BONUS | The Doomsday Fifth Anniversary Meltdown of 2025

Let's all blow our sad kazoos in honour of a milestone I didn't see coming. FIVE YEARS we've been doing this, and I know a lot of people were never able to make their way through the whole back catalogue, and for good reason. So I sat down and did the math:

We've shared 3,489 minutes together! That's just episode time.

That’s just over 58 hours of listening to me trying to make you throw up but then earning your respect back by teaching you how to sew your own arm back on. I tried to figure out how much production time went into that and if I'd started January first and never slept or blinked or ate, it would have taken till mid-April. Imagine screaming for three-and-a-half months straight.

I added a little intro pointing out how great you've been, how helpful you've been, and how much I sincerely appreciate you all being there while I muddle my way through this as professionally as possible. And in this I had the thought to give away the book that started this whole podcast. William McKeown’s book “Idaho Falls, the Untold Story of America’s First Nuclear Accident". I thought it'd make a nice giveaway. Then I had the thought - do I do a charity auction of all my disaster books? Let me know what you guys think.

All that said, we'll all be back for a new episode where we'll be burning down an airport together in no time. I'd say get your safety glasses ready, but they're just going the melt over your eyes.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/doomsday-history-s-most-dangerous-podcast--4866335/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Let me just say this real quick. When I started
this podcast five years ago, in a million years, I
never would have guessed that it would grow to become
as big and popular as it did. And I, in
a trillion years, would never have expected that I would
have an inbox filled with messages from people from around
the world telling me how much they not only enjoy
the show and how much they appreciate it, but how

(00:23):
much has actually legitimately helped them in their lives. And
over the last year, it's really made me feel like
when I lost my dadd a year ago, people came
out of the woodwork to tell me how much he
had helped them, and I had no idea they took
the time to come and tell me how much he
had meant to them, and I can't tell them how
much that meant to me. And over the last year,

(00:46):
a lot of you have just stepped up and come
to me and helped me work through my feelings. So
I just want to say that all of this appreciation
it's reciprocated. Thank you, honestly, sincerely, and may I say
years to another five years. And since no one has
taken me up on my offer to purchase the naming

(01:08):
rights for the show I'm looking at You Betterhelp presents
Doomsday History's most Dangerous Podcast. I guess we're just going
to continue to carry on quietly in my dad's honor.
But now to the reason that we have all gathered
here today. A lot of people have told me that
this first episode is in fact their favorite episode. They

(01:29):
just get nostalgic about it. And over the years a
lot of people have joined on into our little cult here,
and they have a little trouble getting through the entire
back catalog, and I don't blame them one bit. I
sat down and did the math. We have shared three
four hundred and eighty nine minutes together. That is just
over fifty eight hours of content, which is enough that

(01:51):
you could binge on a road trip from London all
the way to central Kazakhstan, or from Anchorage in Alaska
to just below the Mexico border. I don't want to
tell you what to do. I don't know where you
need to be fifty eight hours from now. In our
last episode together, I compared Chernobyl and the sl One
reactor from our first episode, and I pointed out that

(02:15):
the smallest nuclear accident in the world and the biggest
nuclear accident in the world basically had the same causes
and plot points, so much so that I pointed out
that the show had now come full circle, and that
gave me the idea of re releasing this first episode
to ceremoniously cement that as a concept, also quietly to

(02:36):
buy a little more time before we are all burning
down an airport togethersh what you're about to hear was recorded.
I couldn't tell you how many times it was recorded
and then hemmed and hawed over before I finally just
said it and shared it with the world. I just
wrote a little story about a very bad day at work,
and then I taught myself how to speak on Mike

(02:58):
and how to record, how to edit, and how to
do just about everything. I knew nothing, and I suffered
as I learned, and I still do. And lots of
people have volunteered to help me with the research for
this show, but that's really the only part I enjoy,
And having now re listened to this episode, I feel
like I was reading a book report back then, and

(03:19):
I still make myself laugh though, so good for me
and in realizing that I'm now sitting here thinking wow
with that attitude, I could make an amazing crazy person
one day, but not today. I took most of the
inspiration for this first episode from William McCune's book Idaho Falls,
the untold story of America's first nuclear accident, which to

(03:42):
celebrate the new year. I think I'm actually just gonna
give away. I'm not sure how. In fact, if you
have any ideas on what we might do to pick
let me know. Actually, you know what. I might even
just do a book sale to raise money for this show,
sell off all my disaster books. I don't know. We'll see.
For now, I want you to please enjoy a five

