repairing electronic circuits,” Barnes explains. These workers were all preparing for what was actually going on aboveground, and that was full-power, full-scale nuclear reactor engine tests. In order for NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission to be able to verify that NERVA could actually propel a spaceship filled with astronauts the 34 million to 249 million miles to Mars (the distance depends on the positions of the two planets in their orbits), those federal agencies had to witness NERVA running full power for long periods of time here on Earth first. To test that kind of thrust without having the engine launch itself into space, it was caged inside a test stand and positioned upside down.
For each engine test, a remote-controlled locomotive would bring the nuclear reactor over to the test stand from where it was housed three miles away in its own cement-block-and-lead-lined bunker, called E-MAD. “We used to joke that the locomotive at Jackass Flats was the slowest in the world,” Barnes explains. “The only thing keeping the reactor from melting down as it traveled down the railroad back and forth between E-MAD and the test stand was the liquid hydrogen [LH2] bath it sat in.” The train never moved at speeds more than five miles per hour. “One spark and the whole thing could blow,” Barnes explains. At ?320 degrees Fahrenheit, liquid hydrogen is one of the most combustible and dangerous explosives in the world. James A. Dewar, author of To the End of the Solar System: The Story of the Nuclear Rocket, gets even more specific. “One hundredth of what one might receive from shuffling along a rug and then touching a wall can ignite hydrogen,” Dewar wrote in 2004. To help visualize what the facilities aboveground at Jackass Flats looked like, Barnes likens them to Cape Kennedy. “Imagine a one- hundred-twenty-foot-tall aluminum tower rising up from a plateau of cement surrounded by a deep, concrete aqueduct. Add some huge, spherical thermos-like dewars sitting around, each containing something like two hundred and sixty thousand gallons of liquid hydrogen, and you can visualize the spacelaunch appearance of things,” Barnes explains. In Atomic Energy photographs from the 1960s, a single set of train tracks can be seen running along the bottom of the cement aqueduct and disappearing into an opening underneath the tall metal tower. “The railroad car carried the nuclear reactor up to the test stand and lifted it into place using remotely controlled hydraulic hands,” Barnes explains. “Meanwhile, we were all underground looking at the reactor through special leaded-glass windows, taking measurements and recording data as the engine ran.” The reason the facility was buried inside the mountain was not only to hide it from the Soviet satellites spying on the U.S. nuclear rocket program from overhead, but to shield Barnes and his fellow workers from radiation poisoning from the NERVA reactor. “Six feet of earth shields a man from radiation poisoning pretty good,” says Barnes.
When running at full power, the nuclear engine operated at a temperature of 2,300 Kelvin, or 3,680.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which meant it also had to be kept cooled down by the liquid hydrogen on a permanent basis. “While the engine was running the canyon was like an inferno as the hot hydrogen simultaneously ignited upon contact with the air,” says Barnes. These nuclear rocket engine tests remained secret until the early 1990s, when a reporter named Lee Davidson, the Washington bureau chief for Utah’s Deseret News, provided the public with the first descriptive details. “The Pentagon released information after I filed a Freedom of Information Act,” Davidson says. In turn, Davidson provided the public with previously unknown facts: “bolted down, the engine roared… sending skyward a plume of invisible hydrogen exhaust that had just been thrust through a superheated uranium fission reactor,” Davidson revealed. Researching the story, he also learned that back in the 1960s, after locals in Caliente, Nevada, complained that iodine 131—a major radioactive hazard found in nuclear fission products — had been discovered in their town’s water supply, Atomic Energy officials denied any nuclear testing had been going on at the time. Instead, officials blamed the Chinese, stating, “Fresh fission products probably came from an open-air nuclear bomb test in China.” In fact, a NERVA engine test had gone on at Area 25 just three days before the town conducted its water supply test.
Had the public known about the NERVA tests when they were going on, the tests would have been perceived as a nuclear catastrophe in the making. Which is exactly what did happen. “Los Alamos wanted a run-away reactor,” wrote Dewar, who in addition to being an author is a longtime Atomic Energy Commission employee, “a power surge until [the reactor] exploded.” Dewar explained why. “If Los Alamos had data on the most devastating accident possible, it could calculate other accident scenarios with confidence and take preventative measures accordingly.” And so, on January 12, 1965, the nuclear rocket engine code-named Kiwi was allowed to overheat. High-speed cameras recorded the event. The temperature rose to “over 4000 °C until it burst, sending fuel hurtling skyward and glowing every color of the rainbow,” Dewar wrote. Deadly radioactive fuel chunks as large as 148 pounds shot up into the sky. One ninety-eight-pound piece of radioactive fuel landed more than a quarter of a mile away.
