Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 183: SL-1 Nuclear Reactor Explosion

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

in which we talk about an extremely gruesome and also extremely looney toons accident check out scooter on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/angryscooter77.bsky.social or on the horrible website for bad people: https://x.com/Angryscooter77 LINK TO BUY A VAN FOR LIAM’S COWORKER: https://helphopelive.org/campaign/24216/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ some further reading recommended by scooter himself: Tucker, Todd. Atomic America: How A deadly explosion and a feared admiral changed the course of nuclear history. Free Press, 2014.  Stacy, Susan M. Proving the principle: A history of the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, 1949-1999. ID Falls, ID, Washington, D.C.: Idaho Operations Office of the Dept. of Energy ; For sale by the Supt. of Docs, 2000.  McKeown, William. Idaho Falls: The untold story of america’s first nuclear accident. Toronto: ECW Press, 2003.  Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Here's the fuckin' thing. Roz, can you tell our beloved hogs why you had to take a minute to stop the recording? I don't think we're... We don't need to get into that. We're all people of inconvenient bathroom use time. No, it's not the inconvenient bathroom use time. I don't give a shit about that. I lived in the man for years.

I had to give a shit about that. No, no. Tell them what you had to do before we started recording. I had to delete an old file, so I had room to put this one in. ALICE I see. I mean... SEAN It's gotta sound like a Scrams album when I'm done here. ALICE I had the exact same thing, where something was filling up my boot drive, because all

my stuff is on the SSDs and the hard drives that are loose in the computer case, but the actual boot drive is just a little 250 gig SSD. Which is now constantly full. And I'm like, why is this constantly full? And I finally free up enough space to install CCleaner and look and see what's filling it, and the answer is, using Zencast requires me to use Satan's Own Microsoft Edge. LIAM You can use Chrome. ALICE Yeah, but in any case, I don't want to, and... LIAM No, I understand that. I hate that I have Chrome installed. I am a Firefox boy.

ALICE Yes. But so, the whole time it's on, Microsoft Edge is just taking up data? Gigabytes of it. Like, why does it have 12 gigabytes of cache data for the thing that I only use on this website? I dunno, but it does. And so I got rid of that, and now Happy Days problem solved. But that was a stressful moment. SEAN You could also use a WinderStat. ALICE WinderStat? SEAN Winder... WinderStat. ALICE WinderStat?

SEAN WinderStat. ALICE WinderStat. SEAN WinderStat. ALICE WinderStat. SEAN WinderStat. ALICE WinderStat. SEAN WinderStat. ALICE WinderStat. SEAN WinderStat. SEAN WinderStat. SEAN WinderStat. W-I-N-D-I-R-S-T-A-T, Windows Director Statistics, which gives you, in my mind, I use that a lot, because you may not know this, but Audacity also hogs a lot of space, because it doesn't,

at least in my experience, doesn't cleanly delete files I'm done with. Yeah, no, yeah, for sure. Well, this has been fascinating. I am confused. This is great podcasting. Well, I've seen you operate a computer, Roz. A friend of the show, Andrew Saltz, who's a teacher in Philly, said that we should do a 24 hour charity livestream where it's just Roz attempting to use Linux.

But you can install the thing where the window goes wobbly when you drag it around, y'know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wobbly windows. I have the kind of trans woman's natural affinity for old computers, so I'd like it if we went back to the kind of reel-to-reel thing. Whereas with Justin I feel like the kind of time period that you're pitching at is, um...

Free ENIAC. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like punch cards or something. Yeah, sort of a Babbage Adding Machine. The computer is a room that you go into, and then some people take care of it for you. What, you mean like the guys who wipe down the holodeck? Yeah, I guess so. Which, the worst job in Starfleet, no question. I'm the guy who wipes down the loads. ALICE Yeah, I'm doing a historic clean-up detailed

DLC where I've gotta mop all of Riker's cum out of the holodeck. SEAN Thank you. ALICE Just open with that line, no context, thanks so much. SEAN Yeah, yeah. Stage direction. Clean cum? Question mark.

Stage direction. Confetti? Question mark. When we were doing the live show at the film where they were like, alright, we're gonna have a safety brief, which, this was the only venue that did a safety brief. And, because, and they were just like- They got the assignment, yeah. Yeah, and they were just like, okay, so, like, are we expecting stage diving?

And I was like, I hope? Like, can I do it? And they were like, no, you can't. And I was like, okay, well then no. Like... Whenever we do the Kill James Bond live shows shows there's always a question on the safety assessment that's like, are you gonna use any replica firearms? And I've always had to tick no, but I've always kind of wanted to tick yes, and I've never had an inkling of what that

would look like, I think it's mostly I want to do it just to tick the box on the form, but I want to tick the box on the form so bad. This is what you do, is that at the beginning of the show, you inform the audience, you know, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to inform you that during the duration of this show, a pistol will be fired, and then someone else immediately fires the pistol. I mean, that's not my bit. That's from the Maryland Renaissance Fair Act. Hack and slash. It was a really good bit.

I did like too that they were just like, what do you want us to do? Like I had to explain like we will be heckled, but it's fine. It's just the hogs. And they were like, are you sure we can kick people out? But I was just like, I kind of like kind kinda wanted to use unnamed person as an example, but only kick them out. ALICE & TANNER I feel like getting kicked out of a Well There's Your Problem live show for heckling us is like a spiritual injustice that can

never be righted. You would have to kill one of us with a sword for us to make that up to you. And speaking of being killed with a sword, I always do feel a little bit like, um, because whenever I do live shows in person, I always get to meet the fans, so it was really lovely. Oh, of course. A lot of them are wearing shirts that we designed, or whatever. People come up to me, people say things to me, and it's very nice, but there is a little bit of me, like, 1%, because I have an anxiety disorder, that's like, you know, any one of

these people could inajiro Asanuma you. The Japanese Communist Party guy who got killed with a sword on stage. I'm just like, you could get fuckin' killed with a sword right now. So, you know, please don't kill me with a sword, is the main thing. JUSTIN The Fillmore had metal detectors, we were good. ALICE Just stabbing the flat screen, and I'm just like completely fine. JUSTIN Yeah, no, it was funny, they also made us go through the metal detectors.

Just in case you were gonna smuggle in something. I didn't, they patted me down, I got to get felt up for that show. You were supposed to go through the metal, that's fine. Security theater is how terrorists win. Real quick before we begin, this is an ad for us. Please buy the shirt that is now on the store, that is my dad leading, my dad as Chairman Mao. ALICE Yeah, it's magnificent.

SEAN Yeah, with all three of us, yeah. ALICE If you haven't checked the store in a minute, check the store, because there's like two or three new shirts on there. I saw someone wearing a meat deck shirt at the most recent Tri-Shoot show. ALICE Yeah, someone bought one! Wow. ALICE I was so gratified. So yeah, shoutout to my meat deck heads out there.

SEAN Yeah, uh, June thought that it was bootleg merch and I had to explain that no, this is our merch. ALICE No, we really made kind of faux workwear that just says meat deck on the back in big letters. SEAN My design concept for that one was to make it intentionally bad. ALICE I designed it, so I like to think that I succeeded at that.

SEAN That's a good point. Yeah, we collaborated on that one. LIAM Oh, can I reach my fan? I'm so hot and sweaty. Yes! I reached it. SEAN Sick. It's so hot and sweaty. Yes! I reached in. Uh, yeah. And the other thing is, as I mentioned on previous episodes, I slash my coworkers are raising money for my coworkers' grandson to get a handicap accessibility van.

The Glorious Hogs have raised over $9000. Jesus, over 9000?! That's so good though. It's the thing. Yeah, every time you open the browser window it does that. Yeah, we'll drop the link in the video description, absolutely, thank you so much, Hogs. You will be spared during the upcoming, well there's your problem, podcast purges. Yeah, spared by your dad, specifically.

Oh yeah, it's common. It's common. So. Why are we here? That that being said, welcome to... Can I say one thing real quick? Yes. Shouldn't we do a sync point? Oh yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah, thanks Scooter. Alright, what a dev dev, what I want you to do is I want you to leave in the Riker Cum line and the links and nothing else, and we'll just do the sync point. So I'm gonna do three two one, one, mark, everyone clap. Three, two, one, mark. Okay. Okay, we did it. And with that in mind, hello, and welcome to, Well There's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters. With slides. I'm Justin Rosniak, I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he and him, okay go. I am November Kelly, I am the person who is talking right now, my pronouns are she and her. I got hit with a sudden wave of, like, dissociation beam attack saying my own name there. Not sure what that's about.

Yay Liam! Yay Liam, hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. Uh, god damn it. My pronouns are he and him. You got pronouns? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I got em, I got em. My pronouns are he and him. You got pronouns? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I got him. I got him. I got him. Did they get you with a beam attack as well? Cause like, it's going around. No, I spared the beam attack, but I probably have some sort of concussion, I don't know. And we have a guest. We have a guest.

Well, there's your problems number one enforcer. Yes! I didn't know we had a goon, you know? LIAM We do, we do have a goon. ALICE Hit somebody. LIAM Uh, eh. You can say that. The live shows were wild, I'll say that.

ALICE Yeah, someone tried to kill me with a sword, it was... LIAM Like stabbing a flat screen, it was less effective than you would think it was. LIAM No, hi, my name's Angry Scooter. My pronouns are he, they. ALICE You want to be careful with those Angry Scooters, that's how Palestine Action got prescribed. JUSTIN Man of many hats in exactly one outfit. LIAM Yeah, like a cartoon character.

ALICE I think it's completely valid to go Bart Simpson mode. If you find one thing that works for you and you just get like six variations of it, then yeah, ideal. Well not even variations, six identical, same t-shirt, same pants, yeah, perfect. Well I have work uniform work, and work uniform nice. So it all looks like military. The railroad, baby! The work uniform nice is the work uniform, but you've just got a bow tie on.

Oh, I... I mean, close. Bow ties should be banned at this point. When I lead the glorious vanguard party, the thing I believe in. Under the guidance of Chairman Bill, yeah. Chairman Bill, yeah, of course. I was telling my mom that on the LA Transit Bonus episode there's a story redacted, and she was like, oh, and my dad pipes in from the other room and goes, you can tell that

story, it's been long enough. I'm like, nope, it's paywall, baby! ALICE Why are we looking at a big grain silo if someone's built into a Quonset hut? That's not a Quonset hut, but you know what I mean. ALICE Yeah, Ron, do you want to explain this to us? Or Scooter? Scooter, are you taking this one?

Yeah. I think so. It's built in the middle of the desert to hold stuff, we're gonna talk about. Ooh. Spicy rocks. Yeah, it's been too long since we did a Spicy Rocks episode. Yeah. So, yeah, today we're gonna talk about a particularly gnarly nuclear incident at

a reactor known as SL1. But first we have to do the goddamn news. I actually added a drop for this and then the strike ended. AFSCME 33 are garbage workers here in Philly. DC 33 Local, yeah. Yeah. They, whatchamacallit, they reached some kind of contract negotiation last night. It was not the pay increase they wanted. These are some of the lowest paid workers in city government. Pay increase they wanted these are some of the lowest paid workers in city government

The largest blackest and lowest paid union we have in Philadelphia. Yes, and You know, they got I want to say Three percent raises per year as opposed to the five they were angling for don't make like $40,000 a year or something. Yes. Yes. Yeah incredibly difficult agonizing work, especially garbage collection. Meanwhile, would you like to know what the minimum salary for a Philadelphia police officer is? ALICE Sixty-nine thousand five hundred and thirty-two dollars.

SEAN Yes it is! ALICE Don't ask why I know that. I never get back to any of my emails. JUSTIN The thing about these wage increases is that given, you know, cost of living and inflation and so forth, this is still, in real terms, nothing. I mean, very little. Don't Parker's scab mess. Yeah, people are just like, I know the people who are like, you're not, the public isn't

obligated to participate in str- yes you are. You are, though. I saw that one woman, yeah, with the, of the car full of garbage, being like, for $25, I will take your garbage, by the way, I'm not a scab. And it's like, yes you are. Just cause you're doing the work, you're taking money for it, you're doing the work that the striking workers are doing, and you're not in a union. That's scabbing.

It just is. JUSTIN I'll tell you what, I held the picket line, I did not go to any of the city designated drop off points. SEAN Or did I. JUSTIN Yeah. SEAN Hooray for us. JUSTIN You know, exactly, exactly. We were good at solidarity.

Problem is, even though the strike ended late last night, I still didn't get my garbage picked up this morning. SEAN No, it's not happening until the 14th, bud. Not happening until Monday, yeah. And the union rank and file still has to vote on this contract, so we don't know if... If we have DC33 members to vote, no, get the pay increase you deserve. Fuck em. Fuck em all, buddy.

Just, the sort of like, solidarity forever, we can smell worse. Yeah, exactly. I thought... I thought this was gonna go for longer, so... Yeah, you were prepared for it. I mean, the thing is, if anybody at Ask Me, your fuckin' union, doing comms, wants to take this solidarity forever, we can smell worse, and make it into merch, by all means, please do that. Yeah, you can have it.

Send me one. Yeah, so I would rate this as, okay, finally, Maricharelle Parker did a thing, and that thing was bad. Do you remember when she said that Kamala Harris was struggling because there wasn't enough marriage to Raelle Parker in her campaign material? Just really need you to be tied to my personal reputation and brand. We live in the dumbest city in America. Maybe not the dumbest, but we're top five for sure.

Go birds, baby. I'm so proud of it. They're trying to give us awaymos, and it's just like, maybe they should fucking fund Zepter first, I don't know, I'm just an asshole who cheers to the Eagles when I thumb up my ass but... I'm excited to see what the city can do to our waymo. Because I know in my heart there's gonna be some shit I've never seen before. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. You gotta mangle a car in ways that haven't been seen since Burnout Revenge. Yeah, doing crash mode on the first Waymo that shows up. Yeah. I'm gonna slash its tires. Gonna make Hitchbot look like Asimo. Well, in other, uh, non-news. ALICE Weirdly, for a podcast that keeps getting outpaced by events, we kind of don't have a lot of news on this one?

SEAN Yeah, no, we could've put, uh, Elon made rock a Nazi, but I was just like, you all say that, I don't wanna... ALICE Yeah, for sure. And now it's this thing which is Zoran Mamdani, getting subject to some really difficult scrutiny here of exactly what race he identified as, as like a 19 year old. SEAN And New York Times was worried they'd get out-scooped by, what's that fascist I hate, Christopher Rousseau?

ALICE Chris Ruffo, yeah. Chris Ruffo and this one guy who was going by Cremia, Edward Lasker or whatever, he looks like, as I saw someone say, he looks like he could eat an apple through a chain-link fence. Real equine dentition. That guy was like, I'm gonna break this devastating story about Zoran, and it's nothing. It's so much a non-story that even talking about it being a non-story is a non-story. This isn't the goddamn news, this is the goddamn lack of news.

JUSTIN This is the lack of news, yeah. I mean, the full context of the story is Zoran Mamdani, who is a man of Indian descent who was born in Uganda, and immigrated to the United States, ticked the boxes for his Columbia application for both Indian and African American. ALICE Yeah, which is like, doesn't Elon Musk call himself African American all the time as a joke? Like...

JUSTIN I mean, y'know, this gets into complicated questions of race, like, okay, what's an African American versus what is black? Y'know? ALICE This is not something that the Columbia Admissions Department has a kind of, uh, real sort of status to interrogate, y'know? It's kind of like an awkward bureaucratic thing that doesn't also matter that much, necessarily? JUSTIN Exactly. And then people went out and started trying to find his SAT scores.

This, this, this is something I've generally found over the past, y'know, eight or ten months with regard to Palestine protests and all this stuff, is like, why do people talk about college so much? Because, like, it's... Weirdly, all Republicans are college Republicans. Because all the ones who aren't college Republicans don't know how to read. So the ones who are, like, the ones who are typing, they're the ones who, like, were Republicans in college out of contrarianism and racism, and never got over it, and are still kind

of mentally stuck there. It's different in the UK, where the Labour Party is the real, never-got-over-university party, but yeah, that's my diagnosis. It's all college Republicans, you know? That's why, when they were pushing the whole, oh, there's too much woke on campus thing, or going to college campuses and trying to debate and trigger SJWs back in the day. That's why, it's always been about that, it's always been about, like, uh, I wasn't popular enough in college, and therefore the West is falling.

Yeah, you weren't popular because you were a fucking creep who wouldn't stop hitting on underage girls at parties. Exactly, and it's the same reason they try and start their own anti-woke universities, like the University of Austin at Texas or whatever the fuck it's called. It's an extended kind of wish fulfillment of, like, I wish I had been to college in a way that I think was cool, y'know? And it's like, y'know, most people still don't love their college experience, right? Most people feel kind of isolated, it's just, you don't have to turn into the fucking sixth Reich about it.

