End of the Solar System, xix.
32. built into the side of a mountain: Interview with Barnes; see photographs. On Nevada Test Site official maps, these mountains, in Area 25, are called Calico Hills.
33. the underground tunnel was 1,150 feet long: “Corrective Investigation Plan For Corrective Action Unit 165: Areas 25 and 26 Dry Well and Washdown Areas, Nevada Test Site, Nevada.” DOE/NV788, Environmental Restoration Division, National Nuclear Security Administration, January 2002, 12.
34. 34 million to 249 million miles to Mars: According to NASA, “the distance between Earth and Mars depends on the positions of the two planets in their orbits. It can be as small as about 33,900,000 miles (54,500,000 kilometers) or as large as about 249,000,000 miles (401,300,000 kilometers).”
35. a remote-controlled locomotive: DOE/NV #1150, “Last Stop for the Jackass & Western.”
36. “One hundredth of what one might receive”: Ibid., 287.
37. Soviet satellites spying: Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, appendix F, “The Russian Nuclear Rocket Program.” Dewar wrote, “The Soviets built a test complex vaguely similar to Jackass Flats.”
38. 2,300 Kelvin: Finger and Robbins, “An Historical Perspective,”
7.
39. “The Pentagon released information after I filed a Freedom of Information Act”: Interview with Lee Davidson. Davidson’s original 1990s story is from the Deseret News, where he was the Washington bureau reporter for twenty-eight years. During this time, Davidson reported on a number of secret AEC radiation tests in Utah, at Dugway Proving Grounds. “They had a lot of money to play with,” Davidson says of the AEC. “Here in Utah, they were trying to figure out what a meltdown would look like from a number of different angles. The AEC released more radiation in Utah than was released during the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island.”
40. “Los Alamos wanted a run-away reactor”: Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, 280.
41. “data on the most devastating accident possible”: Ibid. Notably, Dewar lays blame for the original idea of exploding the reactor on Los Alamos. The nuclear laboratory may have come up with the idea but Los Alamos takes marching orders from the Atomic Energy Commission, and in the end, the two entities agreed to go ahead and
explode the nuclear reactor on the grounds that it was a safety test. “It was critical to know the total energy release in the explosion and the amount and pattern of radioactive distribution,” Dewar wrote.
42. “over 4000 °C until it burst”: Ibid., 281.
43. chunks as large as 148 pounds: Ibid., 282.
44. “equipped with samplers mounted on its wings”: Ibid., 281. 45. “blew over Los Angeles”: Ibid., 280.
46. “accurate data from which to base calculations”: Ibid., 285. 47. “I don’t recall that exact test”: Interview with Harold Finger.
48. code-named Phoebus: Barth, Delbert, Final Report of the OffSite Surveillance for the Phoebus 1-A Experiment, SWRHL-19r, January 17, 1966. “The data collected indicate that radioactivity levels did not exceed the safety criteria established by the Atomic Energy Commission for the off-site population.”
49. “suddenly it ran out of LH2”: Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, 129.
50. cleanup crews in full protective gear could not enter the area for six weeks: “Decontamination of Test Cell ‘C’ at the Nuclear Rocket Development Station After a Reactor Accident,” January 18, 1967, LA3633; Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, 129-31.
51. long metal tongs: The workers dropped the radioactive chunks into one-gallon paint cans, which were driven out of Area 25 on a lead dolly.
52. officially ended on January 5, 1973: Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, 203.
53. no such final test: Interview with Darwin Morgan. 54. records are “well organized and complete”: Ibid., 323. 55. “Due to the destruction of two nuclear reactors”: Rollins,
“Nevada Test Site — Site Description,” 25 of 99.
56. Milton Klein might know: Interview with Harold Finger; interview with Milton Klein. Klein also says he “takes issue with the use of the word meltdown because that’s not exactly what happens to a reactor when it’s deprived of coolant.”
