report concluded in 2008.
The full data relating to the last tests conducted on the NERVA nuclear rocket remain classified as Restricted Data and the Department of Energy has repeatedly declined to release the documents. Atomic Energy Commission records are “well organized and complete but unfortunately, most are classified or kept in secure areas that limit public access,” Dewar wrote. As for the records from the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, Dewar said that “many SNPO veterans believe its records were destroyed after the office was abolished in 1973” and that “in particular, the chronology file of Harold Finger, Milton Klein and David Gabriel, SNPO’s directors, would [be] invaluable” in determining the complete story on NERVA. When reached for comment, Harold Finger clarified that he left the program as director in 1968. “I have no knowledge of any meltdown,” Finger said, suggesting that his former deputy Milton Klein might know more. “I left the program as director in 1971,” Klein said, “and do not have any information about what happened to NERVA in the end.”
In January of 2002, as part of the Nevada Environmental Restoration Project, the National Nuclear Security Administration conducted a study regarding proposed cleanup of the contaminated land at Area 25. The report revealed that the following radioactive elements were still present at that time: “cobalt-60 (Co-60); strontium90 (Sr-90); yttrium-90 (Y-90); niobium-94 (Nb-94); cesium-137 (Cs137); barium-137m (Ba-137m); europium-152, - 154, and -155 (Eu152, Eu-154, and Eu-155); uranium-234, -235, -238 (U-234, U-235, U238); plutonium-239/240 (Pu-239/240); and americium-241 (Am241),” and that these radioactive contaminants “may have percolated into underlying soil.”
Twenty-eight years after NERVA’s questionable end at Jackass Flats, shortly after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the radiated land at Area 25 started to serve a new purpose when the Department of Homeland Security and the military began training exercises there— including how to deal with cleaning up after a terrorist attack involving a nuclear weapon. T. D. Barnes served as a consultant on several of these endeavors.
NNSA spokesman Darwin Morgan discussed the WMD training that goes on at the test site in a government film that plays at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas. “It’s a PhD experience for first responders,” Morgan said of the test site, “because the site offers real radiation they can’t get anywhere else.” Still, the National Nuclear Security Administration declined to elaborate on how, exactly, this “real radiation” that contaminated Area 25 occurred.
Perhaps in the early 1970s, the thinking at the Atomic Energy Commission was that one day a nuclear facility could very well melt down in an American city. Were this to happen, the commission could have argued, it would be a good thing to know what to expect. By 1972, the nuclear energy industry had experienced five “boom year(s),” according to Atomic Energy Commission archives. Without any kind of regulatory arm in place, the commission had been promoting and developing nuclear reactor “units,” which are the fuel cores that provide energy for nuclear power plants. By the end of 1967, the commission had placed thirty units around the country. The following year, that number jumped to ninety-one, and by 1972 there were one hundred and sixty nuclear reactor units that the Atomic Energy Commission was in charge of overseeing at power plants around the nation.
Six years after the end of the NERVA program at Jackass Flats, the nuclear facility at Three Mile Island nearly melted down, on March 28, 1979. The nuclear reactor there experienced a partial core meltdown because of a loss of coolant. Officials were apparently stunned. “The people seemed dazed by a situation that wasn’t covered in the manuals, torn between logic and standard operating procedures, indecisive in the absence of a strong executive power,” read a 1980 report on the disaster prepared for the public by the newly formed Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Special Inquiry Group. Even though similar accident scenarios had been conducted at Area 25, the “executive power,” which was the Atomic Energy Commission, apparently did not share the information with its partners at the power plants.
At the same time the Three Mile Island accident happened, a movie called The China Syndrome was opening in theaters across the country. The movie was about a government plot to conceal an imminent nuclear meltdown disaster, with Jane Fonda playing a reporter determined to expose the plot. Although it was clear to moviegoers that the film was fictional, it had been made with great attention to technical detail. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Special Inquiry Group determined that the combination of the two events — the real and the fictional — resulted in a media firestorm. The fact that the near nuclear meltdown happened in the media glare, wrote the commissioner, “may be the best insurance that it will not reoccur.” The public’s so-called mass hysteria, feared for decades by government elite, really did work in the public’s interest after all. At Three Mile Island, the media firestorm and the public’s response to it proved to act as a democratic “checks and balances” where the federal government had failed.