RIght, exactly. I sure did not love mine. Oh yeah, I definitely had some pretty bad experiences in college, yeah. Yeah, but instead of letting that lead you to, like, incel shit, you became a successful podcaster instead. Exactly, exactly. That's us, baby? That's the trick. Exactly, exactly. My college experience was great, I barely was there. That will do it. I mean, I just finished my open university degree, and that was the ideal college experience,

in that I regularly forgot I was doing it. I never had any communication with them outside of the bare essentials, every email they sent me went directly to spam, and stayed there. And, yeah. I paid the tuition, I submitted the assignments, I'm hopefully gonna get a degree out of it, and I had absolutely no involvement with anything beyond that. Totally atomized. The dream.

JUSTIN You had the good version of the nightmare where you signed up for a course and forgot to go to all the classes. ALICE Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. I barely opened the course materials, like, I'm sorry to say, but, just, yeah. So I'm just gonna read about this on my own, and I'm just gonna do the essays, and that seems to have worked out, so, y'know, maybe after the right completely defunds college education, that'll be the only thing that's left, y'know? JUSTIN Well, probably.

Uh, well, on that piece of non-news, that was the goddamn news. ALICE No, it wasn't. JUSTIN Alright, we gotta talk about our favorite thing. SEAN Oh, I have one more piece of news, which is that the fillies 113 and nothing, we're back, baby. JUSTIN Oh hell yeah. SEAN Yeah, alright, that's it. Let's talk about spicy rocks. JUSTIN Spicy, I have one more piece of news, which is that the Philae's 113 and nothing, we're back baby. Hell yeah.

Yeah, alright, that's it. Let's talk about Spicy Rocks. Spicy Rocks. Yeah, Spicy Rocks. I feel like I've seen this diagram or some variation of it about six different times on this show. The Explain How A Nuclear Reactor Works one. Yeah.

It's all turbines. It's the Drake's Well of Spicy Rocks. Drake's Reactor. Drake's Re of spicy rocks. So. DRAKE'S REACTOR. Drake's reactor. One guy dug up a bunch of weird rocks, got cancer from them, and was like, what if I use this to power Philadelphia? It's a changed world. And everyone knows that, okay, nuclear reactor, spicy rocks, boil water, turn a turbine, make

electricity, but Scooter here knows more about them than we do. ALICE Okay, let's go. SEAN I mean, I'm gonna try not to explain on a college level, because that's boring, but- ALICE That's fine, I won't listen to it anyway. SEAN Perfect. So it's technically Drake's Well and Rickover's reactor, get there. But on the right, you have your pressurized water reactor, which is what like your everybody knows as a nuclear reactor pretty much. This is Three Mile Island. And if you want to get

into it, go to the Three Mile Island episode. But simply a pressurized water reactor is full of water bottom to top as the spicy rocks in the center, some control rods that keep spicy rocks from playing too much with each other, and then a water loop that goes out to a heat exchange. That then takes the hot water, puts it in other hot water, in two separate vessels, which then the second loop of hot water spins a turbine, gets condensed with the big cooling tower, goes back inside the heat exchange. Fair enough? gets condensed with the big cooling tower, goes back inside the heat exchange.

Fair enough? Right. So the water's under pressure. There's two separate loops of water, very hot water from the reactor heats up the less hot water from outside the reactor so the turbine doesn't get covered in radioactive water. Exactly. The important thing to note about a PWR reactor is that it doesn't boil. Kept under pressure so no steam gets generated in the reactor. Is it done?

Sorry if I'm asking the obvious. Is it done in these? Oh, I see the steam generator. I just didn't see that at first. Yes. All right. Continue. OK.

So on the left, you have the boiling water reactor, which this one, the opposite. It's in the name. Much steam which this one, the opposite. It's in the name. Much steam. Yeah. You want steam. You want a lot of steam. It's not full.

It's depending on the reactor, like one quarter full to three quarter full. And it's one loop. It goes out to the turbine, down to a condenser, and back into the reactor. Real simple. And now your turbine is all nice and radioactive when you gotta work on it. Exactly. And that's the reason why these didn't catch on as much.

But they're still used commercially. They have their purpose, especially when you want simple, which is today's subject, is making nuclear power simple. So next slide please. Right. So when you talk about boiling water and making steam, you have to talk about how these things interact with each other when you make you make your spicy rocks, you're trying to get them more spicy, essentially. Right. So in a reactor, you normally have a coolant, which also acts as a moderator.

And the coolant obviously is to keep the spicy rocks from getting too hot and becoming a puddle of spicy rocks. That's bad. Spicy lava. That's not a good situation. I don't like the idea of radioactive lava. I'll tell you that's shit right now. But so it's a coolant, number one, but two it's used as a moderator and what

a moderator is and I get in trouble with this explanation, but I'm going to do my best when you get thistle material and it's naturally breaking down. It breaks into fast neutrons and slow neutrons. Slow neutrons have a better chance of impacting the next atom, breaking it and continuing on. Fast neutrons pretty much zoom by it. Think about it like bowling, right? You want to hit it, the pins correctly so that pin hits the next pin and so on. You don't want to divide into a 7-10 split. JUSTIN I'm looking at this and I'm thinking more along the lines of croquet, actually. ALICE Okay. ALICE Yeah. This is the funniest possible way to conceive of nuclear fission, is a big

croquet game on the lawn of a big country house. LIAM I got into an argument that it was billiards, somebody I was working with called it more like billiards or pool And it's like billiards. It's like bocce ball. It's like I don't know Name another sport. What are the sports where a ball hits a thing? Yeah, uh handball uh, high lie It's actually a lot like polo. There's water involved, it's water polo. There you go.

So what water does is it slows your fast neutron down by giving it a medium to pass through, it bounces around and becomes a slow neutron which gives it a better chance to hit. And continue the site. ALICE Oh, it gives it Riz. Okay, sure, I'll see myself out, it's fine. My bad. LIAM No, it's fine, dude. LIAM I left!

ALICE Thank you, thank you. I was sort of caught off guard, I believe. ALICE Uh huh. Cause chance to hit, like, idiomatically, like, to have sex with someone. Oh, I see. I see. I am of pure mind and body, and I don't... stoop to your pure-eye ways, Nova. Actually, they're actually like Puella now.

Is that how you would switch the gender of Puro? Because, whatever, come back to me, I'm gonna get my Latin dictionary. Alright, you do that. Alright, let me hear about spicy croquet. So, the moderator's important so you get more chain reactions control. Puella-line. From Puella, meaning girl. Okay.

I like that this is just copyright 2012, Encyclopedia Britannica ache, and we're just like, yep! It works! Someone commented, like, hey, could you include a bibliography of your sources, and I was like, well, there's a couple of reasons why we might not wanna do that. This is the best thing I could find that wasn't somebody personal's own diagram that would come back and be like, that's mine! ALICE If you saw us stealing the Encyclopedia Britannica's content, no you didn't.

SEAN No you didn't. ALICE It's fine, if they sue us, we just take it down and we do a hand-drawn crayon version, it's fine. SEAN Exactly, exactly. You saw me. JUSTIN Roz, it is MS Paint, genius delirium, yeah. SEAN I missed those MS Paint diagrams. It was hard not to include Roz's nuclear reactor diagram in this.

The sun, yeah, with the sunglasses on. I was considering going back and grabbing that and putting it in, I just couldn't remember which episode it was on, or I couldn't find the slides. We lost those tapes in the great Roz's hard drive disaster of every year he's ever been alive. It's fine, I keep the backups in one of these. Alright, so, Modric... Did you like the sound of me kicking it for real?

No I didn't! Ah, my sweet baby, soon you will be liberated from the shackles of terror of November. ALICE Listen, this computer case has an expired Windows 10 license key stuck to it, a logo for something called Crap Co. stuck to it, and then two big googly eyes, one of which has fallen off. SEAN It's just Cyclops, but just, ugh, Cyclops with some sort of massive CTE diagnosis. Yeah. And this is the keys to my livelihood, somehow.

I have a nice... my PC has a place of honor. See? Uh huh. Uh huh. Oh, don't look at my stuff. None of the viewers can see this. I don't care. I'll be quiet.

Alright, let's go. Alright. Anyway, so, let's go. Alright. Anyway, so, moderator, that's why you have it. Control rods stop reactions entirely between dual assemblies. Moderator helps them hit each other better. That's simple. So like a forum, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Moderator is ensuring that there is some level of disorder and violence. But a controlled disorder. Yeah, exactly. A peaceful protest, not a violent protest. Yeah, we're not allowed to call for organized violence on this podcast. You two will get mad at us. So also on this slide, I want to talk real quick about steam fact,

because you're using water as a coolant, right? Steam is a horrible moderator. It does not allow the reaction to continue because it's more spaced apart. It's less dense. Make sense? Yep. Yes.

That easy. Boiling water reactors, you have to use a pump to push water through so you don't get voids. You get steam voids as it's boiling, cause that'll cause your fuel assemblies and everything around them to start vibrating and all kinds of other bad stuff that you don't want, so you just keep it full, you don't get steam except where you want it, problem solved. ALICE All of this radioactive steam, you just keep

it over there, and then nice and contained, not your problem, unless anybody has to work on it, which you just hope they don't. It's fine. LIAM That's their problem, not yours. JUSTIN Yeah. Not yours. Yeah. LIAM So there's the science of it.

So now we get into the history. Next slide, please. Oh, you're on it. Sorry. ALICE Pile one, baby. LIAM Yep. So, you have Chicago Pile One on the left, and this is our first real nuclear reactor used to test the theory of fission, essentially.

It's made out of graphite, it's built in Chicago under Stagg Field. It's a squash cord, right? Under a squash cord, yep. They are playing Assum Squash, okay. Yeah, yeah. My favorite note about this is not any of the real history about it, but the workforce was thirty high school dropouts that they stacked blocks. They didn't care, they didn't value human life in that way.

My question is, you say it's under Stag Field, what is Stag Field, is that a sports field? Yeah, it's the football field at Chicago. Oh hell yeah. Chicago used to be a legitimate football program. Just wondering why every football player of that generation has mega foot cancer. Oh, no, these are my mutant atomic supermen. Just getting the okay on this by telling the football program that it might give them powers. Yeah, exactly. LIAM But yeah, there were these, like, thirty guys, sorry, I just gotta finish this.

These thirty guys are getting ready to ship out for World War Two, so it's like getting your friends together to move and giving them the case and addy light. To stack some blocks. It's great. ALICE Calling your one friend who has a pickup truck to get you to move the nuclear reactor. LIAM This is kind of a trend with Argonne National Laboratory reactors we'll get into later, but that's what the University of Chicago's nuclear laboratory becomes.

And there's just this different vibe of their reactors that comes from the 30 guys stacking the blocks. On the right is EBR-1, which is the experimental breeder reactor. This was built in 1951 at the National Reactor Testing Station, so out in the middle of Idaho, there in a little bit. Built as a breeder reactor. So they were testing... That's one of my kinks. Sorry. If you're into

it. They built it to take uranium Q38 and turn into plutonium. It's breeding fissile material. It used a liquid sodium potassium coolant instead of water. Why? It was early nuclear reactors, so they were testing what coolants were going to be best for heat transfer, going to be best for all different types of reactor usage, and this And this is really good at being a coolant and moderator, but it's really bad for life, for corrosion, pretty much everything. So it's not really used commercially. Yeah, it's been like the problem with all the molten salt reactors is like, molten salt's

not very good for metal, you know? Correct. So interesting thing about this is on December 20th, 1951, it was one of the, or it was the first reactor to produce in-house electricity being generated. And they powered four 200 watt light bulbs. Hell yeah. Wow. Incredible. Later on, they hooked it up to the city of Arco, Idaho, and powered it for a while, and

Arco's like, 12,000. This is also notable because in 1955, it suffered a partial meltdown during a coolant flow test. ALICE My light bulbs! LIAM Oh no, they're melted! They fucked up, they didn't plan for the thermal expansion of the reactor and the fuel, and it jammed up the control rods, and, y'know, just melted it a little. You can still go see this, it's out in Idaho, it's a museum now. Cool. It's a little fact about it.

It'll be fun. You can go see the partially melted down reactor. Kids, get in the car, we're going on a road trip. Yeah. You're gonna get superpowers. Gonna get so good at football. So that's dimly remembering the history of American atomic exploitation and being like, yeah, Americans invented nuclear power in order to get good

at football. That would track, though. I mean, have you seen the CFL? Yeah, that's a good point, yeah. Actually, I have seen a CFL game, but I wasn't in the stadium, I was on an overlook on, what should we call it, Mount Royal. Um. So, next slide please. So that's, what we just talked about is just the general beginning of reactor history, but this is the 50s.

Everybody wants in on the nuclear craze, right? So you have commercial, military, and every branch of the military wants to do their own thing. Right? What if we put them in planes? We'll do a thing about nuclear aircraft sooner or later, I'm sure. LIAM I've done it once, but somebody was a little crazy. ALICE What if we just do it all over again?

Like at a certain point, I forget enough that it becomes funny for me to do different jokes. ALICE I love this for you. LIAM There will be a slight refresher further on, but long story short, everybody wants to get in on it, so the armed forces splits it up to where the Navy's going for nuclear power in submarines, the Air Force is trying to do it in planes, and the Army gets stationary reactors for just general generation. They didn't want to put it in a tank or something. LIAM They did, of course.

LIAM But that was down the line. ALICE Yeah, once things elaborate to the point of, like, what if we dug one of these into sort of like, pack ice, or like, what if we put one in a tank. But right now it's like, what does the army have building? LIAM Pretty much. So, the army starts a test program, and they decide to build a prototype reactor but also one that they can train people on. And in 1957 they build the SM-1 in Fort Belvoir? Fort Belvoir, yeah.

This is where I had my first Boy Scout camp out. What? Not near the reactor, but it was on base. Belvoir, Belvoir. It was across from the commissary. I want some Belvoir, cause the NSI isn't me. Don't they do some intelligent stuff about Belvoir? The Army of Northern Virginia, whatever they call it.

Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was gonna say it at the end of the slide, but Fort Belvoir is headquarters to Defense Logistics Agency, the Defense Acquisition Agency, or Defense Acquisition University, Defense Contract Audit Agency, Defense Technical Information Center, the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command, United States Military Intelligence Readiness Command, the Missile Defense Agency, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the National Geospace Intelligence Agency. ALICE DOOBIN-CURRY DTRA's cool.

I mean, I hope they haven't all gotten doged yet. A shoutout if we have listeners out there, thank you for making sure the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons didn't get loose in the 90s. LIAM Also, I think Geospatial is actually just off base now, they've got that nice new building on a Fairfax County parkway. ALICE We're not beating the Fed allegations if we're talking about all of these agencies like co-workers. LIAM I do have to say, the guy that was at the live show in DC that was really mad you

didn't bring up the DOE is one of the three letter agencies. ALICE I'm sorry. I know you guys are special, I know you have, like, special clearances that you don't even get to talk about that are like fucking just letters and numbers and sigils that make you go mad. LIAM Cue clearance! He's got cue clearance! ALICE I know that for a while Rick Perry was one of the most powerful human beings to have

ever existed. I know that Ernest Moniz and his hair was also one of those. I'm aware of the Department of Energy. ALICE I have a special clearance that means it's safe for me to hold the Cobalt 60 rod. DROPPIN' ROD TO ALL PART OF ME BABY LET'S DO THIS. I mean, I don't think it's problematic to be interested in the fed shit, and to say that sometimes the fed shit is aesthetically cool and interesting, that just means you've played Control once in a

while. Like, of course. Yeah. I just wanna say, he wouldn't say what part of the DOE he was in, so I fully believe he was one of the crazy cops that chased nuclear weapons. Those guys rule. Yeah. No.

Huge fan. Um. Okay, Huge fan. Um. Okay, well back on stuff. Yeah. No, no, no, I got like an hour more of this. I, um, on Trash Future, because we have a similar relationship with the sort of organs of the British state, we had a running gag about doing a shirt that's like the GCHQ logo, but it says gender confirmation headquarters and it's in the trans flag colours.

And, cause we haven't gotten, those people haven't gotten doged yet. Yet. Here. And so, I was like, oh, it's a funny joke, we never got around to making it. And then at some point I heard from somebody being like, it's a shame you never got around to making it. And then at some point I heard from somebody being like, it's a shame you never got around to those, because I know like two dozen people who would have kept those in their locker to change into. So I don't know where that leaves me in terms of my relationship with the security state,

other than that I could have been purveyor of t-shirts to it. You know? LIAM Hey, just FYI, my audacity crashed. ALICE That's them now, I guess. Hey guys. Sorry, I never like using guys for a group that includes trans women, so, high-season professionals of the government communications headquarters. LIAM What do I do with Audacity Crash? ALICE They also, I think they do tours of the Pentagon.

I'm not sure though. ALICE That's true, probably not anymore. JUSTIN Maybe not anymore. Well, you're hardly gonna be able to fly a plane into the pentagon from inside it. I mean. Oh my god. Bringing, sneaking a plane in through the metal detector. Yeah.

