk. We Site people cared more what the people in Washington were telling the nation about us than what a small time TV station was telling our neighbors. And our real information came through our regular sources, the men who worked at The Site. So while the official investigation took weeks to reach a verdict of “operator error," we knew within a day or two how it had happened. One of the three men was always bragging about his strength. Several times people had seen him showing off by standing on top of the pile and lowering the damping rod into the core by hand (rather than by whatever mechanical device was generally used). Most likely, he was doing his little stunt again and got the rod jammed in its sleeve. Without the damping rod to absorb radiation, the reactor had gone critical in a few seconds. Maybe that’s why they finally thought to tilt the camera up, and found the third body pinned to the ceiling. Mom said it was probably hanging over a rafter or something, but I remember the news stories saying pinned. The mystery was solved and interest gradually drifted. SL-1 was sealed up and left to cool down for a long time. The SL-1 Explosion must have been in 1961 or 1962. It has remained a pivotal point in my life, of the same historical magnitude as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. But when I left Idaho, I kept finding otherwise well-informed people who looked blank when I menW e learned early that “dirty” meant contaminated and “hot” meant radioactive, and they weren’t the same. Dad had several shirts and pants, pairs of shoes, dozens of pairs of gloves, buried out there. tioned the SL-1 Explosion. No one—with only two exceptions in these eighteen years—had ever heard of it. Indeed, no one even knew of The Site. fingering .^^^alf- Lives I came out of Idaho Falls three days after high school graduation, not to escape the governmental-corporate-scientific, high-security, high-risk, high-stress atomic research environment, but to escape the artistic and literary desolation I perceived there. I thought that in The Big World, the achievements of the educated elite—my people—were not so narrowly constrained by the critical importance of their work (atomic research), nor impeded by the dead weight of dumb Mormon farmers. I went to Berkeley, despite its radical reputation, because friends there offered me the quickest escape from Idaho. Like most country kids going to the big city, I found the world much wider than I imagined. I was no longer part of the educated elite: they had gone to expensive private schools and learned a lot more than I had. In fact, I didn’t like them very much, and I was a hick to them. “My” Site people were considered as backward and provincial as the farmers I had so heartily despised. My dual-class view of society was no longer valid, nor my juvenile loyal- , ties and prejudices. I plunged, as though instinctively, into the mechanics of illegal drugs and clandestine politics. I was adept at using codes, steering conversation around sensitive topics, remembering the phone was tapped, remembering who knew what and who shouldn’t, remembering what name to call everyone by in each situation. It was easy; I’d done it all my life. But all through the anti-war period I continued to be a staunch supporter of nuclear power. (I had discovered that only hicks still called it “atomic.”) When my radical friends would not be convinced, I reverted to my childhood arrogance: they weren’t Site people; they didn’t know what they were talking about. When I did turn against nuclear power, years later, it was on political, not technological grounds. I still believed that nuclear power was feasible, efficient, and could be made as safe as any other form of energy generation if research were not hampered by fears of the ignorant. But the economic and administrative centralization it required made it undesirable for the world in which I wanted to live. It was still later that I came to see how nuclear power, for all the white lab coats and sterile rooms, was dirtier than the coal mine my grandfather died in. But while acknowledging the danger of the radioactivity at a reactor’s core, I still see more danger in the security system around its perimeter. The one may have killed my father, but the other could do worse yet to my daughter. The nuclear zone in which I grew up was small and contained, though I didn’t know it at the time. It was easy to get out of; half by accident I stumbled into the nuclear-free world. Now there is talk of nuclear-free zones, which sound like places you don’t find your way out to, but find your way in to. And all around them would be a nuclear world where kids grow up thinking that nuclear power and protection from nuclear power are as necessary and normal a part of the balance of nature as day and night, summer and winter, life and death. And to learn otherwise, they would have to happen into one of a few shrinking, embattled enclaves, like Indian reservations. I grew up in an atomic zone, left the moment I could, and under no circumstances will I go back to one. I lived there in a nuclear society, and I won’t go back to that either. It took me a long time to appreciate this big, free world, and I’m not prepared to surrender or abandon it. Gwion is a writer living in Portland. This is his first story in CSQ. The photos were taken by Gwion’s father or have been provided by the Department of Energy. Clinton St. Quarterly 7
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