Once the explosion subsided, a radioactive cloud rose up from the desert floor and “stabilized at 2,600 feet” where it was met by an EG&G aircraft “equipped with samplers mounted on its wings.” The cloud hung in the sky and began to drift east then west. “It blew over Los Angeles and out to sea,” Dewar explained. The full data on the EG&G radiation measurements remains classified.
The test, made public as a “safety test,” caused an international incident. The Soviet Union said it violated the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which of course it did. But the Atomic Energy Commission had what it wanted, “accurate data from which to base calculations,” Dewar explained, adding that “the test ended many concerns about a catastrophic incident.” In particular, the Atomic Energy Commission and NASA both now knew that “in the event of such a launch pad accident [the explosion] proved death would come quickly to anyone standing 100 feet from ground zero, serious sickness and possible death at 400 feet, and an unhealthy dose at 1000 feet.”
Because it is difficult to believe that the agencies involved did not already know this, the question remains: What data was Atomic Energy Commission really after? The man in charge of the project during this time, Space Nuclear Propulsion Office director Harold B. Finger, was reached for comment in 2010. “I don’t recall that exact test,” Finger says. “It was a long time ago.”
Five months later, in June of 1965, disaster struck, this time officially unplanned. That is when another incarnation of the nuclear rocket engine, code-named Phoebus, had been running at full power for ten minutes when “suddenly it ran out of LH2 [liquid hydrogen and] overheated in the blink of an eye,” wrote Dewar. As with the planned “explosion” five months earlier, the nuclear rocket reactor first ejected large chunks of its radioactive fuel out into the open air. Then “the remainder fused together, as if hit by a giant welder,” Dewar explained. Laymen would call this a meltdown. The cause of the accident was a faulty gauge on one of the liquid hydrogen tanks. One gauge read a quarter full when in reality there was nothing left inside the tank.
So radiated was the land at Jackass Flats after the Phoebus accident, even HAZMAT cleanup crews in full protective gear could not enter the area for six weeks. No information is available on how the underground employees got out. Originally, Los Alamos tried to send robots into Jackass Flats to conduct the decontamination, but according to Dewar the robots were “slow and inefficient.” Eventually humans were sent in, driving truck- mounted vacuum cleaners to suck up deadly contaminants. Declassified Atomic Energy Commission photographs show workers in protective gear and gas masks picking up radioactive chunks with long metal tongs. Like many Atomic Energy Commission officials, Dewar saw the accident as “achieving some objectives.” That “while certainly unfortunate, unplanned, unwanted and unforeseen,” he believed that “calling the accident ‘catastrophic’ mocks the meaning of the word.” The cleanup process took four hundred people two months to complete.
So what happened to NERVA in the end? When Barnes worked on NERVA in 1968, the project was well advanced. But space travel was on the wane. By 1970, the public’s infatuation with getting a man to Mars had made an abrupt about-face. Funding dried up, and NASA projects began shutting down. “We did develop the rocket,” Barnes says. “We do have the technology to send man to Mars this way. But environmentally, we could never use a nuclear-powered rocket on Earth in case it blew up on takeoff. So the NERVA was put to bed.” That depends how one defines put to bed. President Nixon canceled the program, and it officially ended on January 5, 1973. Several employees who worked at the NERVA facility at Jackass Flats say the nuclear rocket program came to a dramatic, cataclysmic end, one that has never before been made public. “We know the government likes to test accidents in advance,” Barnes says. Darwin Morgan, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada Site Office, says no such final test ever happened. “Something like that would have been too huge of an event to have happened to ‘cover up,’” Morgan says. “I’ve talked to people in our classified repository. They don’t have anything.”
The record suggests otherwise. In studying Area 25 to determine how former Atomic Energy Commission workers and contractors with cancer may have been exposed to potentially lethal doses of radiation there, investigators for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health determined that “two nuclear reactors” were in fact destroyed there. “Due to the destruction of two nuclear reactors and transport of radioactive material, the area was extensively contaminated with enriched uranium, niobium, cobalt, and cesium,” the authors of the