Uh, uh, this is, eh, eh, this is, this is allowed, I do not wish to create a jointer with you sir, trying to hustle my sessile into the pentagon. So. So. The reason the reactor was constructed 18 miles away from Washington DC, at this fort, was because it's the headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers. So they wanted their nice fancy toy right next to their headquarters. ALICE In their backyard, sure.

ALICE Those guys are so good at putting one brick on top of another brick. LIAM They did quite a bit, because they had to build a containment dome here on this one too, so they not only did the internal bricks, they did the external bricks. On a leg too. I don't have anything for a containment dome, and I'm disappointed in myself. Just give that containment dome until the cobalt... So the shit I was doing in lockdown was getting containment dome.

Very good. There we go, we got there in the end. This was the prototype for a reactor that was going to go to Fort Breely, Alaska, up where it's cold as hell and they're just using coal power. And it stands, the SM-1 stands for Stationary Medium-Sized Reactor Prototype 1. Where's missing the R and the P there? It's the Army, they forget. They're not so good at letters.

They're not chewing crayons, but they're close. The cool thing about this one, and quite a few of the Army reactors, is that it was built by ALCO. JUSTIN The American Locomotive Company. ALCO. Smokefame, yeah. JUSTIN The train people? LIAM The train people, cause they're good at building boilers.

And that's all a nuclear reactor is. JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, by this time they're winding down steam locomotive production, so you know, you got all the equipment for it, I mean... ALICE A little bit of retrofuturism where you're like, well, I've had a long career building steam engines, but now I can finally do the work of the future, I can build the like, pressure vessels for the reactors, everything's gonna run off, I assume. JUSTIN Yes. In your car.

ALICE Surely after this we won't go back to like, building, y'know, coal power plants or whatever. JUSTIN No, no, they'll be in everything. They'll be in your car, they'll be in airplanes... ALICE Energy too cheap to meet our... yeah. JUSTIN They'll be in your toaster. LIAM They'll be in your tank. JUSTIN Yeah, your tank.

They'll be in your home hot water heating by nuclear reactor. ALICE Oh boy. LIAM This was a pressurized water reactor, so more akin to what commercial use and so on. Because they had space to build it, you didn't have to worry about, y'know, logistics of moving this thing or setting it up. Everybody was trained on this, so Army, Air Force, and Navy reactor operators that are going to work on stationary reactors, would go here first, and then go to whatever project they were working on next.

ALICE That's not a bad system, you know, this is the training wheels. You know? LIAM Correct. And if they fucked up, they're only 18 miles away from Washington, DC, so it works out. JUSTIN This is your, uh, you know, Fisher Price baby's first reactor. ALICE Either I do my job right, or it's not my fucking problem anymore. LIAM So, moving on, next slide please. Camp Sanctuary!

Let's fucking go. We'll start with the do line on the left. So it's the 50s, the cold war's raging, and the Russians are coming to our doorstep, maybe, probably. And they would likely come over to North Pole. You'd see all those bombers, right? Yeah, coming in the form of TU-95s and shit. Again, retrofuturism, Soviet bomber engineer being, like, I've designed the last four-engines

propeller bomber of the Soviet Union, after this, all jets, we're not gonna still be using it in like, y'know, fuckin' 2025. ALICE Aha, stupid! JUSTIN Youvgeny, I will make Bomber fly over Parade seven times so we do not have to build seven Bomber. Oh shit, we need to make sure we could spot them. And we had lines of radar stations close to the United States, but they wanted to build one as close as you could get to Russia. So they came up with the distant early warning line.

It was built along the 55th parallel, the Arctic, and it had like multiple stations. So you'd have bigger or big air bases with multiple radars you'd all the way down to like a station that was self-contained and no one was at called a gap filler. The problem with the do line is it's in the Arctic so you're having generators run all this non-stop. Did we lose Liam? Right.

Did we lose Liam? Liam. Liam. Liam. Fuck. God we lose Liam? Liam! Liam! Liam! Fuck! God damn it. It's fine. We'll claw our way through this one.

So keep going? Keep going, yeah. Okay. So, you're using diesel generators, you're in the Arctic, it's unforgivable, so the thought is... I'm gonna have to fly a C-130 full of barrels full of diesel out here every month. LIAM That's literally what they did. ALICE Yeah, it's finally like, you know, Transport Fever where you fill the airplane with diesel, yeah.

LIAM But, uh, so the thought is, put a small nuclear reactor there, problem solved. You got heat, you got energy, runs itself. ALICE Yeah, the bit in Kerbal Space Program where you unlock RTGs and you're like, this will solve all my problems. This game doesn't model radiation. I can stick fifty of these fucking things in like a radial formation around whatever it is I'm doing, it's gonna run forever.

Yes. It'll be fine. Don't worry about the launch pad. So about the do line, it came online in 1957. What else happened in 1957? SPUTNICK! Yeah. Alright, cool, rise of the gods, let's do this.

The second it came online, it was outdated. I love the Cold War so much, I will play all comers at Twilight Struggle and I will win. It's my favorite period of history largely because of how simultaneously dumb and terrifying it is. Hell yeah. I'll buy that. Just any moment, any single moment, the whole world could have ended, like, human civilization as we know it could have ended, and it kept not happening for like, fifty years?

Can you imagine? ALICE Duck and cover, baby. JUSTIN Well, we would have a very different podcast if it did happen. ALICE Oh yeah, welcome to Coach Nuclear Fallout, well there's your problem with But we're good at football. ALICE So the do line stayed intact to an extent, all the way up to 1990 in certain forms, so even though it was outdated, it stayed operational. ALICE Existed primarily as a kind of internal management tool, as somewhere they could send

you if nobody likes you. LIAM Bingo. So there's still a point to build something to put up there in 1957, that's the thought. The other place... ALICE Shuttling snow in Siberia, except it's in Greenland. LIAM Well, speaking of Greenland, the other place that makes sense to put a nuclear reactor for the army is Camp Century. Camp Century was built on the public idea of having a research station under the ice up in Greenland, to have a place to learn about the polar ice caps and...

melt them more efficiently. Stuff. Stuff, yeah. And Ross's priest is up there too. Literally, yeah. I don't know if I've told this story on the main feed. I think I told it in the Catholicism episode. Oh yeah, go for it. So at Nativity Catholic Church back where I was my parish growing up, there was Deacon Corpy, Deacon Bill Corpy.

I think he's Father Corpy now. I'm not sure if he's still alive. Anyway, he, you know, but he was, I went to the Catholic school, Deacon Corpy was known, you know, he was a big hit with the kids, known to be a big bullshitter though, you know, but one of the stories he would tell was about, oh yeah, I was chaplain at a secret army base under the ice in Greenland. And we're like, oh yeah, sure. Yeah. Then I saw a documentary about Camp Century on YouTube, it was an old one from the 50s, and, you know, they've gone through the various base facilities, and, you know, like, we even

have a chapel, and then the camera swings over and there he was! It's Deacon Corby! Holy shit, it was real! Everything was real! How did you feel? Ross' eyes just melting out of his skull. Calling out Father Corbyn to be like, I'm sorry, brother. I wasn't familiar with your game. And he's not brother, father. Fuck you man.

So the real point of Camp Sentry was to test whether or not you could make a missile base underneath the ice. It was part of project Iceworm and the thought was what a day he would tunnel miles and miles of tunnels underneath the ice, build a rail line between all these tunnels, and then put nuclear missiles, medium range nuclear missiles on rail cars and move them between the different tunnels so the Soviets could not track and target them. What? My understanding was this is also like proper trains, not like, you know, some kind of train-esque

thing. Yeah man, the outgoes right there, we got this. Yeah, nah, nah, we're gonna dump a diesel locomotive in there and some flat cars, you know? Can you imagine being the poor son of a bitch that has to collect a railroad retirement from these jack-offs? And, it's literally like, we'll build our own Siberia home, right, we will have our kind of, instead of just driving around in

TELs, we're just gonna do it on trains. I also note that this runs between Thule Air Force Base, Camp Century, and Camp Fist Clench. So, where did you serve? I was at Camp Fist Clench. I was in the gay army, actually. So you've been in the Navy. New tunnels were to be dug every year so that after five years there would be thousands of firing positions, among which several hundred missiles could be rotated. At Fox. About that. thousands of firing positions, among which several hundred missiles can be rotated. ALICE That fucks. LIAM About that. So they build Camp Sentry to test trying to do that, and they decide

Camp Sentry is like the place you need a nuclear reactor, because it's cold, it's under the ice, makes sense. So they build the PM-2A reactor, which is a smaller version of what was a pork bell voir, but it's closer to what we will be talking about later in its design. So, you're hearing this box from the American Locomotive Company with a cute dog on top. I love that picture. Yeah. I also love the portable reactor plant on the box.

It's like an Acme box, you know? This order of the portable nuclear reactor. All these have to be- The truck drops it off on your head. I like that it's addressed, you know, just in case it got to someone who wasn't the Corps of Engineers and they were like, no, no, sorry, this isn't for me. It had to be small enough to fit in a plane to transit in, like, 1950s planes, so pretty small.

I just like the idea of them just dropping this out the back and leaving, like, fuck Greenland, we're lit, here you go, here's your reactor. ALICE And it's liquefied. Alright, let's do this. ALICE Dropping a sorry we missed you card onto Camp Century. You were out, and it's like, motherfucker, you didn't even knock on the ice door! ALICE I mean, we've spread nuclear material all over Greenland before, so it wouldn't put a pass doing it again.

ALICE What's one more? Yeah yeah yeah yeah. ALICE I'm looking at the map of Camp Century here, and the chapel had to share a space with the theatre, which must have been fun. I'm also noting that the offices had a separate latrine. Privileges of rank, I guess. Yes. So, just while we're on the subject of Sentry, the reason why we never got completed Project

Iceworm is because ice melts. Ice shifts, and Camp Sentry, over the decade or so it was around, would have situations where a whole tunnel would just kind of fall in and go sideways. ALICE Oh, chapel's gone. Chapel's gone. It's just gone. LIAM There's a famous picture of one of the barracks where the beds are sideways and the roof's right on top of one of the beds, and I just thought, what if you were sleeping

there when that happened? ALICE Fuck that. I don't know, would not be ideal. ALICE Of all the things that you want to happen to your little containerized nuclear reactor, crushed in ice flow is not, like... SEAN No, I feel like that's down on the list. JUSTIN Yeah. It's probably gonna be hard to use at that point.

ALICE So, we're gonna leave... SEAN It's gonna get in the reactor room and it's like on the side of the wall instead of on the floor and just like, uh, okay. SEAN Do it with us later. LIAM Yeah. Greenland's problem. ALICE I'm going to the chapel slash theatre. I'm going to the, is this a glycol trench?

I don't wanna go to the glycol trench. LIAM Gotta bury it somewhere. Let's take a step away from Greenland, and let's go to another wonderful place that's cold, frigid, and barren. We're gonna go to Idaho. Oh, you're on. ALICE & LIAM Oh, that's the last way? America's Siberia Part Two.

LIAM So we're in the deserts of Idaho, near Idaho Falls, at the National Reactor Testing Station. It's 1949 when it opens. And everybody runs to it to put their new nuclear project on site. The EBR-1 was there, that we talked about. It also became the target for Admiral Hyman Rickover to place his testbed reactor for the Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine. ALICE Man, that's an unfortunate name.

ALICE We've talked about Hymen Recova. JUSTIN Have we? ALICE Yeah, I'm sure we've talked about Hymen Recova. Because if nothing else, I've laughed at the name Hymen privately. JUSTIN Ah, I see. I see. I'm seeing here he was... ALICE The father of the nuclear navy. JUSTIN Famous for stealing salt shakers.

LIAM You motherfucker. Yeah, he would, when he went over to other people's houses for dinner parties and stuff, he'd leave and their salt shakers were gone. Apparently this happened every. Single. Time. He was an admiral, what do you mean? What is he doing with the salt shakers?

Fuckin' a- No one knows. Did he have a little serial killer, like, uh, like, Killram, full of other people's soul shakers? LIAM Well, if you read anything about Rickover, he would be the type to do something serial killery, but not actual commit. He was a hardass. His claim to fame that I find the most interesting is everyone that joined the nuclear Navy to be a reactor operator had to interview with him every single person and he he would come in and fry you no matter who you were. and rip your resume apart. There's multiple parts to this, I won't spoil all of them for somebody that would want to research him further, but my favorite thing he did other than the salt shakers, was he

would light you up and then he'd go, give me your tie. What? Give me your tie! And if you gave him your tie, he would open up a drawer, throw it in with all the rest, and throw you out of his office. You just lost the job. ALICE. Jesus!

LIAM. If you stuck to your guns, you would get the job. ALICE. Just, one of, one drawer, ties, one drawer, salt shakers. Somehow, somehow this man nuclearized the entire United States Navy submarine fleet with a desk that was one half necktie's one half salt shakers. This is why I kind of get the Atomcraft 9 Danka stuff, the anti-nuclear stuff, is that atomic power, it works, it's safe, it's like an incredible civilizational advancement.

Everyone who likes it, dangerously insane. Yes. Well, and that's what's crazy about Rick over here. At the end of his life, he admitted that he did not agree with nuclear power. It was a necessary evil to win the Cold War. Okay, dude. Just like, why'd you do so much of it, man? It was a necessary evil, he was committed to the military.

He was doing his, like, the thing he was really fond of, which was stealing people's cutlery. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the advanced coal turbine plane, or, you know, aircraft coal propulsion just doesn't have the same ring to it. Advanced coal turbine plane, or, you know, aircraft coal propulsion just doesn't have the same ring to it. ALICE Yeah, what do you do on the bomber, Demetri, I'm a stoker. JUSTIN Well, when it comes to the nuclear navy, they build a nuclear submarine in the desert of Idaho, in a pool, so the reactor can actually interact with the outside water.

ALICE It's instead of a stone frigate, it's an adobe submarine. LIAM But they build this thing, and all Navy nukes are sent out here to train on this, and then go out to their subsequent submarines. When something went wrong, because Rickover believed that it's not the engineering that was going to keep reactors safe. It was the people so if there was anything up with these reactors, especially this one when they're designing it say a steam pipe would break. Well, they would pull the steam pipe out investigate it if it

wasn't what they wanted what was supposed to be they tear everything out of the reactor that had anything to do with that and put it back but Put the right thing in. There was no excuse in the nuclear navy for any failure, and to this day we've never had a reactor issue in the nuclear navy that caused the fatality. ALICE And the price of it was letting one deeply, deeply unwell man run it as his own kind of personal fiefdom. LIAM Yes. unwell man, run it as his own kind of personal fiefdom. Sometimes dictatorship works, like, I don't...

Not even a benevolent dictator, just a dictator, but he just knew what he was about, I guess. So also at the test site, they have, if I say so one more time, eat me. It's fine. I say like and uh so many times, whenever I listen back I want to hit myself with a hammer. I hear that. LIAM Also on the site, there's Test Area North, which is relegated to the Air Force, which goes, well the Navy gets propulsion, I want propulsion. I want a nuclear bomber!

That's nuclear powered! ALICE This is insane, but it's a different kind of insane, right? Because the real weirdos, Joachim and Ricover or whatever, any uniformed service, any bureaucracy, you get a limited supply of those, and it just so shook out that the particular kind of nuclear-inflected weirdo that the Air Force got was your strategic air command kind of guy. I'm not saying we won't get a hair must, but like, 100-200 million tops kind of guy. The, I'm not saying we won't get a hair must, but like, 100-200 million tops kind of guy. Rather than, like, it's the, like, I just want to see Moscow

get vaporized once in my lifetime, please God let me not die without seeing Moscow get vaporized guy. Rather than the, I want to put the nuclear reactor in the back of the plane and I want all the guys who work on the nuclear reactors to be, like, personally traumatized by me in an interpersonal session. LIAM And I want their tie. SEAN The tie is a metaphor for blood. LIAM Yeah. JUSTIN The thing about the test area north is they, it's away from everything, because they're

testing nuclear powered jet engines that is open air. So you're just tacking a reactor onto the back of two J-47s. Yeah, J-47s. ALICE BELLAMY Bump a sticker on the exhaust nozzle that just says, fuck the environment. Yes. Yes. LIAM They built a smokestack for it to just get it up high enough to not contaminate the area around where they were testing.

So it could blow down wind. This is- ALICE It's like, that's fine, there's no environment in Idaho. ALICE This is the same program that, in Georgia, for testing materials, they had an open air reactor that when they were testing like what does aluminum do when it's under intense radiation? They would fire it off and it taxidermied everything around it. Everything would drop dead and then stay there because there's no bacteria left.

