The SL-1 Accident

Yesterday, while watching the History channel, they had a 15 minute segment on the Stationary Low Power Reactor No. 1 (SL-1) disaster in 1961. I haven't thought about the SL-1 in several years and it was great to find so much information available online.

The U.S. Army operated a small reactor out in the Idaho desert (at the National Reactor Testing Station) that was intended to be used for powering remote radar stations to be used in the early warning system. For various reasons, there was an accident that claimed the lives of all three technicians, required the complete disassembly of the plant and in many good ways, significantly influenced the way that military nuclear facilities were operated.

This recounting of the story has a lot of good links, including one to Proving the Principle, a terrific history of INEEL (Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory); chapter 15 covers the SL-1 accident. The July '96 issue of "Atomic Energy Insights" is completely dedicated to the story of the SL-1. This Freedom of Information Act page has a number of official documents regarding the accident. Here is a very good picture of the plant (along with some information about the rumors that were floated, I'd heard some of them before) and radiationworks has some good pictures of the clean up effort, including two pictures of the control rod in the ceiling.

The state of Idaho has some interesting documents, including a final cleanup disposition (which includes the SL-1). It seems that not everyone is happy with the final resting spot for the SL-1 debris. The clean up is part of a settlement agreement between the state of Idaho, the U.S. Navy and the US DOE on a lot of other clean up issues that need to be addressed (including the SL-1).

Even the Naval Reactors Facility (also known as Nuclear Power Training Unit - NPTU -Idaho) needs some clean up (higher Cesium 137 contamination levels than expected). I guess that they no longer send Navy Nuclear personel there for training, the A1W, S1W and S5G plants have been shutdown. The Expended Core Facility is the only plant operational now. As you see from this map, NRF had it's own little area out there in the middle of nowhere.The S5G prototype was amazing. The complete back end of a submarine in a giant tank so that they could do operational testing of the natural circulation system as the boat was rolled from one side to the other.

None of this is stopping INEEL from doing new research and development on Generation IV reactors as the DOE puts it. This document contains an overview of the fourth generation work and links to http://www.nuclear.gov/ (I'd never been there before).

The Federation of American Scientists site has a bunch of information on military nuclear power plants (none on Aircraft Carriers plants though, I guess that information has not been declassified).