For as many nuclear accidents of its own making as the Atomic Energy Commission could foresee, they could not have predicted what happened on January 24, 1978, when a nuclear-powered Russian spy satellite crashed on North American soil, in Canada. NORAD analysts had been tracking Cosmos 954 since it launched, on September 18, 1977, but after three months, the movements of the spy satellite were causing NORAD ever-increasing alarm. The Russian satellite had been designed to track U.S. submarines running deep beneath the surface of the sea, and what NORAD knew about the satellite was that it was forty-six feet long and weighed 4.4 tons. To get that much payload into orbit required phenomenal power, most likely nuclear.
In December of 1977, analysts determined that the Russian satellite was slipping out of orbit, dropping closer and closer to Earth on each ninety-minute rotation of the globe. Calculations indicated that unless the Russians could get control of their satellite, Cosmos would, in all probability, reenter the atmosphere and crash somewhere in North America within a month. President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski pressed Moscow for information about what exactly was on board the crashing satellite. The Russians told Brzezinski that Cosmos 954 carried 110 pounds of highly enriched uranium 235.
Richard Mingus worked at the Department of Energy’s emergency command center, located in Las Vegas, during the crisis. The center was in charge of controlling public information about the looming nuclear disaster, following directions from the CIA. According to a secret CIA report declassified in 1997, a decision was made not to inform the public. Trying to predict the public’s reaction to a nuclear satellite crash was like “playing night baseball with the lights out,” wrote CIA analyst Gus Weiss, because “the outcome of [Cosmos] 954 would be akin to determining the winner of a train wreck.” The CIA knew exactly what would happen, and that was that “the satellite was coming down carrying a live reactor.” The CIA also believed that “a sensationalized leak would disturb the public in unforeseeable ways.” This information has never been made public before.
“It was extremely tense,” recalls Richard Mingus, who spent several days fielding calls at the emergency command center. By 1978, NEST — Nuclear Emergency Search Team — was finally trained to handle nuclear disasters. The man in charge was Brigadier General Mahlon E. Gates, also the manager of the Nevada Test Site. According to Gates, “the nucleus for NEST-related activity was established within EG&G, which had responsibility for overall logistics” to the nuclear lab workers and those assigned to NEST by the federal government. The team waited on standby at McCarran Airport, “ready to go the minute the thing crash-landed,” Mingus says. “Our job at the emergency command center was to keep people across America from panicking.” All that Brzezinski had said publicly was that America was experiencing a “space age difficulty.” Mingus believes this was the right move. “The satellite was still pretty high up, there was no radioactive danger until it actually hit the ground. But imagine the panic if people, or say a mayor of a city, started calling for cities to evacuate based on where they thought the satellite was going to crash down on the next ninety-minute rotation?” Mingus says the feeling at the command center was that if that were to happen, it would be panic like in The War of the Worlds.
When Cosmos 954 finally crashed, it hit the earth across a large swath of ice in the middle of the frozen Canadian tundra, one thousand miles north of Montana on Great Slave Lake. At McCarran Airport a fleet of unmarked NEST vans — meant to look like bakery vans but really loaded with banks of gamma- and neutron- detection equipment inside — drove into the belly of a giant C-130 transport plane and prepared to head north. NEST personnel included the usual players in the nuclear military-industrial complex: scientists and engineers from Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, and EG&G. Troy Wade was the lead federal official dispatched to the crash site. Looking back, he explains, “It was the radioactive fuel we were most concerned about. If a piece comes down that weighs a ton, you can’t predict how far and wide the debris, including all that fuel, will go.”
For this reason, the first order of business was detecting radiation levels from the air. Wade and the EG&G remote-sensing team loaded small aircraft and helicopters into the belly of the C-130, alongside the unmarked bread vans, and headed for the Canadian tundra. As part of Operation Morning Light, NEST members scoured a fifty-by-eighthundred-mile corridor searching for radioactive debris. “This was long before the advent of