Jesus. All from the aircraft nuclear propulsion. It's an episode in itself, it's out there, it can come back, but there's so much to this that's just wild, and we did it for a billion dollars, 1960 money. ALICE I'm so sad that, because you know that, like, as much as the Soviet Union should have won the Cold War, they were also allotted their number of weirdos, right? And despite it all, despite a lot of historical investigation, we don't know half as much

of what their weirdos were up to, and I wish, I wish deeply that someone could go into the archives and find out the type of shit they were doing to, like, wild deer in Kazakhstan or whatever, that we still don't know about. You know? Like, rock. So, the important thing about this, relating to our story, is they built a hanger for what was going to be this nuclear plane, at Testerion North. I love the trifoil on the rudder there. Hell, yeah. The MB-36 was like, the coolest plane ever built.

And it is a shame it was scrapped. But, so they built a giant hangar for this giant plane that was gonna haul a reactor, and then they cancelled the program, so there was no reason to have it. ALICE And it's a cold war, what do you care? Green light! ALICE And it's a turboprop! It's a turboprop, it's all turbines! Radiation gets sad when you don't use it to turn a turbine. And it's a turboprop! It's a turboprop, it's all turbines!

Radiation gets sad when you don't use it to turn a turbine. Alright, it's a Convair, six turnin' four burnin'. Hell yeah. One spicy. One spicy. I guess one boiling, I don't know, huh? So that's kinda what's gone on around the rest of the Nevada, er, sorry, Idaho testing site?

Yeah. Nevada's where they're doing the other crazy shit with nuclear propulsion. You had a lot of states and they used like five or six of them just to be like, we can just light shit up. Just to irradiate. It's a testing range, the whole state's a testing range. Fuck y'all. So another thing they were doing at the testing site was the Borax experiments.

This one's the boiling reactor experiments. Oh, it looks like it's boiling alright. Yeah, I feel like this image on the right, things have gone well slash poorly. Well, what they would do with Borax is it was testing to see if a boiling water reactor would shut itself down if it got too out of control. And so they would run excursions, run the run the reactor up too hot, blow it up in small geysers. It wasn't like blowing the reactor apart. They would just melt some melt, some fuel, melt some rods,

make everything around it nice and spicy. And they did this 70 times. Oh, same reactor. That feels unfair. But they discovered that a boiling wire reactor tends to inherently be safe because once you produce steam, the reaction shuts down. The reactor goes back to normal, you might get a small geyser, but you won't get a meltdown, per se.

But! They fucked it up enough to where they decided that, well, let's just see what happens when we blow one up. So the last test they do with it is they stick a spring underneath the main control rod. ALICE The last one being like, let's do a silly one. ZACH Yeah, it is, literally. They get in a lot of trouble for doing this. They shoot the control rod out in like, two milliseconds, and the whole reactor just heats

up and detonates, and blows the mound that's around it apart, and shoots the control rod drive mechanism, that top part on the top of the mound 10 meters into the air. And then everybody at the testing site gets real mad at these guys for just contaminating everything around their site. But their experiments prove that boiling water should be safe, and is simple to operate. This creates a false sense of security. ALICE No, no, trust me, I just blew up one of these

things. I tortured it for like, 12 months, and now I blew it up to put it out of its misery? I'm pretty sure it's safe. LIAM It's good, bro, trust me, yeah. JUSTIN Well, the real thought was like, look what it took to blow it up. You can't fuck this up by doing anything normal, so that creates this false sense of security, like, you cannot, if you design this right, you can't do anything wrong.

And that percolates throughout everybody in the reactor community. When it comes to boiling water reactors. Next slide, please. Next slide please. Oh. Yes. So- We made this one idiot proof, and also I'm kinda distracted because Hyman Reckover I think is breaking into people's shit and like stealing their neckties and salt shakers. That's why they couldn't, they couldn't build a molten salt reactor around them, they'd

steal it. Yeah, he had an incredible gift for stealth. Shovelygadadoodle. He'd be working on this and you'd be like, I swear I was wearing shoes. ALRIC over strikes again. Oh god, I love that, man. So we're back to the army. We're back to the army programs, and they decide to build a prototype of what they want to put out on the do line and what is being built for Camp Century.

And they want to make this a simple, incredibly simple, incredibly easy to operate, incredibly portable, small reactor. So they design, they have Argonne National Laboratories design the SL-1. The stationary low power reactor, prototype one. Notice that it was not built by ALCO, or anybody else that's been doing reactors so far, it's built by a laboratory. ALICE That's fine, I mean, you start under a squash court, it's all good.

JUSTIN Yeah. under a squash court, it's all good. LIAM They built it in 1957, it goes first time critical in 1958. So since it was built by a laboratory, and it's for the army, they still need somebody to maintain it. ALICE You still got those like, 30 dropouts? LIAM No, they got turned into mulch. LIAM Well, it's even better. They hire Combustion Engineering, which is famous for locomotive superheaters. So it's another group of people that are familiar with steam, but not particularly familiar with

the army or reactors. No, no, it's all steam locomotive guys. All the way down. So, this reactor, just for some statistics, is a 3 megawatt boiling water reactor that's designed to generate 200 kilowatts at the generator. So it's for like, small applications, small bases, small steam generators. You run the lights and you're kind of like, horrible ice hole. Correct. Is that a usual amount of efficiency there? I'm just thinking, three megawatts to two hundred kilowatts seems like kind of... there's

a lot of wastage here. There is. But you're... the wastage is fine, cause you're only trying to hit a certain target, you're not trying to... you can only get so big of a generator in a plane, for instance. Right, okay, that makes sense. RIght, sure. JUSTIN This thing's supposed to be portable, you'll see in two slides that this thing's only like twenty feet tall, total.

So it's a little guy. We'll get to another little guy here in a bit, too. ALICE It looks like a fucking grain silo, like... SEAN That's what I was thinking, yeah. JUSTIN They designed it, it's a big metal building, round building, because, again, you're putting this out in the middle of the Arctic. You don't need anything but protection from the elements.

So it didn't have like a containment dome because it's why you're making it simple. It's and it's inherently safe boiling. Why reactors can't explode, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. So you don't need to have a dog now, baby. Let's do this.

Yeah. So and it runs it just to put a number in your head, it runs at 300 pounds per square inch of pressure when it's operating and generating electricity. Are we sure that it didn't have a containment dome, and then Hyman Rickover visited it? Opening a desk drawer full of domes? Well, it's portable, so he would've stolen the reactor, too. Well, I was gonna get to this later, but I will say, Rickover has nothing to do with this.

And he's pissed about it. He's a really fun guy, okay, sure. He is mad as fuck that the army's doing this without his oversight, or at least input. You dare create fissile reactions without my input? Give me your tie. Just escalating, be like, you know what, give me your pants too. Right now.

Let's go. Walking out of his office pantsless and being like, having to call my wife and be like, no, no honey, I didn't get the job, sorry. Also, we need to get new pants. ALICE What the army does to keep him out of it, is the navy has an agreement to train people on it, but the army demands that only the navy's CBs, the engineering leg of the navy, can be on it, keeping all of Rickover's men away from it

This becomes important later. So next slide. So we're looking. Oh, this looks gloomy and What it is is it's mostly aluminum the fuel assemblies the boxes that hold the uranium are An aluminum alloy big waffle iron big one Yeah, the are an aluminum alloy. Big waffle iron. Big one. Big one. Yeah. The I could go for some waffles. The plus signs that you see are where the control rods go. And what the control rods are is they're actually like paddles instead of a round rod there or square.

They're like paddles. So you get four paddles to eat rod that gets pulled up and out of the reactor. The idea is to keep it small so you have more reactivity per control rod. Makes sense? Uh huh. Right. Yes. Enough. It's built to take 59 fuel assemblies and nine control rods, but they decide to make it only 40 fuel assemblies and five control rods to again help minimize this design and the react and

the complexity. But what it does is it increases the reactivity in this in the core. So that center rod becomes the if you pull it out, can start up the reactor by itself. That's good, right? I mean, it's good if you're trying to start the reactor quickly. I sure am. What if I'm trying to start the reactor really quickly? What if I'm trying to start the reactor really really really quickly, like microseconds quickly? We'll get there.

Oh no. So it turns the outside rods into like, trim rods, like it helps adjust, but you don't particularly need them. There were also tacked onto the fuel assemblies, bore on boron poison strips. And when I say tacked on, I literally mean somebody went in and tack welded these to the side of the fuel assemblies. Oh, hell, yeah. Nice. It's not engineered in.

It's it's just some some at Argonne just like zzzz works. ALICE Looks good. Pretty sheer welding uranium. Just slap it, slap it. This bad boy can fit so much energy inside of it. ALICE So, what kind of welding do you do, like TIG? Or like, no, uranium. LIAM Uranium.

JUSTIN Are you okay, dude? No. like, Tig, or like, no, Uranium. ALICE Are you okay, dude? No. But I'm really good at football now. It's like, it's like the guys that were hired at the bud plant, y'know. You wanna do some shot welding? You wanna live for ten years? You're hired.

ALICE People don't know this, but the guy in Chernobyl who gets super irradiated and he looks like crispy bacon, that guy could have kicked a field goal from any distance. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Yes. Getting him off the bed, that's an issue, sure, but incredible legs on that guy. JUSTIN His foot might go with the ball, but... That's not a paddle, that's shut up. No.

I think that's three more points. I think that's equivalent of a touchdown. I think you're right. So part of him touched the end zone with the ball. Oh, there you go. Oh yeah, all you gotta do is break the plane, baby. Yeah, well, as long as the foot hit the... Is it in the rules the foot has to be attached to the player?

I don't know if I've ever thought of that one, so we're gonna find out, buddy. So you show me, you show me where it says... So there's a percentage of the body that has to be in the end zone, and it's 2%. So these Boron poison strips are to help trim reactor start-up, the reactivity, so essentially it keeps the center from burning up faster than the outside, that makes sense? It's... without getting way into it, that's the gist of it. The problem with these is that they started rotting fairly quickly, and they would rust jack against the control rod channels. ALICE Another one of my kinks.

Sorry. I left it open for that. ALICE I like to leave them to die in silence just to make you feel bad and give you a complex. Listen, I crave attention like a monkey out of circus, none of this bothers me. Can you tell I was an only child? Hi, mom. I was also an only child. Maybe it just makes you like this, I don't know. Who's to say? So there's this rushjacking happening, and there's also flakes of boron falling off

into the reactor, and getting switched up into the control rod channels. So these channels are getting really sticky. Like, really sticky. Meanwhile, next slide please. The reactor was built to be incredibly simple to operate, because it's going to be operated by like three guys in the Arctic. You want to be able to maintain it easily with like pipe wrenches and a small crane. Yeah.

Keep in mind those three guys, you know, only like half of them know how to read. Half of one of them knows how to read. So the thing about how this was designed, which we'll get there, but everything can be taken apart with a dude and a crane, but all of the drive mechanisms for the control, all the motor control, is like, liftable by a man. You don't need a crane, you don't need anything, to make it easy to assemble and disassemble. Because the reactor's only twenty feet tall, like end to end, that means every single part is maintenanceable, but it also means everything's fairly easy to move and deal with. So the army's like-

ALICE Just pick up the reactor, throw it over your shoulder, walk to the next base. RILEY Yep. Yeah, you and Rickover can do that together. RILEY But the army sees this as like- ALICE Like, am'm wearing a pocket. The army sees this is like, oh, they can just do the work. It's their problem now. So they minimize the amount of staff that would work on these.

But also they minimize the amount of combustion engineering's oversight. So this reactor is built new in 58. And as people are trained on the maintenance of it and the general operation of this thing, it starts to wear down really quickly. So one, control rods are getting stuck when you would use the motor to drive them in and out. If you scram the reactor,

which shuts supposed to shut it down instantly, drop the control rod, shut it down instantly. There were times where it would drop the rods and they would have to manually crank them down through the channel. There were also circumstances where when they were doing maintenance, they would find like all the all the mechanisms that move stuff were wearing out. Seals were wearing out. Bearings were starting to fail and wear out. My favorite story about this is right before January 1961. They're doing the procedure where you put the reactor

back together after like changing fuel out or doing general maintenance, and once the control rods get stuck, and they have to take a pipe wrench and beat it down into the reactor. ALICE Not only no, but fuck now. LIAM Now, if you look at the diagram, and look to the right in the right hand... ALICE This is spiritually so Soviet, I have to say. ALICE Right. LIAM We're in competition with the Soviet army, we're gonna act like them, right? Yeah.

They build a Davy Crockett, we build a Davy Crockett. They build a Shade Reactor, we build a Shade Reactor. Yeah, the Soviets. In order to melt down a reactor, the Soviets spent millions of rubles developing the AZ-5 switch, and the Americans used a wrench. Yeah. LIAM So, just to point out on the right hand side, if you look low in like the last quarter, the core of this reactor is only... fuck, I can't see it on my own presentation.

ALICE 50 inches tall. LIAM Two feet two inches tall. ALICE Three apples high. LIAM Yeah, two feet two inches tall, so it's like half the height of my legs, honestly. It's not very big, but that means, that means, uh, fifty inches... Yeah, you're right, I'm sorry, I thought you said fifty feet. I'm tired. JUSTIN Fifty feet tall, no, that's too many.

That's too big. But it's 50 inches tall, so it's not very big. That means that the control rod, that's the long pieces in the center that go up to that drive, those are shield plugs, and above that's the rod that you can manually operate to do work, is only 84 pounds. So again, this is really easy until things start failing to. Sorry, I lost my place here. The nuclear chain of thought. Yeah. Yeah.

The control rod fell in and just shut everything down. So long story short about what I'm trying to get to is this thing is incredibly easy to work on, but also incredibly... the margins of error are also really small. We're talking in two feet, you have your whole core, so you figure half of that core is like operating, is like your operating depth of the control rods. I think it shows on that diagram as well how high the water is, which is like two thirds of the way up the vessel. ALICE Right, yeah.

ALICE Doing, like, miniaturized nuclear reactor operation, but also I have to do it with like a wrench. JUSTIN Yes. So the water only being like two thirds of the way up is important, in a little bit. So keep that in mind. So next slide please. Hi, it's Justin So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to

People are annoyed by these so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes, so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want or don't. It's your decision, and we respect that. Back to the show.

LIAM So, they would call the groups of people doing the operations a cadre. And the cadre, working in January 1961, were the three guys in front of us. ALICE Oh boy. I feel similar later when you give me name and photos when I hear a date at this point. SEAN Yeah. I also love this photo because it's like, this is the photo of these guys, there's no others that are used, and it is the worst photo I've ever seen. ALICE That's to say, you know, it's an official document if it's got that much photocopy.

SEAN There's a lot of photocopy burn on this. So this cadre is, they operate in three man teams, and they're sending these guys out from Fort Bel-Belvoir to... To... Belvoir. Belvoir. Named, I imagine, after a confederate, because that's some shit I can hear Shelby Foote saying, you know.

Well the Midwest in me is like Fort Belvoir. Call it Belvoir. Fort Belvoir. Yeah. Well, no, it's Fort Belvoir. Yeah, there. Yeah. So these guys get sent-

It's named, Virginia moment, it's named after the plantation it was built on top of. Yeah, that sounds about right. So these guys get trained for a year, in Virginia, and then get sent out to SL-1 to learn how to operate this reactor and so on. The goal of almost everyone in the reactor program is to spend their year, like their initial sign on with the army, learn how to run a reactor and get the fuck out of the army and go work in commercial nuclear power. Because that's where the big bucks are.

So nobody in this program actually gives a flying fuck about going to Greenland or the Arctic Circle. They just want to do their time and get the hell out. So starting with the youngest, we have Jack Burns, who's 22 years old, a father of one, he's an avid skier, and his life is falling the fuck apart. ALICE Incredible. I mean, not a lot of skiing in Greenland. LIAM Yeah.

You did. LIAM Idaho's a little better, but... ALICE Yeah. Losing the thread a bit, like, this still has to do with the ice, the ice worms, right? His life is falling apart because him and his wife do not mix. They fucking hate each other. She's like, I'm sick of your skiing shit. Yes.

Sick of your skiing. You always talk about the piste, you always talk about the fucking, what's the thing skiers do after they ski, they get drunk in the chalet, the that. He's always talking about the fucking, what's the thing skiers do after they ski, they get drunk in the chalet. The that. He's always talking about the apres ski, he's always talking about, like, fucking, what dickhead snowboarders are, and it's like, we live in Idaho, you work on a nuclear reactor, Hyman Rickover keeps stealing shit out of our house.

Yep. Well, he hates her so much he takes a job at a Texaco station just to stay out of the house. Jesus. Wow. Back before No Fault Divorce was instituted and the, like, mysterious death rate among men dropped by, like, a third? And this was one of the other options, besides getting murdered, was just, get a second job, stay out of the house all the time, both of them independently pay a living wage, you own six houses that

no one now will be able to afford even in Idaho. ALICE Yes. LIAM The big thing with him is, other than his marriage just being a wreck, he is a moody asshole at work. ALICE Probably mad because he's not skiing. LIAM Pretty much. And he's judged unfit for promotion, so he gets to stay as a base level reactor operator for the rest of his fucking career.