(04:02):
year anniversary replay of our very first episode. I want
to thank you again so much for listening and sharing
this show, which we now ceremoniously bring into full circle
in three to one. There are over four hundred thousand
caskets at Arlington National Cemetery, but only one is lined

(04:24):
with lead, sealed under several feet of concrete, and placed
in a metal vault, just to prevent it from killing you. Hello,

(04:45):
and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together we
will rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and conspiring,
but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human
history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll describe
the the worst groin injury in the recorded history of
medical science. You'll learn how to autopsy a corpse from
across a room, and you're also going to hear both

(05:07):
kool aid man and silkwood shower used as verbs. This
is not the podcast you play around your kids, or
while eating, or even a mixed company. But as long
as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and
learn something that could potentially save your life, our work
is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids
out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses,

(05:27):
and let's begin. When I say Idaho, you're probably thinking
of potatoes or people dying from a broken leg on
the Oregon Trail. But did you know Idaho is actually
an unspoiled corner of America filled with natural beauty and

(05:48):
spectacular scenery. It's so big it runs all the way
from Canada to Nevada. But it's so little understood that
if I showed you Wyoming on a map and said
there it is, you'd most likely agree. Idaho's blessed with
diverse landscapes, from high deserts and jagged mountains to dense
forests and turquoise blue lakes. It has bubbling hot springs
and roaring waterfalls. It even has canyons deeper than the

(06:09):
Grand Canyon, and more than twenty million outdoor enthusiasts centure
there every year. But to make sure this doesn't start
off as a kind of a bait and switch podcast,
it's fair to say that Idaho is also home to
a lot of pretty lonely and desolate places, and that's
where today's story takes place, about forty miles east of
Idaho Falls and a little town called Arco. If you're

(06:30):
having trouble picturing it, it's basically the Phillipsburg Montana of Idaho.
According to trip Advisor, the top recommendations for visitors to
Arco are the Craters of the Moon Park, which is
ideal if you're looking to instagram yourself into the lava
fields of Mordoor. And the best dining can be found
at Pickles Place on Front Street, home of the praiseworthy
Atomic Burger. You'll think you're in a Michelin Star restaurant

(06:52):
only in Idaho, So why are we in Idaho. Well.
To answer that, first, we have to travel back in
time to just after the end of World War II,
the ironically named sequel to World War I, the war
to end all wars we all know. World War two
was most infamous for being the only times nuclear weapons
had been used in combat. Russia and the United States

(07:12):
had been fair weather allies during the war, but as
soon as Germany and Japan surrendered, all that good will
quickly evaporated and was replaced with a lot of side
eye and competitive one upsmanship, and nothing fuels military excess
like a healthy mix of distrust in bottomless pockets. Between
the two nations, they would create over one hundred thousand
nuclear weapons. This is a ridiculously and unusably dangerous number

(07:34):
of weapons. Scientists warned that they couldn't openly rip on
each other without ending the world as we know it,
remodeling the Earth into a kind of a global wasteland,
of a radiated garbage and endless winter. Eisenhower understood this
in his own words. He said, they couldn't have this
kind of war because there wouldn't be enough bulldozers to
scrape the bodies off the streets and that's an actual

(07:54):
historical quote. By the mid nineteen fifties, the two nations
had fallen into a cold old war, where animated turtles
taught school children how to duck and cover under their desks,
and the Arctic Circle was lined with radar stations on
constant alert for the first sign of anything bigger than
a sled flying overhead. Interesting thing about the Arctic, it's
famously cold, and because radar stations couldn't be powered by

(08:15):
burning furniture and frozen bodies of dead soldiers, they required
endless shipments of diesel fuel. This was expensive, though, and
sometimes dangerous, so the army started thinking smaller. A new
kind of power source was needed, and that's when Uncle
Sam got into the experimental nuclear reactor business. The Argon
National Laboratory designed and ran the ultra secretive Manhattan Project,

(08:37):
developing the original atomic bomb, and now they were tasked
with designing and building and testing a whole new kind
of nuclear reactor. What the army wanted was something portable
enough to be loaded onto a flatbed truck or parachuted
out of a plane, and simple enough to freeball out
of a manual by a small crew of enlisted personnel.
They wanted it small, but what they got was small,

(08:57):
say compared to a home depot. By July of nineteen
fifty eight, what they received was a direct cycle natural
recirculation boiling water experimental nuclear reactor concept, which got mercifully
shortened to the less weighty r GONE Stationary Low Power
Reactor Number one, also known as the SL one. It
was a three level building about forty feet tall fifty

