3 Men Dead, the steaming radioactive wreckage of a reactor, and a mess that extended far

beyond the confines of SL1 and the boundaries of the testing station.

You'll remember that as part of its basic design, SL1 had no containment building.

No structure that could withstand the force of a steam explosion and keep radioactive

materials from escaping.

All it had was a thin, metal walled structure, almost like a silo, which, given the circumstances,

held together remarkably well, in fact it kept a lot of the contaminated materials from

launching out into the desert.

But it was not airtight, not by any means, and radioactive particles easily slipped through

the cracks and out the exhaust vents into the cold night air and made their way across

the southeastern Idaho.

I have been there and it is a lot of space, definitely isolated, but it's not empty.

So the three operators of SL1 were not the only ones at risk when it exploded.

That night there were other people working at different parts of the testing station.

Then there were the emergency personnel that responded first, who were then followed

by hundreds more, doctors, nurses, scientists, government officials, plus all of the residents

of the town's peppered throughout Idaho's Snake River Plain, including the appropriately

named Atomic City, located only five miles away with a population of 140, the town of

Arco, 16 miles away, with about 3,000 people, and Idaho Falls, which sat 50 miles to the east

and had roughly 33,000 residents.

So although the explosion didn't happen in a major urban area, like, say, Chicago, a large

number of people were still at risk of radiation exposure, not to mention all the animals and

...