Which means when he goes out of the army, the best chance he has is getting a low level position, no big bucks for him. I mean, here's the thing. That is Homer Simpson as a career trajectory. And he seemed happy. JUSTIN Yeah. That's because Homer Simpson had a union. ALICE That's true.

That is true. He had a union and he loved his wife. These are the two pillars of happiness. JUSTIN Yes. And he got to strangle his kid all the time. ALICE We're not adding that as a third pillar of happiness. JUSTIN I mean, it's the 50s, it's possible here, too. ALICE Getting strangled by your ski-obsessed dad,

and all of a sudden you're just this, like, poor boomer who has a bunch of inexplicable alpine trauma? JUSTIN Yeah, he went up the mountain and he was, I saw Flanders. Stupid, sexy Flanders. ALICE Years later, as Hyman Rickover is finally forced to retire at the age of 90 or whatever, they're clearing out his office, and I'm like, why does he have skis? JUSTIN So...

Goddamnit. ALICE It's like the last bit of Citizen Kane, they've got the sled with Rosebud on it, but it's not his sled. JUSTIN LAUGHS. JUSTIN I would like to think that it was like a green golf ball situation, you know, no one knows what happened to the salt shakers, or the ties, they all disappeared. LIAM When he died in 89, I wonder if he was buried with them. ALICE Why does this coffin rattle so much?

Maybe he kind of, like, maybe nuclear power is kind of eldritch and unholy after all, and he was feeding a kind of malevolent presence in his desk drawer, that's just like, in order to, y'know, the devil's bargain there is, we'll give you the nuclear navy, but you have to keep feeding us salt shakers, which for some reason we like. He didn't even want to do it, he was horrified, he was so embarrassed by it, but he had to do it. And people don't even know the sacrifices that he went through. Well, you know, it's kept the nuclear navy safe ever since then, so I don't even know

if it was a malevolent presence. Do you know how there's something... Do you know what a morally ambivalent devil? Yeah. You know how there's something inherently so, like, evil and traumatic about being, for instance, president, that everybody ages like twenty years for every year in the job? Part of the reason why is because as soon as you get briefed, as soon as you get read in on a bunch of classified stuff, you find out who really killed Kennedy, you find out about the Epstein files and all this shit, but they

also find out that, by the way, the US Navy needs, like, 60 salt shakers a year, otherwise the entire planet's gonna implode. And the salt shakers, you can't buy them, they have to be stolen. LIAM And they have to be stolen. ALICE Alright, well, since we're on the fun fact of Rickover, or of him... ALICE I can't stop being on my dad. LIAM I gotta tell another story about him, because you can't do, well there isn't your

problem with Hyman Rickover. He wouldn't wear his navy uniform, ever. And it pissed off everyone. ALICE I don't wanna, I don't wanna. LIAM He didn't want to, he didn't want to. Why would I want to? This whole drawer full of ties. Yeah, I gotta feed this possibly malevolent nuclear devil. It is so prevalent that he didn't, that his statue at the Naval Academy has him in a civilian

outfit, not in a naval uniform. It's because he liked blending in with the contractors so he could just fuck around more. So he could just be the angry... He shows up at General Dynamics and is like, hey, fuckers, fix my boat! And they're like, who's that angry motherfucker that just came in here? That's the animal running the program, guys. ALICE I do also know that he's, because he's an engineer, and he's not like, deploying or whatever, he's got like, nine metal ribbons,

as like a three star flag officer. So maybe that's why as well, as being like, I got like, ribbon insecurity, y'know? LIAM Short King Syndrome. Yeah. Speaking of short kings... Oh, you know what it is? Navy uniform doesn't have the pocket space for salt shakers. No, you're carrying fifty of those out a week.

Double breasted jacket, you're not going into that with a salt shaker and not getting caught. My lights just dim, so if I lose power, simply go on without me. It's fine, I got like fifty more minutes of salt shaker bits. LIAM Oh, proud of girl. JUSTIN Well, let's go back to the short king statement, because that's who we're talking about next, is Richard Legge. He's the next operator at SL-1. He's a Navy CB, so he's the exchange student of the group, here at SL-1. He's a chief operator, just promoted to chief operator, shift supervisor, he's 26 years

old, he's also tiny. He's like 5'4", maybe shorter. Of course, that number's obscured in everything you read about this, just like this whole fucking thing. Everything's different. ALICE Also, it's the 50s, so they probably called him Dick, so Dicklag. LIAM Yeah, Dicklag. ALICE Dicklag.

LIAM Dicklag. Yeah. LIAM Poor guy. He is also hotheaded. ALICE God has made you a 5'4", angry short guy named Dicklag. On the other hand, he has seen fit to get you promoted, so. LIAM Yeah. Well, he gets promoted only by, like, force.

Like force majeure. ALICE Six guys had to come into the office, hold him down, and sew the extra stripe on him. LIAM The guy who, uh, I forget, the Sixthest? No. The guy who didn't want to be Pope. ALICE Oh, Celestine V, yeah. I love to make Celestine V a recurring figure on this podcast. Well, the problem with Dick Legg is that he also doesn't give a fuck about his job, and he's a jokester. Just doing the like, yeah, y'know, we all know that what we do here isn't that important,

and a nuclear reactor! Correct. Yes. Different facets of Homer Simpson, all of them. Well, the funny thing about him is he's caught sleeping in his car regularly. Did he also hate his wife? Like is this a fuck wives shift that we're dealing with here? He's recently married to a very young Mormon girl.

She's just like, babe, can we do the soaking thing again? I'm off the 50s quailudes, I encased a whole ham in jello, he takes one look at this, he's like, I never want to come home again. I'm gonna stay at work. Like overnight, it's fine. LIAM She's eight months pregnant, so yeah, he probably doesn't want to be home at all. ALICE Oh my god, he used to just... Like, patriarchy.

Wild. Still wild. He used to be wild, too. LIAM Yes. LIAM The big thing about Leg, the big known thing about Leg that's important, is he's a practical jokester. So he would regularly go throughout the reactor building and set off alarms just to fuck with his other crewmates.

Oh, yeah. Doing practical jokes on my heavily pregnant child bride. Again, everyone born in the 50s has such a depth of trauma. As much as we're down on boomers, we don't really understand some of the shit that they went through. Like, in the womb, being like, yeah, my mom didn't know what a car was, and then my dad kept exploding paper bags directly behind her. He used to do that and then disappear for like thirty hours at a time. Anyway. One of my buddies-

Went out for cigarettes, disappeared for two years, then had the gall to show back up. One of my buddies said that a very probably handed off rumour that I could not find in any writing, was, Legwood set off an alarm in the reactor, and then slammed the door on somebody running through the reactor, to go figure out what's going on. So he's literally juice people. ALICE I guess our boy Hyman was right, that if you don't exercise, like, tyrannical rule over your nuclear program, it does become... Dufus city, yeah.

The three dumbest men in your twenties you've ever seen all jerking off at work. Yeah. So what's important between these two men is, they hate each other. Yeah, you don't say. I don't get promoted, the guy who keeps slamming doors in my face gets promoted. This could have been a workplace shoot. This is a nightmare. This is like page minus three of the stan. Like, I... Well, they hate each other, one, cause you're right, Leg got promoted, Burns didn't.

But even worse, Burns would go to parties and get wasted, and Leg was like enough of a military man to be like, what the fuck's wrong with you? Yeah, we all hate our wives, but you don't have to get drunk about it, you deal with it like a man, by terrorizing them with practical jokes. LIAM Well, there's a party, sometime in 1960, where they're both at, and they go to blows. Like they get in a fistfight, and Leg like throws Burn out of the house. Nobody knows why, some say it's because Burns was fuckin' around with a hooker at a military

party. ALICE So cool. LIAM Starts saying that it was just Leg being like, dude, you're fuckin' drunk, leave. Fuck off. And Burns went and took it. ALICE Maybe he was just satisfying his desperate need to slam doors in people's faces. That's true.

ALICE Just opening and slamming, opening and slamming, opening and slamming right into the sector. Yeah, like, has presumably a whole bunch of various practical jokes, you slam the door on your face, drop a safe on you, maybe uh, you know. Oh, it's a drop and run, doesn't it? Large comedy mallet, can go over the head with it, you know. Large comedy pipe wrench from the reactor. Oh, good point, good point. Yeah.

Spicy. So, those two fucking hate each other. That's important. Third, at the site, is Richard McKinley. He's fresh to the Army, he's in the nuke program, because he transferred from the Air Force, he's 27, that's important. He's 27, he was originally in the Air Force, he's 27, that's important, he's 27, he was originally in the Air Force, he transferred to be an Army nuke for the idea of the experience

in becoming a commercial operator, but just because he's smart. ALICE Oh my god. Totally normal guy, totally normal guy who would've passed the necktie test and they locked him in a reactor room with these two fucking idiots. ALICE- Correct. JUSTIN- Wise and old man. You know, definitely, uh, yeah, he is the straight man to the two, uh, you know, uh... ALICE- Goons. We call this the mature student on a group project experience.

JUSTIN- Yes. Yeah. So, McKinley's like, well liked, and everybody loves him, and he's only been there for like three weeks, and he gets put on shift with these two fucking idiots. And their goal, the reactor had been shut down for the holiday, it's been Christmas, we're January 3rd, 1961. So they're- No radiation today, it's Christmas.

LIAM But why you need the reactor spinning when nobody's there. The night before they go on shift, Burns goes to a party, and just doesn't seem right. It's because his wife has thrown him out of the house, and he is sleeping on his buddy's couch for the last two days. ALICE The house that he is barely in, by the way. LIAM Correct. ALICE Because he already hates his wife.

LIAM But she's also taking most of his paycheck. Which they regularly get in fights about. ALICE This guy seems like a fucking asshole. LIAM Well, he goes on, he's on shift with Leg as his boss for this show. Okay, I do see that part, right, because, like, okay, you're an asshole, fine, lots of people are assholes. You then go to work, and your boss is a bigger in some ways asshole and also a different type of asshole in a way that clashes with you being an asshole.

You're generic asshole, he's Looney Tunes asshole. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like, you, you, just like regular 50s misogynist, right? First thing through the door you are catching a pie full of shaving foam in the face. I'm imagining here, like, Burns being sort of a John Fetterman type character. Especially with, like, Legg being shorter. ALICE It's another fight that she got me into.

LIAM I don't wanna be here. I don't wanna do this job. ALICE Just be at the beach, yeah. Do you think Legg was having a good time doing this, or do you think it's worse? Do you think he was doing the pranks while he was actively miserable, just to cheer himself up? LIAM I think it was to survive. I really will. ALICE Aww, damn. ALICE And then, oh, by the way, the completely normal

guy is here. I'm like, you two fucking assholes. You're like, door opens, bin that's been placed on top of it falls onto Burns' head and he stumbles around trying to get it off. Totally normal guy also present. You just hear a guy yelling into the inside of a bucket about how he's gonna come back with a gun and shoot up the place, and you're just like, I gotta get a fucking transfer off the ship. I missed the fucking Air Force. It's even funny if you try to envision why he would have left the Air Force in the 50s, so it's like, as a nuke as well, it's like, I gotta get out from under these general ripper psychos, they're gonna get us all killed.

I gotta work with some normal people. I'm just imagining him like Gareth with the newspaper just face buried in it as these two just go at it all night. Settle down children, there's just like, there's just cobalt just being dropped onto you. And a reminder to everyone listening, these guys are fucking around screaming at each other with a nuclear reactor in the background. That's how you know it's good. And their job tonight is not to just flip some switches and watch some gauges and generally operate this thing.

Their job tonight is to put it back the fuck together. That seems like a tall order for our beleaguered hero and his two dumbass rivals. Guy who has been sleeping on a 50s couch, one of the most uncomfortable things I can imagine, thinking about nothing but how much he hates his bitch wife. Guy versus guy who is escalating to setting up like, bear traps on the floor because he can think about just how much he hates his bitch wife. And then one guy who is desperately hoping for a transfer.

Yeah. F**k it, I'll go to Greenland, just send me! This goes out to like, every single person in this situation who is like, totally normal and all of your co-workers are assholes. Like, please, accept my regards, I hope you don't work in a nuclear reactor. So, what they have to do, what they have to accomplish this night is as follows. Perform a reactor pump down, reassemble the control rods and install plugs and replace the shield blocks.

Leave the top shield off, so the big steel block on top, leave it off. Connect the control rod drive motors. So we're on step three. Four, electrically and mechanically zero the rods, so up, down, y'know, make sure they set where they're supposed to. Accomplish control room and plant startup logs. ALICE It's gotta be hard to do all of this while your boss is hitting you over the back of the head with a frying pan.

LIAM Yeah, no. LIAM Perform cold rod drops, check for leaks, JUSTIN Lot of pianos being delivered to this facility for some reason, huh? LIAM Replace the top shield, and then accomplish a normal startup. All in one night, with these fuckers. ALICE Jesus. LIAM With the guy, with, again, Looney Tunes asshole being the guy in Sharsh. ALICE I don't love that.

LIAM To put it on the record so I don't get yelled at, I know Legg was not that Looney Tunes, but for the love of God it's funnier if he is. ALICE Comedy podcast. Comedy. Podcast. As far as we know Heim and Rickover was not feeding a kind of elder demon salt shakers, either. LIAM I choose to believe that now. ALICE We just get fuckin' disappeared off of having said that, like, there's like two guys from the Office of Naval Intelligence at all of our doors first thing tomorrow morning.

LIAM Oh, you guys, yeah, use the Eldritch Horde unit, yeah, Eldritch Horde unit, you guys gotta start... ehhh. RILEY Yeah, use the Eldritch Horde unit, you guys gotta stop. Ehhh. SEAN They're gonna disappear you into a hole that Leg painted on the floor. ALICE In this list, I can't. LIAM You don't. Well, it's the Looney Tunes shit that's about to happen. Is it funny here now?

I can't get to it. So they they get through step one and two and they're on step three, which is to connect control rod drive motors, which means you have to pick up the control rods, lift them four inches, and then reattach them to that sideways motor drive. And you have to do that with all five. ALICE And they're all kinda sticky and finicky, and the whole time you're thinking, I wish I was at fucking Camp Fist Clench or whatever. Yeah, but by the way, every time I say Camp Fist Clench, can we throw up the like, uh, Hey Arthur, like, fist clench meme?

LIAM Uh, god damn it. I'm telling you, it's so much funnier now that this is a Looney Tunes situation. I'm not gonna be able to make it through this. So what you see on the right is the shield plug. That's the thing that you put the control rod through so that shit doesn't leak by it because the rod goes up and down through that plug. This is important later. You have to take a C clamp off so the rod doesn't fall all the way into the reactor.

Lift it up four inches, clamp it again and then connect the drive motor so it gets put in gear. Then the drive motor holds it. That's what they're supposed to do, and assuming that Legg's the supervisor, he's making Burns do this. Right? Fucking do it, newbie. I'm gonna fucking stand here and drink my coffee.

Yeah. Go lift the 80 pound thing. Just go do it. It's the fifth, it's all the sixties, whatever. Remember. He's been like, greasing up the soles of his shoes. Remember, lift with your back. In a jerking, twisting motion.

New kid, you're gonna wanna use like a, yeah exactly, jerking, twisting motion. So it needs to go four inches. Burns reaches down, we assume Burns reaches down, grabs the rod, it's January 3rd, 1961, at 9.01pm. Next slide, please. ALICE Oh, that looks foreboding. This looks like the kind of place you'd be taking the hogtide to. ALICE Wes Anderson shots, you know, it's too centered in the frame.

LIAM At 9.01, an alarm goes off in the reactor testing station's firehouse. It's the third time this day. The first two times on first shift, before these jackasses showed up, was a heat sensor that was faulty. So these poor fucker firemen, sorry, these poor firemen, have to run out to their truck and go out into 6 degree weather, drive ten minutes, and this is like an old firetruck where you have two guys hanging on the back, freezing their dick off. JUSTIN Yeah. That's 6 degrees Fahrenheit, I would assume.

ALICE Pretty warm in the bunker gear, at least you'd hope. What hopes? Yeah, it's American numbers, so it's 6 degrees Fahrenheit. They're freezing their dicks off. It's like a negative 1 million Celsius. It's colder than the surface of Pluto, like... Yeah. So they've had this happen twice, it's the third time. They're like, oh god fucking damn it's SL1 again

They drive out there they arrive at the reactor There's like a guardhouse in front of it and there's no one to let them in so they have to get like a security guy To come over and let them in instead of the operator they pull up to the reactor Get out grab their gear and they walk into the office Control room and there's no one there. But they notice everyone's jacket is still there, and everyone's car's outside. Oh boy. The cups of coffee sitting on the control stand are still hot.

And the radiation alarm's going off. Welcome back to BuzzFeed Unsolved Mysteries, presented by Well There's Your Problem. But the radiation alarm's going off. And it's for the whole building. So they assume something might be wrong, so they go back out and get a Geiger counter. Standard tools for the station. They walk back into the building and start walking towards the reactor building, the silo we talked about earlier. Get about halfway there, and the Geiger counter pegs at 200 Rankin.

