On January 4, 1961, the day after the explosion, the front pages of newspapers around the country had screaming headlines about SL1.

Trio killed an atomic plant blast. Three die as violent nuclear blast releases radiation in Idaho.

Adam reactor blows up at Idaho Station.

The Idaho Falls Post-Register reported on the incident, of course.

But also, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, even Canadian papers like the Ottawa citizen carried the story.

I've no doubt that officials at the Atomic Energy Commission, the AEC, shuttered at this turn of events.

This was the last thing they needed, an explosion, three dead men, an anxious public, especially as the government had just set aside money in the federal budget to help civilian nuclear energy companies add seven more reactors to the current fleet.

They had plans. Cities illuminated by an infinite supply of power, energy that was too cheap to meter, a miniature nuclear reactor in every basement, powering every home.

Okay, so maybe not that last one, but still. Atomic energy was supposed to be the future, and this kind of incident did nothing to assure the public that it could be done safely.

Of course, safety was important. There's no question that the government and the military wanted to know exactly what had transpired on the night of January 3rd, so that they could prevent it from happening again.

But first they had to figure out what happened, how did it happen, and who was responsible. Only three people knew for sure, and they were all dead.

Pains takingly recreating the situation and figuring out all the details would take months, and that gap provided plenty of time for rumors and gossip to take hold.

Was this sabotage? An intentional effort to destroy the reactor? Did this have to do with the men's personal issues? Or was all this rumor and innuendo simply a distraction from the real problems?

And ultimately, what information could people trust?

I'm Laura Kranz, and this is Wild Thing, going nuclear. A series about the power of the universe contained in the tiny little package of the atom.

The endless debate over heart-assing that power. And whether we humans are responsible enough to mess with it.

A benefit, a draw of destruction. A good, honorable one.

The investigation into SL1 was difficult to say the least. Not only had the reactor itself been destroyed, but the whole place was insanely radioactive.

We'll hear more about how they dealt with that in a future episode. But suffice it to say they had to take a lot of extra precautions.

Figuring out what kind of explosion had happened became the first goal of the investigation. It being the height of the Cold War, several officials thought there was a very real possibility of sabotage.

That was a theory, I think, in that kind of, you know, 1961, Francis Gary Powers have been shot down like six months before. Like this is the hottest days of the Cold War.

That's Todd Tucker, author of Atomic America. And he's referring to the pilot of an American U2 spy plane. Shot down over Soviet airspace in May of 1960.

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