57. radioactive elements were still present: Table 3–2, “Corrective Investigation Plan For Corrective Action Unit 165: Areas 25 and 26 Dry Well and Washdown Areas, Nevada Test Site, Nevada,” 32.
312 “may have percolated into underlying soil.” Ibid. Certainly, Barnes’s eyewitness testimony suggests as much. “When we would run the reactor, we had to clear out forty miles of the canyon around Calico Hills, it would emit that much radiation,” Barnes explained. “And every time we ran the reactor, giant dewars of water would flood the whole area, which would help cool everything down. Enough water to make a temporary pond of water several feet deep.”
58. Area 25 began serving a new purpose: Interview with T. D. Barnes.
59. “It’s a PhD experience for first responders”: Film shown on a loop at the Atomic Energy Museum in Las Vegas. Also in this section of the museum was a photograph of Area 25, which depicted desert terrain interrupted by a bright blue sign on a post that read: “EG&G Training 295-6820”—an indication that the federal partner in WMD training at Area 25 was EG&G. Morgan denies this partnership existed and insists EG&G stopped working as an “official contractor” at the test site in the 1990s. The photograph at the Atomic Testing Museum has since been taken down, but as of December 30, 2010, the telephone number remained in service (using the local area code) with a voice mail stating: “You have reached [name redacted] in the training department. Please leave a message and I will return your call as soon as possible.”
60. one day a nuclear facility could very well melt down: For an understanding of nuclear reactor physics, how a power reactor differs
from a nuclear rocket reactor, and how both differ from a nuclear bomb, see Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, xvii.
61. five “boom year(s)”: Rogovin, Three Mile Island Report, 182-
83.
62. nuclear reactor “units”: Ibid., 182.
63. dispatched an EG&G remote sensing aircraft: EG&G, Inc., Las Vegas Operations, “An Aerial Radiological Survey of the Three Mile Island Station Nuclear Power Plant,” U.S. Department of Energy, 1977. The cover page of the president’s commission on the accident at Three Mile Island features a thermal photo accredited to EG&G.
64. “may be the best insurance that it will not reoccur”: Rogovin, Three Mile Island Report, 5.
65. nuclear-powered Russian spy satellite crashed: Gates, Mahlon, Operation Morning Light, Northwest Territories, Canada 1978, A Non-Technical Summary of U.S. Participation; “The Soviet Space Nuclear Power Program,” Directorate of Intelligence, CIA.
66. a decision was made not to inform the public: Weiss, “The Life and Death of Cosmos 954.” Marked Secret, Not to be Released to Foreign Nationals, 7 pages, no date. Declassified 10/24/97.
67. “playing night baseball with the lights out”: Ibid., 2. 68. “It was extremely tense”: Interview with Richard Mingus.
69. NEST: Secret, United States Atomic Energy Commission, No. 234505, Responsibility for Search and Rescue Operations, to M.E. Gates, Manager, Nevada Operations. November 19, 1974; see also Gates, “Nuclear Emergency Search Team,” 2, www.nci.org.
70. “established within EG&G”: Gates, “Nuclear Emergency Search Team,” 2.
71. “space age difficulty”: “Cosmos 954: An Ugly Death,” Time magazine, February 6, 1978.
316 would be panic like in The War of the Worlds: Interview with Richard Mingus.
72. meant to look like bakery vans: Interview with Troy Wade.
73. Troy Wade was the lead federal official: Note that Mahlon Gates, who authored Operation Morning Light and put together NEST, was the senior U.S. government representative on the project and also the head of DOE Nevada Operations but did not have an active role in the boots-on-the-ground operation.
74. high above was an Air Force U-2: Weiss, “The Life and Death of Cosmos 954,” 3.
75. somewhere on America’s East Coast: Time magazine reported, “The craft crashed into the atmosphere over a remote Canadian wilderness area last week, apparently emitting strong radiation. American space scientists admitted that if the satellite had failed one pass later in its decaying orbit, it would have plunged toward Earth near New York City — at the height of the morning rush hour.”