Straight to it. ALICE That's, um, and you're thinking suddenly about how much time you've just spent in that building. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. LIAM Correct. But they think it's a false positive, they think the meter just went haywire.

ALICE Please. JUSTIN So they go back out to the firetruck, they come back in again with a new meter, this time they're wearing their Scott airpacks, so that just in case, right? ALICE Right, of course. JUSTIN They get closer to the reactor building, it goes straight to 200 again. So they're like, wait a minute, fuck this.

ALICE Yeah, I'm not going in there. ALICE How to clean own diarrhea out of bunker gear pants. You just go in the suit, it's fine. LIAM They leave, and at 917, the health physicist for the site arrives. The health physicist is the more intense knowledge on radiation. He gets out- ALICE Yeah, he knows, for instance, that you don't need to go and get a second Geiger counter before you start running. LIAM Well, he brings the third one.

It's high level, is 500 Rankin's, and they start walking towards the building, towards the silo. They walk halfway up the stairs, and it pegs at 500 Rankin. ALICE Nope. Fucking nope. ALICE He didn't tell me that the 200 Rankin was off-scale high. I didn't know that piece of information. That also makes me think differently about these Fire Fights.

SEAN Not great, not terrible. LIAM They still haven't found the operators, so they decide to press on and just try and get in and out as quickly as they can, hopefully finding these guys. ALICE I mean, at this point they're like, fucking sizzling for heat. It doesn't matter, like... LIAM At this point they become Tom fucking Brady. Next slide, please.

So, they turn the corner at the top of the stairs and look in, and this is what they see. Those big blocks are the concrete blocks they were supposed to put on top of the reactor when they were done. Clearly, that didn't happen. They immediately booked the fuck out, when they see this. Yep. Fucking leave.

That sounds like what I would do. And at ten thirty- You know what, just get a helicopter to dump five hundred tons of gravel on top of it and call it a day. Never go back to Idaho, no one goes back to Idaho, whole state's over, just take the star off the flag. ALICE Yeah, state's closed. LIAM But there's three military men in there, you have to go get them. SEAN We're not the US Marines, we do absolutely

200% leave a man behind. ALICE 500 tons of gravel. Put a flag on top of it, I don't care. Tap your rules. LIAM It's also the 50s, so yellow, we're gonna go back and get em. ALICE Oh my god. LIAM At 1030, the lead health physicist for SL1 shows up, his name's Ed Valerio. Er, sorry.

He gets in his car, drives out with Paul Duckworth, the operation supervisor from combustion engineering. They don air packs with the firefighters and go to inspect the facility again. At this point, everyone and their mother has no idea what happened, and they don't believe anything nuclear happened. This is just an industrial accident, in theory. So they're assuming they need to find these guys, get them out, they'll probably be fine, let's go.

ALICE I don't know how you come to that conclusion at this point, but I'm glad that their response is, let's stay out of the building. LIAM Reactors are inherently safe. These reactors will not explode. That's the thought process. They get to the top of the stairs, they find McKinley still alive. But with price. SEAN Jesus Christ.

He doesn't want to be. ALICE Alive. But with Christ. He doesn't want to be. He's landing field goals states away. Yeah. He has a massive facial injury, and his left hand is essentially blown clean off. But he's still alive. You can block with one hand. This is the normal guy as well, this is terrible, this is heartbreaking, this is the guy who just wanted to go to work, and

his two co-workers are fucking around, and he gets his fucking hand blown off, he gets his face stove-ed in, he gets massively irradiated, like, I know that's kind of an average workday for a lot of people in the 50s, but like, Jesus Christ! Well, he's like, moaning, and trying to crawl away, towards the door. They find him, they rush out, go get three other men, rush back with a stretcher, and throw him on it. While they're doing this, somebody sees Burns, on the other side of the reactor, runs over to him, checks his pulse, dead, runs back, and helps the guys with the stretcher.

When they go to exit, their Scott airpacks- ALICE Wait, hold on, hold on. There's one other guy, where the fuck is his leg, is he just like the perfect Wile E. Coyote silhouette on the wall? LIAM Hold that thought. ALICE Oh, hold that thought, yeah. ALICE Fucking god. LIAM Their air packs start to fail, so they start holding their breaths. ALICE This is a nightmare. This is a nightmare. LIAM One guy's, because of the air pack, it starts fogging up his glasses.

So on their way out the door, what had been holding the door open was- SEAN Guys always passes the girls with big glasses as he's just gasping for air and dying. Correct. There was a coffee can holding the door open. What?! And they trip over it on their way out the door and fall down the stairs. That was a what holding the what?!

You have to get out of here in an emergency situation, but first, you must navigate the recently deceased Richard Legg's maze of pranks. You have... This is the most anyone has been posthumously owned by a dead prankster since the middle Saw movies. You're trying to rush this horrifically injured guy out and every single one of you steps on a different rake that he has placed there for this purpose. SEAN And there's probably for the silly just saying

got you again, and then just like dead guys falling like raindrops. Now for my greatest prank yet, VAPORIZES HIMSELF. They didn't think you could do that with one of these reactors, but he figured it out! Oh, that thought. We'll get there. ALICE LAUGHS. Jesus Christ. What? We're just... just... the level of complacency. Radiation does not need your fear brackets, yes it does, but it does demand your respect, and holding open the door to the fucking reaction room with a cat, with like a Kenko coffee

cat. JUSTIN It demands both your respect and your tie. ALICE It demands your respect, your tie, your salt shaker, and a little bit of poop to come out of you. LIAM Also your soul, who's to say. JUSTIN Okay. Alright. So they trip over the coffee can, they fall down the stairs. ALICE Just, like, barely conscious, incredibly irradiated,

missing a hand, being stretched out, you're like, can this day get any worse? And then you get thrown down the stairs. LIAM Down the stairs. SEAN Keystone cast, maybe you see a catfish on the way out, who's to say? ALICE And then the bin perched on top of the door falls on you. So, because we don't know, they don't know it's McKinley yet, they just know it's one of the guys that's still alive. This becomes a mess later.

Oh god, okay. But they take him down the stairs, they fall down the stairs, and then they throw him in one of the many employees that are here now, they throw him in the back of his panel van, because they need to take him to the hospital because he's fucking dying. Right. Nobody. Yes. Is thinking about what this man is about to do. Don't love that. So they throw him in the panel, then they start up.

And the next slide, please. Yes. As soon as they get the van started, the ambulance shows up. So they take him out of the panel van! And they just- ALICE Bonk his hand on the doorframe a bunch of times, like, yeah. JUSTIN They throw him in the ambulance, where a nurse is in the back of the ambulance, cause it's the 50s. They throw him in the back of the ambulance, it's 50s. They throw him in the back of the ambulance.

The nurse checks his vitals and says she hears him like hardly breathing, but he's breathing. Close the ambulance door. Off it goes to go to Idaho Falls Hospital. Oh, this guy's not making it out, huh? Director of Safety, He's barely making it in. Director of Safety, Wayne Bills, leaves church choir practice because he's heard about the incident, and redlines his Studebaker to go pick up the AEC doctor, John Spickard.

Ow, fucking heck, just kicking the ass of your Studebaker out on a dirt, like, desert road, fantastic. Yeah. And then Bill, of course, redlines it all the way to the SL-1. They get to the gate at the edge of the site, and they see the ambulance coming and they flag it down. The reason is because Director of Safety Wayne Bills has realized that this man is so radioactive that no hospital should have him in it.

ALICE Oh boy. LIAM Oh no. They pull out their Geiger counter, which they have the high end Geiger counter, and it reads 400 Rankins. Well it's gone down a hundred, so... They then grab the nurse and throw her out of the ambulance. Jump in, check him for a pulse, and hear nothing. So the nurse heard his last breaths. Which must have been a relief for him at that

point, cause like... LIAM You're fucking kidding. They grab the driver then, pull him out of the ambulance, and go, this thing is so hot that we cannot take it back to the hospital, we can't take it back to the garage, and we can't take it to the... ALICE We gotta make like a new access road, and this ambulance stays here forever. Somebody's dumping 500 tons of gravel on it. About that.

They give the driver a lead blanket, throw him back in the seat, have him turn right, and drive into the desert a half mile. I serve the Soviet Union. By fang-ing this ambulance. LIAM They say they see the lights go out, and then the man jump out the side and start running. And then they leave the ambulance. It is now sitting now in the six degree cold, indefinitely.

ALICE What's the half-life of the fuel that they're using in this reactor? Because if you wait like a thousand years or whatever, mint condition ambulance. ALICE Oh yeah. ALICE You gotta scrape the guy out the back of it, but like, otherwise. LIAM Spoiler! ALICE Like a putty knife, yeah. LIAM Spoiler!

Once all this is said and done, they actually decontaminate this ambulance and use it for another twelve years. ALICE No they don't, Jesus Christ, man. ALICE Anything with fleet vehicles, you're like, this thing has seen things I don't even want to know about. ALICE It's like JK's limo! ALICE JK's limo! ALICE Yeah. ALICE Ambulance is the worst.

The worst for those. ALICE JK's limo, it'll buff out. It'll buff out. ALICE Yeah, yeah. I want to hear some ambulance safety thirds. If you can do that without compromising patient confidentiality, WTYP. P.O. We got that message, crashing your ambulance. FYI, this whole thing is just a safety third.

I come back with a whole episode safety third again. So, but yeah, they decontaminate the ambulance as a training to practice doing decontamination and get the skills and procedures on how to do it. So that just runs for another ten years, but we have to move on. Do not change the slide, do not read ahead. ALICE I wouldn't trust that ambulance, I'd be like, you missed one bolt or something that you didn't unscrew, and that's currently giving everyone who rides in this ambulance turbo cancer.

LIAM So, leg has still not been found yet. Oh. Oh. At 1038PM, four men enter the silo, with their only job, to find leg. Don't kick over the coffee can on your way out. They have 60 seconds to get in and out. The guy's banging the big pipe, like... you know? They do that later on. Hey, buddy, wake up.

Oh my god. Okay. LIAM They are given flashlights, and they go into the reactor building and start swarming it. Two minutes after they get in, they come back into the control room, ashen and shaken. When they were in there... ALICE Probably because they spent twice as long in there as they should have done. Yeah.

LIAM Well, it takes a minute to get from the reactor to the control room. They get back to their waypoint in this mission. One of their flashlights had grazed the ceiling while they were in just moving around, trying to find him. And they found a bundle of rags stuck to the ceiling by a shield plug and control rod. Oh, once they all focused on it, they realized it was leg. Next slide, please.

ALICE This is a horror film. Jesus Christ! ALICE Yeah, don't love that, we're gonna have to slap a graphic content warning on this one. Yeah. I'm sorry. ALICE The good news is, I can't even tell this is a guy! So...

Really, really good prank. LIAM Yeah, I was about to say, he died as he lived. ALICE About to do some shit the likes of which you have never seen before, well and truly. LIAM For my grand finale! ALICE The prestige, Master Y. LIAM I tried to cut most of the graphics out, but you can't miss that for this story. It could get a lot worse with the autopsies, but we're gonna skip that, cause I don't... ALICE Thank you.

LIAM Yeah. ALICE I'm morbid enough that I might look those up in my own time. But like... ALICE If you want Lynch after this, I can send him. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah, please do. I love gore, I guess, I'm not sure why, I don't know what's wrong with me. LIAM I'll also cite my sources at the end so people can go, yuck, dig. So they find Leg, and everybody gets the fuck out of the reactor and leaves for the last

time. Because now there's no point to risk radiation at all. 500 tons of gravel. Fucking dead. But there's a problem. If you look in the diagram, he is directly above the reactor. There is concern that if he has enough fissile material stuck in him, or, because a person is mostly water, if he falls and moderates the reactor, it will heat up again and go off again.

ALICE This guy was so fucking good at pranks. He almost pulled another one off after he died. JUSTIN So you can't just fucking leave him. And also, at the 50s, you can't leave your brethren behind, question mark, question mark. ALICE He was an asshole, but he was our asshole. LIAM Yes. One of our assholes, other guy's dead, so one of our assholes is missing. So before we- Me when I eat too much Taco Bell.

Yeah. That's if someone's missing from the bridge of the spaceship from Spaceballs, right? So before we talk about getting him out of there, we have to talk about what the fuck happened. And this is where we have to talk about what prompt criticality is versus regular criticality. Regular criticality is what we talked about with moderation, where you have general decay going through, you're trying to increase that to a point where you get enough heat to run something. Simple way of explaining it, not going for scientific accuracy here.

Prompt criticality is less the slow reaction, and more comparable to a nuclear bomb. ALICE Last night, the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin nuclear power plant achieved its target for the generation of electricity under the five year plan in.001 microseconds. Yes. Correct. You're shotgunning neutrons out, neutrons out, and it's guaranteed no matter how fast, how slow, whatever, they are gonna hit others, which will then cause the process over and

over again in a series faster than you can blink. The reactor had gone prompt critical in four milliseconds. Water boiled in the bottom, or sorry, the fuel boiled in the bottom, which then caused the water above it to boil and then push upwards and water hammer the top of the pressure vessel. Yeah, water hammer. So you mean in terms of like the fuel itself, like the uranium turned into a gas? Correct. Effectively.

Wow. Oh. The, and I just have to read this verbatim. The slug of water was propelled at 150 feet per second, 109 miles per hour, about, with the average pressure around 500 pounds per square inch. That then hit the top of the vessel and made the entire reactor vessel, the whole tube, jump upwards at 27 feet per second, or about 18 miles per hour. But we have those shield plugs in the top so the control rods can go up and down, they are shot out of the top at 85 feet per second, or about 57 miles per hour.

ALICE And for his finest trick, dick leg is hit by one of these and killed instantly. DARREN Correct. He's standing above it when it happens. ALICE I mean, at least you probably don't know anything about it, I'll take that over the agonizing radiation death where they're throwing me in and out of different panel files. JUSTIN Yes. And dropping me down the stairs. LIAM And dropping me down the stairs.

Yeah. So, of course, all the shield plugs and control rods just went up until they hit something. The whole vessel jumped all the way up nine feet, hit the crane above it, and then fell back into the hole. So we know that the reactor went prompt critical because a brass screw on McKinley's lighter and then the watch band on Burns had both turned radioactive copper 64.

Whoa. So that means the only way this could have happened is if that reactor went full on and irradiated everything around it. Before that, though, before they discover that in the investigation, no one believed that this reactor had detonated itself there. We'll get to it in the next slide. But there's more than one theory about what actually happened, but we know that it went critical and blew itself to pieces.

The picture on the left is what's left of the core. ALICE All those, like, cruciform things with the paddles in which have just been busted wide open. RILEY Correct. And turned to scrap. That's all aluminum, too, so you can imagine all that just shredded. It's not like it's steel, it would just kind of blow apart. So next slide please.

ALICE We built a radioactive pipe bomb. JUSTIN Pretty much. ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN So what happened? What caused this to happen? Instead of Control Route number 9, the center one, being lifted 4 inches and attached to the drive mechanism, it's calculated that it was lifted 20 inches. You remember, the reactor was two feet tall.

ALICE Yes. It's not grabbing yoink too hard. somehow, correct. The theories that start were, industrial accident first, then immediately people thought it was sabotage because Cold War. So during the investigation, they do chemical analysis to find any kind of explosives, and can't find it. That rules that out instantly.

ALICE I have a theory. I have a theory, which is, so Burns is pulling out the thing, and Leg is behind him, just blowing out into the paper bag. ALICE & LIAM LAUGH. Well, about that. Oh my god. The theory that starts going around in the space is that it's a murder-suicide with two explanations.

The first, that is the one that's spread the most on bullshit YouTube videos, and even in the reports in the 60s, was that Leg was cheating with Burns' wife? Or Burns was cheating with Leg's wife? So they- Super prank! Hark the Chirp. Yeah. I was gonna say, yeah.

Or the other one is that Burns was fucking hated Leg, fucking hated his wife, fucking hated his job, and decided just to fucking kill himself in the hardest way possible. ALICE But why would you do that with something that you believe to be inherently safe? LIAM Right. Yeah. LIAM So, there's an explanation for that.

There's a mix in the reports that people either thought that this won't explode, but if you pull the rod out it will just irradiate the piss out of you. ALICE That's a horrible way to die. Like, generally... LIAM It's the 50s. ALICE Okay, yeah. He's just like, I don't know what that does. Sure.

Whatever. It's like... You're in the military in the 50s in Idaho, you have a gun and everyone around you is using theirs to kill themselves with. Like you, like, ehh. ALICE It's just like the prestige where the guy thought the drowning was painless. ALICE It's like, a nuclear physicist, or a health

physicist having to be like, no no no no no, actually extremely painful to die of radiation sickness. Yeah. So, that's like what gets spread around, it's a murder-suicide. I forgot to mention up earlier that at seven o'clock the night of the incident, Burns' wife called to ask for a divorce, and the last thing they talked about was dividing up his paycheck after the divorce. ALICE Let me just call my famously, like, buddy rich level fly-off-the-hand-door husband at work at the nuclear reactor to tell him that I'm gonna divorce him.

And I think his boss just shook his hand, but he had one of those electric buzzes. LIAM Surely this'll kill her, yeah. ALICE & LIAM Just hanging up that vocal like, mmm, that's, um, mmm. JUSTIN He's got a flower. ALICE & LIAM So, that's the theory that gets spread around. Likely bullshit, because, why, right? Like, also, Legg's wife is pregnant, so why would Burns... yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Heavily Mormon as well, I think. Lightly pregnant, heavily Mormon. Yeah, I do buy interpersonal

beef of just like, this guy just tied my shoelaces together, or whatever. For the last time. Either as he was doing the thing, or he's like, fuck it, I'll irradiate everybody, I don't give a fuck. LIAM That's what, if you wanna believe that Burns did it to try and kill himself, but they all believed these reactors were safe, that's probably what it was. Was, fuck it, I'm right, I fucking hate legs, so he can die with me, we'll just vaporize each other with radiation.

ALICE And do that to Paul McKinley? I never like to libel the dead, necessarily, and whenever we do the USS Iowa turret explosion we'll talk some more about that. Assuming we haven't done it already and I've forgotten it. So, like, yeah, no, I'm buying, like, practical joke potentially gone horribly wrong, in the funniest way. LIAM Yeah. DARREN Well, about that.

The next theory we need to talk about is, oops, which is, the rod got stuck, and it's eighty-four pounds. So, you're trying to hold it- ALICE Oh, lifted, like, unhandled 84 pound vertical weight, just like, manually? I'm doing a kind of jerk-off motion here. LIAM Yep. So like, he's down- ALICE And because the radiation leaks out as you lift it, you get stronger, and stronger like some radiant-

LIAM Eventually, right, eventually you do it Aaron Rogers- ALICE...doing weighted squats with the control rods. So the thought is it got stuck, he yoinked on it too hard, went up to 20 inches, off it went. Just like whoop, and the second it does that, it does a comedy sound effect and then blows your boss's head off and throws him into the ceiling. And you're like, man, I don't even necessarily like that guy that much, and then milliseconds later you are shredded by aluminium shrapnel.

Yeah. So, we get to the... I have a personal theory I need to say first. Listening to Todd Tucker talk about this, who essentially wrote the book on this accident, after all the accident reports, he believes Legg was who was on the control rod and because of where his body ends up with control rods or shield plug seven going through him because he would have had to be standing on top of the reactor, right? Yeah. So he, he has a theory that it was leg lifting the rod, and that it just got stuck because of

the poor maintenance on this reactor. That's an easy, that's a simple explanation for this, right? My belief is if it was Burns, and again, this is after reading all the reports, and all the reports argue themselves, so there's not really, the final answer was not really direct. ALICE We don't know. We'll never know. JUSTIN We'll never know, because the only guys that know got blown to hell. ALICE Should've asked McKinley in the ambulance, be like, what did those two assholes do?

And while he's agonally breathing, he's just like, KEN Frank, gone wrong. It's just a break. Bro. JUSTIN Gone sexual? Dumbass break! Bro, gone sexual! ALICE AND LIAM LAUGH. ALICE AND LIAM Yeah, yeah, yeah, leg just sticks this little tiny iPhone microphone in Burn's face. I'm just like, what's your body count? About to be three high, I'm like, woooooo.

LIAM So what I believe is Burn, Burns was having, like, the worst night of his fuckin' life. He's ordered to do this, it gets stuck, and he has, like the worst night of his fucking life. He's ordered to do this. It gets stuck and he has like a fit of rage, you know, cause who wouldn't at this point. And that's when he jerks it and it comes up and off it goes. Hey, when I, hey, when I jerk it and I kill, Yep. Kill three people and irradiate most of Idaho. Who's to say? Kill three people and irradiate most of Idaho. Now, if it's Legg, there's one more theory, and let me finish saying it before we start.

Jesus, okay. Legg was a practical jokester. We know this. And McKinley is a new trainee on site. One thing that has been suggested, other than Leg just pulling it, getting stuck, and then pulling harder, is that you could bounce the control rod up and down past the 4 inches and make the Geiger counter shirp harder every time, freaking out your trainee. So there's a theory that he's bouncing the control rod, making the Geiger counter whir

and pissing off McKinley, who's the straight man in our timeline. Like, oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. It gets stuck, and then... Gotcha! Explodes! And then... GUTCH! EXPLODE! So his last words were, whoop-boop-boop-boop-boop! Even more horrible, then, for that guy to be the longest living witness and to die in agony, to be like, my boss was doing an asshole prank on me and fucked it up so bad that it took me hours to die.

And also we are radiated like half eye now. JUSTIN Yeah, if life's the joke and death is the punchline, I don't think this one worked pretty good. LIAM So this is where we get into, there's arguments in all the reports about how it happened, because you have combustion engineering in the army not wanting them to take the blame and nuclear power not to be besmirched. So that's where you get like theories of like, maybe it was the murder, suicide, maybe it

was the fucking around with their wives. They investigate all this. You have GE come in as a second investigator or third, sorry, they investigate all this, still have like a lot of reason to not blame nuclear power and blame it on these guys fucking up. But then, Admiral Rickover sends a guy in. ALICE and LIAM And I was never here. he's not happy with the other reports that have gone public. Rickover's guys' report is still classified.

Interesting. But, after interviews, it's surmised that it was the poor reactor condition, is why this fucked up. Something got stuck. Send in a bunch of official-looking guys to copy documents and steal all the salt shakers. I don't like the sheer amount of photocopier burn we got going on here. The lunchroom had a salt shaker up, probably, so you had to go get it. Had.

Had. So, the reports argue that the rods never got stucked, the rods always got stucked. In the appendix of one of them, it says the main rod got stuck, the rods always got stuck, in the appendix of one of them it says the main rod got stuck seven times recently, and then once needed to be moved with a pipe wrench, that's where we get the beating the fucking rod in with the pipe wrench. So... ALICE It's hard to get it out that way as well. LIAM Well, you just pull one of the others out, take the rest with it.

So, we'll never know, the three guys that know got blown to hell, or heaven, clearly not burns, but the rest. ALICE and LIAM Mormon heaven, unclear. I like to believe in universalism, I think. I think Dick Burns or whatever is in heaven. He's just an asshole there, too. JUSTIN Yeah. Lag is pranking angels in heaven now.

SEAN Well, doing the paperback thing right behind us and cherubim. So you can't, is that the kindness like a bunch of rings with eyes? I don't know man. Because that would be difficult on that. I guess if you get inside the rings, but that seems like an invasion of personal space. Yeah, it's heaven, what do you care? That's a good point. Can we move on to the next slide, please? Yeah, go for it.

Alright, so we know what happened, we know how it happened, to an extent. Now we have to clean this shit up. Oh boy. Reactor cleanup detail. Legs' final practical joke comes up. Grand finale. I'd like to see you retrieve my mangled body.

LIAM After four days of planning, Legg's body, which was by far the most contaminated, was retrieved. They would sing guys up for 60 seconds, get pictures or video, and come back down to get a general idea of how they're gonna do this. They jerry-rigged this stretcher on the right, on a crane, to slide under him. ALICE How the fuck do you take pictures and video on film? It's gonna get irradiated to fuck itself.

LIAM Well, why you think everything's so grainy? ALICE Yeah, no kidding! LIAM They had to get a welder inside of a lead-shielded box attached to a crane, to able to like make this all work. Of course. And on January 9th in relays of two at a time, they put the stretcher in the door underneath leg and then two men at a time with 65 seconds each

poke at him with 10 foot long sharp hooks and attempt to pull his body free. ALICE Oh god. LIAM Without dropping it into the reactor. ALICE Right, yeah. LIAM When they get it out, they dump it into a lead cask, because it's... ALICE We're also gonna fuckin' putt it, right. ALICE Slam dunk this guy's body into a sarcophagus.

ALICE Did they get him in one piece? SEAN As far as everything I've read, they got what was left of him in one piece. RILEY Okay. This is the worst carnival game ever. SEAN Yeah, it doesn't get into the detail, I don't think the autopsies will ever be classified, but I'm sure he didn't come down cleanly. RILEY Probably not, though.

SEAN He wasn't rotting, all the bacteria's long dead. ALICE There's a reason they call him Leg and not Legs. SEAN I wanna talk about the autopsy, but I can't do it. ALICE No. Why not?

Why not? Talk about the autopsy. ALICE I'm gonna be nauseous. Knock yourself out, scoot, I got it. SEAN Alright, let's continue the story. ALICE I got it. We support your welfare, just mute yourself for a bit and go play Bellatro or something, You know, knock yourself out, scoot, I got it. We support your welfare, just mute yourself for a bit and go play like, Bellatro or something,

I wanna hear about... I have a medical interest, I wanna hear about the autopsies. I'll warn when we get to the part that I'll give you a countdown on, I guess. So they take them all to the chemical plant at the site, and they rig up an autopsy room. They had burns in McKinley, which they still didn't know if McKinley was leg or McKinley. They had burns of McKinley on ice in stainless steel tanks and then they bring leg in in the leg cask. The autopsies were performed by Clarence Lushbaugh, which is, who performed the first autopsy of an irradiated man, which was Cecil Kelly, which happened at Los Alamos, who safety-thirded

himself by a plutonium purification tank. Oh yeah, I've heard about this. You gotta be careful with those barrels. Turned a switch on, died. But Lushbaugh's famous for being a body snatcher, he would take parts of his autopsies and send them around for other scientists to look at without permission. How fake pranksters look when a real prankster comes out. So we're gonna talk about the autopsies, so give us like, five minutes.

I'm good. I'm here. All right. So they identify leg. Once they get them in on a, they had two saw horses and a stainless steel sheet. I just want kind of throw them over. Like you're like, like a sack of flour. You're correct. Yeah.

And then they have medical instruments on 10 foot poles, that were tack welded onto the end of these poles, so like a scalpel, some, I don't know the terms, but stuff to pull them apart. ALICE You're not gonna be precise with that scalpel. LIAM They have a hacksaw on a pole, and then the dogcatcher wire loop thing that to grab onto parts and pull them and pull them out of the way. They identify leg because he has a Navy Sea Beast tattoo. So the first time they realize it's leg,

the mass has the Sea Bee tattoo. So then they know that McKinley's the guy that got his face blown off. Burns is discovered to be dead by getting impacted by a flat, something flat, so he got blown away from the reactor, impacted, and a rib broke off and pierced his heart. Mckinley had his face destroyed and his arm blown off, because he might have been behind something, and that's why... ALICE Also, it just catches him in the, like, face

and hand, or whatever. Yeah, sure. LIAM Right. And that's why he was likely still alive, but unable to be identified. Leg, obviously, was... I'm not saying it the way it is on the on top, in what I read. Obviously had whole go-through body. ALICE Mm.

Sort of a unrecognizable mass of flesh. So just becoming like one of those like a guy out of like cocktail got one of those cocktail. Yeah. I'm really trying here. The important thing is they also try and prep the bodies to be less radioactive. But any part that was like McKinley's hand, legs, head, anything that was hyper radioactive, they had to saw off the bodies with the axe.

Uh huh. Yeah. They would then take those and put them in a lead line cave at the autopsy site, eventually barreling them up and burying them as radioactive waste with the rest of the reactor. Incredible. Most of the command chain in the science side of this wanted the bodies buried off site with other radioactive waste, never to leave the testing site.

But, because it's the military and because the families wanted the bodies back, they opted to cut all the most radioactive parts off the bodies, put them in Batesville Mono-Seal Caskets... ALICE I really, I like the brand name there, yeah. ALICE Yeah. ALICE BATESVILLE MONO-SEAL CASKET. LIAM I gotta shout out my hometown. I have to. ALICE I googled Batesville monosil casket, and the first thing is an eBay listing for

the key to one of those, so if anybody wants to do any grave robbing of like, extremely radioactive dead bodies, I guess that's easier to find than the casket itself. JUSTIN Yeah, I was about to say, what does an extremely radioactive body get on the open market these days? ALICE Sorry, Bucks. Depends who you sell it to. ZACH I had to shout out my hometown, cause we're the city of death.

They build caskets and the beds that, like, hospice uses, across the street from each other. ALICE Just to get you used to the feeling before you, like, use the rest of their project line? LIAM You will spend the end of your life in a Batesville product. ALICE I like a shroud burial, personally, I don't know that I need to be in a box, I would get claustrophobic. LIAM So speaking of boxes...

ALICE It comes in four different colors, India Star, Huntington Green, Star Quartz, and so on. LIAM Oh, Star, Huntington Green, Star Quartz, and so on. LIAM Oh, I want Huntington Green. ALICE Ooh. ALICE Yeah, me too, it looks really nice actually. LIAM So, speaking of boxes... JUSTIN Are we that old, we're looking at caskets and stuff. Yeah, we're pretty good.

ALICE I'm a trans woman who lives in Britain, I gotta get ahead of this shit while I can. LIAM If you got the money, spend it now, right? Only gonna get more expensive. ALICE That's true, yeah. LIAM Might as well buy the plot while you're at it, just make sure it's got room. So boxes. They put these guys in the boxes, and fly them to their hometowns to be buried. Burns, I don't have the names of the towns handy, because I didn't want to talk about

it, but oh well, fuck it. Burns is flown to Michigan, and the Atomic Energy Commission goes with each of the caskets to make sure nobody's getting too close, or fucking around with them. These people are too good at football, you know, at this point. Even from beyond the grave, we gotta have someone with them. LIAM Burns' funeral, they want to see the casket, they don't want to just put it in the vault, they want to see it, and the Atomic Energy Commission's like, nooo. They're like, for five minutes, and they're like, mmkay.

So, for the funeral, they raise the casket out of the concrete vault, and the radiation level pegs turn his service. So I can just imagine two guys in black suits just grabbing their collars, starting to sweat as this eulogy's being given. ALICE Make the, like, hurry it up kind of gesture at the priest. LIAM Yeah. A short version.

Um, uh, veil of tears, amen. So, he's buried, uh, Leg is buried in New York, kinda the same situation, nothing of note that I remember. And McKinley is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. It's the least they could fuckin' do for the guy. That's what I was about to say, yeah. As the only normal person there. On January- I'm reading straight from the book here.

On January 31st, 1961, this letter was sent to Arlington National Cemetery from the AEC. To Superintendent Arlington National Cemetery, radioactive remains of SP4 Richard McKinley were interred at Arlington National Cemetery on January 25th, 1961. It is desired that the following remark be placed on the permanent record, record of interment. Victim of nuclear accident, body is contaminated with long life radioisotopes. Under no circumstances will the body be moved from this location without prior approval by the Atomic Energy Commission, with consultation from this headquarters." Is that forever? It's there forever at the tomb of the incomplete soldier. I'm sorry.

ALICE Um, I'm gonna go die. Fucking liar. So. ALICE We all cope with the bleakness of our old ways here. JUSTIN Yeah, yeah, that's true. His grave's not, like, any differently marked than any of the others at Arlington, it's not like they put a trifle oil or anything on it. ALICE It's just weirdly warm under your feet, though.

LIAM Yeah. But what's fascinating- ALICE I didn't know it had like, underfloor heating here. LIAM And I didn't realize this when I visited Arlington, cause I went to see his body. Bird's grave. ALICE Yeah. ALICE There was a shovel, and there was some breathing apparatus.

LIAM Yeah, that's my key for sale there, I already used it. No, I went to see the grave just to see it, cause I like atomic shit. And what's funny, and it was pointed out inside this book, is you can see from Rickover's grave, McKinley's grave. Yeah, Rickover's epitaph just says, should've done it my way. LIAM Well, the book reads, the irreductible laws of radiation shielding Haver make it necessarily true that some infinitesimal amount of radiation still streams from McKinley's shattered body, crosses Sheridan Drive, and illuminates ever so slightly the grave of

Admiral Rick Over. That's incredible. A fitting end for them both. You can tell Rick Over's grave, because there's just a patch of brown there, and the earth has been salted. So nothing will ever go again, of course. Alright, next slide please.

I'll make this one short, I'm sorry. ALICE WALES It's fine. It's literally fine, I'm having the time of my life. SEAN Yeah, this has been good. STAN So, General Electric's named the prime contractor for cleanup. It's 1961, and the... or, sorry, it's the end of 1961, going into 1962, and President Kennedy has just cancelled the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Project. ALICE WALESOWS was right.

ALICE LAUGHS. Now this is the real truth, there's an Air Force guy going. So, General Electric has like 500 people at the testing site, and nothing for them to do. So, it works out, cause now they can just send them next door. ALICE Oh, being in the military fucking sucks so bad. ALICE You wanna clean up this horrible thing that

happened? ALICE Yeah, you all just got volunteered to dismantle the most radioactive grain silo ever made. JUSTIN Yeah. Do you want to keep your fucking job or not? JUSTIN Listen, there's only a little bit of gore still left in there. ALICE There might be a Jolly Buzzer or a Whoopi Cushion, too, you gotta watch out for those.

So G goes in, starts the process of cutting into the building so they can get the reactor body out. They have the 60 second time limit, you go in, you cut, you get the fuck out, you're done for three months. ALICE I gotta be honest, I'm not doing shit in those 60 seconds. I'm gonna pretend to work, and I'm gonna be like, okay I'm done. Cause like, I'm in there for... they're not checking? They're not, what are they gonna do, send me back in? Be like, oh it doesn't count, you didn't do it. Like, fuck you, I was in

there for 30 seconds. LIAM I didn't hear any grinding, motherfucker. My kid's gonna have horns because of you, fuck off. Yeah, I go in there and I spend the first thirty seconds looking at the gauge on the acetylene torch and trying to remember if this is a setting that's fine or one that causes it to instantly blow up. Does this... Does this cut the beam, or does this cut the beam?

ALICE Yeah, once it says that, you're dead anyway, don't worry about that. ALICE Yeah, you know what it says, like, measure three or four times cut, you know, well, maybe cut, like, once? LIAM So they have five hundred people taking turns to go in and out of the building to get this. They cut away, get in to where they can get a crane to lift the vessel, and they pull it out, but there's a problem. There's nowhere big enough on the test site

to take this thing, except for the hangar from the aircraft nuclear program at Test Area North, which is 25 miles away. So they have to put it in this truck with this vessel in the picture, remove 45 power lines, and drive the tractor trailer with a convoy of like, 50 cars, cops... ALICE The scariest psychos early 1960s America had ever produced, which is a fucking... that's stiff competition. LIAM Up a highway at 10 miles per hour to take it into the hot shop. Once they get the reactor out of the building, it, it's much easier. They can go in, scrub, cut, take stuff down without as much of a time limit.

They bury everything from the silo 1600 feet north-east of where it was sitting. But they keep the control building and all the auxiliary buildings until 1993. Just in case you need them. Almi never throws anything away. Well, what they did was use this practice for decontamination to learn how to make a site usable again. So they- Alright kids, let's get into this highly contaminated radioactive site. We're going to we're going to do some decontamination.

Let's break down with hot water. It's fine. Get that break out the break out the purple stuff. That's what they did. And then they painted over the walls inside the building to just hold the radiation in. I'm not joking. And lead paints and all of the things. Lead paint. Yeah, I was going to say. Yeah. The landlord special. It works. Anywhere the soil was Lead paint, yeah, I was gonna say. The landlord's special, it works.

Anywhere the soil was too hot, they'd just pave over with asphalt, and it lasts that way until 1993, where they finally decide to decommission these buildings. Lockheed Martin, sorry, gets in to do the decommissioning, gets paid infinitesimal money, buries all this shit with the rest of the shit 1600 feet away. And then sometime in the 2000s, the Superfund site that SO1 becomes is not good enough to be just left as a burial ground. So they have to do a cleanup again,

move everything out of the burial site and into essentially a radiation landfill further into the Idaho facility. So this was a general contractor's wet fucking dream. Oh yeah. What a sentence. You can make so much money off of this. So much goddamn money.

So SL1's gone. Has the Army learned its lesson? Probably not. Next slide please. Hell no, they didn't learn their lesson. Probably not. Next slide, please. Hell no, they didn't learn their lesson. So Camp Sentry's reactor is already running, and SL1 was where they trained people to send them to Camp Sentry. Because Camp Sentry was relatively the same as SL1, it had the same problem.

The central control rod had way more capability of starting the reactor up. So, they put an interlock on the central control rod that no one can touch without the base commander there. ALICE Just putting a big sign on it that says, do not kill everyone. Yeah. LIAM So they run the Camp Century reactor till 1963 and then decide, fuck this, it's not worth it, and take it out, and they take it out back and shoot it, essentially. Ship it back home, I don't know where it's buried, but it gets disposed of.

In March 1962, the Fort Greely, Alaska reactor comes online. It's an alco reactor. So it's a pressurized water reactor. It's fine. It works for a while. They decide it's not worth it and go back to coal power. Also in 1962, a PM3 reactor sent to Antarctica to McMurdo station.

They used it for heating and operating the base down there for the Navy. It lasts a few years, gets decommissioned. They used it for heating and operating the base down there for the Navy. It lasts a few years, gets decommissioned. And in 1967, the MH-1A Sturgis, a converted Liberty ship, had a 10 megawatt reactor installed for the Panama Canal Zone. ALICE Wow. Hey, do you mind if we just run this nuclear reactor inside part of your country? ALICE Well, by the way, it doesn't matter, because

we own it. LIAM Yeah. SUCKS TO SUCK! ALICE Yeah. LIAM I... it was Jay that pointed out, I think, that they put the reactor on a Liberty ship known for breaking in half. ALICE Ohhh, we've talked about those ships. Uh huh. JUSTIN So, it was just moored at a dock, so it should

be fine, but... ALICE It'd hope. JUSTIN It lasted... It lasted... Go ahead. Sorry. ALICE Yeah, I welded some, you know, uh, you know, welded some beams on the side, it'll be fine.

JUSTIN It lasted a few years, but then they decided it's probably not a good idea to have a nuclear reactor in a contested part of the country, so they pulled it out, and then, because they didn't have anywhere else to send it, they scrapped it. And so the army's nuclear program ended. They never deployed SL-1 clones to the do line, because the do line was outdated, but when it started, they didn't deploy them up north any more than they needed to. They had one station in Wyoming that I didn't list here. ALICE The whole thing was a waste of time.

LIAM Pretty much. It was there for like, two years. JUSTIN The United States Army is still the world's number one consumer of diesel fuel. ALICE Well, I mean, good news. The Army Futures Command is mooting. What if we just, what if we got back into the nuke business, what if we had a very small, very reliable nuclear reactor we could use for remote installations?

Wouldn't that be handy? Now, far be it from me to speculate as to what installations they might be talking about, but they are talking about it. So this can all happen again. And the only thing stopping us from this happening again is woke. Right? Because the current dismantling of woke is going to create another situation where men hate their bitch wives. Because under woke men love their wives, whereas this, this is the kind of, like, the patriarchal thing where you hate your bitch wife, you don't want her to divorce you, you are sleeping in your car,

etc. etc. etc. And as we increase the divorcidness of America in a kind of malignant, like, fault-required sort of way, this is more likely to happen again. You too can join the army and become a stupid nuclear science bitch. ALICE & TANY The only way to make this safe is to make it so that the relationships are very positive, and very chill, and everybody takes it seriously and everybody is a scientist, you have to have the cadre of the thing be a polycule. The only way. Only way it works. Mandatory.

No exceptions. And unfortunately it's the army, so that absolutely will not happen. I know. Bruce, well, that's why it works on the Navy. See you all again for the SL-1-2 episode, when some, like, MAGA chud soldier gets impaled with a reactor core. JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, it's the secret of running a good nuclear reactor is some form of sodomy. ALICE Oh, what the fuck.

ALICE That's true, yeah. Because, because, doing this honours the god Uranus, to whom, you know, Uranium is named, and after whom Uranian, the first term for Gay was called, so this is why it's important. You gotta be gay. You gotta... Radiation, gay science. You gotta be gay.

Yep. ALICE. Roz and I have to just burn coal, I guess. ALICE. You can use renewables, it's fine. SEAN. So, before we move on, there is currently a program where they are planning to put a small modular reactor back in Alaska for the army.

ALICE Let's fucking go. LIAM Hopefully they learn their lesson. ALICE Is the United States Army a lesson learning institution? Does it do that? LIAM Ask Pete. Pete heads up. JUSTIN Oh, we got that.

We got a 90 slide PowerPoint presentation about that. ALICE Well, there's your problem, the US Army. Yeah. So, I wanted to end on the note of, at the end of the day, SL-1, all the army reactors were small modular reactors. They were able to be put anywhere, supposed to be transported, built for a specific use. And that's all the rage nowadays is building a small modular reactor that we can put anywhere, use to power smaller cities. It doesn't cost as much, it's easier to build. Or you have like a big power plant that has like 20 of

them on racks. Yeah so you can shut one, the rest run. And while I was doing this, I found this picture, I don't remember, it was like a general picture, didn't say which company this was, but it looks familiar. About 20 feet tall, has a big cap on the top, is about the same size as SL1's, and it just rings back to the poster that was spread around after the accident, the Lest We Forget. Engineers in all fields still refer back to SL1s, you can't make it so simple, one person can fuck it up. No matter what their intentions are, it shouldn't be a situation where one person can blow a

reactor up, or fire the missile, or whatever. ALICE Do a hilarious prank. ALICE It is honor, right? JUSTIN Time is a flat circle. LIAM This is why, like, these newer reactors are going to have to be incredibly heavily censored, automated, etc. because with smaller reactors there's less in there, you can do more with it, there's always the chance. I just wanted to point out as well that in our nuclear fearing world, everybody's starting

to catch on to nuclear reactors, but the SMR guys just seem to name their shit in the least confidence building way. You have new scale that's like leading the field in it, but then the Idaho National Laboratory named their SMR the 4S, the super safe, small and simple reactor. I thought that started with Toshiba or something. Me too. Yeah, I don't know. It's a whole, everybody's getting in on it. But then there's also TerraPower, which is Bill Gates' company. TerraPower?

Yeah, TerraPower. Is that the one that's across the river where New York shipbuilding used to be? I don't know. I don't know either. I'm pretty sure they build like either components for SMRs or SMRs in there. Um... That's wild. Yeah. Well, my last... the last one's my favorite. for SMRs, or SMRs in there. Um. That's wild. Yeah.

Well, the last one's my favorite. Their website made me laugh. The Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation? Uh huh. With their micro modular reactor? Oh. Oh, MMR. Green Radio Station.

Um. Ultra Safe? So let's hope they take from what we've learned today as well. My nuclear power corporation's name is raising a lot of questions, which are answered by the name of my nuclear power corporation. So, what'd we learn other than don't make it so simple? Not that the term isn't bad. Pranks at work are always funny and will never backfire.

Yeah, pranks at work, great idea. People will love you for it. You definitely won't piss off other people so much that you cause the stupidest nuclear disaster in history. Don't let your nuclear reactor get into such a bad shape that shit gets stuck in it. Probably a good idea. Probably a good one. Don't put, like, 20 year olds in charge of a nuclear reactor. No.

Mm. Yeah. That was Rickover's... Put the 27 year olds in charge of it. Right. That was Rickover's big thing when it came to Three Mile Island, because he was brought in as a consultant for that, of course, was that in the shipping port reactor, he always had supervision, somebody that knew the reactor back forward and so on, where at Three Mile Island, even though they were all Navy nukes, there was no one

that was overhead of them. They just kind of flailed. He was then blocked back on to say Three Mile Island 1 was safe, because they wouldn't start it up without his blessing after he bashed in their heads with his comments. ALICE & LIAM That he stole every soul shaker in here. ALICE & LIAM As he was leaving, they're like, didn't we have more cooling towers than this? LIAM Where are my pants? No one in the control room's wearing a tie, what happened guys? Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger. Hello Justin, November, yay Liam, Devon, etc. Good enough. You demoted to a Sasharose ghostvin, etc. Good enough. The demotion to it's Sasharose goes wrong. Ouch. Wow. This story comes to you from the exciting world of piano tuning. Oh, I saw this one.

Yeah. Warner Brothers has, of course, made us all very aware of the many things that can go horribly wrong around pianos. That's what we forgot. His leg didn't drop a piano on birds. Yeah, nah, nah, I did mention a lot of pianos are being delivered. To the uh... Little where we covered it.

Yeah. These instruments can and do in fact fall on people, fire their steel springs into walls and floors, and albeit only partially implode. Oh. But today's story instead comes from the fact that so many people nowadays forget that we piano technicians still exist. ALICE Well, I don't. And thank you for your service. Right.

JUSTIN On a day in question, one of my tuning appointments was a grand piano in the front stage in a middle school auditorium. So far nothing out of the ordinary. I signed in, I scanned my ID, the front desk summons the music teacher who leads me to the piano and promptly runs back to her class. I get to work. Some 15 minutes of tuning pass and the public address system crackles to life. Working in schools means contending with announcements and the occasional fire drill. A shelter in place is the command from a calm and unhurried voice with not much more explanation. This seems to be some kind of lockdown drill. Definitely better than a fire drill so I get to stay put and keep working. A few more

minutes pass and the voice is back on the public address system. All students are being told to go to the neighboring high school's auditorium. On command the sound of hundreds of feet not so enthusiastically marching down the halls. Rattle the doors of the middle school auditorium. There's a sort of institutional malaise about the whole thing. This is obviously, yeah, this obviously some sort of drill they make the kids do. There's no instruction to the staff, teachers, or contractors. The main office where I had signed in maybe 25 minutes prior was less than 50 feet from the auditorium,

so I figured if there was some sort of actual emergency, they could easily open the door and shout. So I kept working. The building gradually went quiet again, which is the perfect condition for my work to continue. I've finished up with... ALICE I'm concerned that there's just like a tornado bearing down on this guy. Like, I say guy, I mean, just a tornado bearing down on a heroic piano tuner, like the end of Serious Man.

LWIPE I finish up with the tuning, and move on to some minor mechanical adjustments. And it is at this point that I realize just how quiet the building has gotten. But, my work is nearly done, and I still haven't been given any instruction to go anywhere else." autism moment, I feel ya. Yeah. Just as I was finishing up, the side door of the auditorium opened. Through the big double door walked a local police officer.

Our eyes met with similarly shocked expressions on our faces. All I could think to say was, oh. You gotta get outta here, man. You smell gas?" He said a little bit bewildered. ALICE Oh thank god, it's just about to explode, at least it's not a mass shooting. Jesus Christ. JUSTIN Before I could reply, the opposing side door

burst open behind me, two more police officers marched in. "'Are you Child's Name Redacted?' one asked." Weird thing for a cop to say. "'No, I'm the piano tuner,' I said. "'My hand's still inside, said instrument.'" Visibly tuning piano. "'No, I'm the piano tuner.'

"'Who are you and how did you get in here?' "'I'm a locksmith, and I'm a locksmith.'" These three officers were apparently risking their lives to search for a missing child inside a school that was about to explode. Uh huh. Can I grab my tools? I asked for some reason. The policeman said, yeah, I guess, just get out of here.

Picks up his tools, spark happens, everyone dies. ALICE No, that's why piano tuners tools are made of beryllium. ALICE Can I just take my control rod with me? One second, I'll just... JUSTIN Aw, shit. BOOM. ALICE Tuning... ALICE It's weird that they had that on the stage.

LIAM Tuning the piano in one of the keys is the bomb. ALICE Tuning the piano in the experimental nuclear reactor. You gotta have that for morale. JUSTIN They're trying to train the kids early on nuclear reactors so they're better at it when they go into the army. ALICE & LIAM At 19, yeah. JUSTIN Yeah. So with my tool bag- that's STEM education right there.

With my tool bag now on my back, I made my way out of the auditorium and towards the exit. Emerging into the atrium, I was met with a sea of flashing lights. Mmm. Sleepy baby. Little bit tired, yeah. Sea of flashing lights shining through the glass of the school's main doors. An armada of police, fire, and EMS vehicles surrounded the school.

I held the door open for yet more confused police officers entering the school. As I stepped out and walked back to my car, I smelled it. And from extensive experience blowing stuff up in my backyard as a teen, I recognized it immediately as burning plastic, not gas. I had in fact smelled it earlier and figured New Jersey just smelled like that. Since I hadn't had the time to put the various exterior parts back onto the piano, I had no choice but to sit in my car and eat lunch while the situation blew over, rather than have the school staff try and reassemble the piano. Soon enough, the students were marching back to the school, confirming that yes indeed, New Jersey just smells like that."

LULZ. Thank you for sending in Safety Thirds. Send in more Safety Thirds. WPIPod at gmail.com. Buy the shirts. Keep the Safety Thirds to about a page in length. Seriously, please. By the time we get here we're all delirious from pranksters and Facebook. If we get a few good long ones we'll just do an all Safety Third episode. That would be the third one we've done, you're welcome.

JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Alright, end this. JUSTIN Alright, that was Safety 3rd. ALICE Shake hands with danger. JUSTIN Our next episode will be on Chernobyl, does anyone have any commercials before we go? ALICE I think we covered all of them. Scooter, if the people want more Scooter, where can they find you? I'm on blue sky and Twitter at AngryScooter77, I mostly do train shit.

The whole reason we're talking about reactors is I used to be in Procedures and Quality Assurance for company redacted, but I still write papers on this shit. Every once in a while I'll post nuclear shit, but it's mostly me bitching about my job. Yeah. Nice. If you want more Scooter, go charter a private railroad car. Yes. It's fun and extremely expensive.

Alright, I think, I think that's it. Well, do it. Goodnight everybody. Alright, goodnight everyone. Goodnight. Alright everybody.