(09:18):
feet around, something like a big stubby green silo, with
a long low administration building attached to the outside. The
lowest level contained the reactor itself, the middle level housed
the reactor room, and the top level was called the attic,
and it collected steam from the reactor to turn back
into water. So I haven't said Idaho in a minute,
so back to the question. As beautiful as Idaho can be,

(09:39):
and with apologies to Idahoans, when the Atomic Energy Commission
needed about twenty three hundred square kilometers or eight hundred
and ninety square miles of bare nothing to test this thing,
Idaho's Sagebrush Desert fit the bill. They say, it's about
as desolate and lifeless as the moon, the perfect place
to hide an experimental nuclear reactor, or maybe even an
experimental nuclear reactor. Mishap let us meet the cast of

(10:03):
our story that manned the station on the miserably cold
night of January the third. Nineteen sixty Army specialist John
Burns was a handsome twenty two year old from Utica,
New York. He joined the sl one staff the year
before moving to Idaho with his nineteen year old wife, Arlene,
who must have been ecstatic, and their one year old son,
who was only one and couldn't have cared less. John's

(10:24):
hobbies included ignoring his family, chatting up strippers, and throwing
temper tantrums at work. Burns was said to be always
up for a laugh. He once turned off a fan
that cooled critical instrument systems just to watch his crewmates
freak out, and at least one time he was found
asleep in the parking lot when he was supposed to
be monitoring the reactor at first blush, Yes, this was
unspeakably negligent and dangerous, but in his defense, yet a

(10:46):
baby barely out of high school and raising kids can
be very tiring. Next came Navy cebe Richard Legg, who
joined the staff at the same time with a successful
launch of the nuclear submarine USS Nautilus, Naval students looking
to get an early foot in the door or hatcher
or whatever subs use would sign up to train on
nuclear equipment at Idaho Falls. He was a stocky twenty

(11:07):
six year old for Michigan who traveled to Idaho to
advance his career and ended up finding love in the
arms of a Mormon girl. Everything was looking up for Leg.
He had already worked two years as a Navy electrician
before enrolling in the SL one program. He'd even been
in the same class as Burns back in Virginia. Around
four p m. On January third, Burns and Leg began
their shift at the SL one. Assisting them that night

(11:29):
was twenty eight year old trainee specialist Richard Leroy mc kinley.
He was a family man from Ohio who had served
in both the Army and Air Force during the Korean War.
Right before the holidays, another crew had shut down the
reactor for routine maintenance, and tonight's job for the three
men was to simply grab a clipboard and prep it
for a restart. And if you're thinking, oh no, that
sounds dangerous, something dangerous is going to happen. Just calm down.

(11:52):
You have no idea to understand just how much, so
now is probably a good time to quickly Cole's notes
the basics of power generation. The entire Industrial Revolution was
based on the idea that water turns into steam. Power
plants would burn coal to boil water, which turned into steam,
The steam spun a turbine, and the turbine generated electricity.
Nuclear power plants work the same way, but instead of

(12:14):
burning coal, they split neutrinos from uranium atoms, which release
a ton of energy in the form of heat, which
then boils the water, which then spins the Turbine's same idea.
And you might say, professor, isn't splitting atoms inherently dangerous?
And I would answer yes, But I'm not a professor,
And it would be incalculably stupid not to have some
kind of brakes you could throw on these things if
they started feeling all chernobil. And that's where control rods

(12:37):
come in. An easy way to understand how they work
is to imagine nineteen sixties hard throb kirk Douglas. Imagine
young Kirk Douglas attached to a device that lowered him
into and out of a room full of people. His
presence would immediately begin to absorb all the attention, and
scientists could control the amount of attention he absorbed by
raising and lowering them in and out of the room.
Engineers control the rate and intensity of nuclear reactions by

(12:58):
raising the lowering control rods. Need more energy, lift the rod,
want less lower it. Tonight was Leg's first shift as
the crew chief. He'd been promoted to supervisor over Burns,
which he didn't much care for. Turns out, they'd never
really gotten along. They kind of hated each other. The
two men had even come to blows at a bachelor
party at burns beloved strip club just the year before.

(13:21):
If drunkenly defending the honor of a stripper at two
in the afternoon on a weekday made him wrong, Burns
didn't want to be right. The three man crew on
the evening shift had a large number of tasks to
perform on the operating room floor, and there was no
one left in the control room to keep log books
or monitor the plant conditions. The men had already cleaned
out the reactor housing, reinstall the plugs, reassemble the control rods,

(13:43):
and replace the shield blocks. The only box left unchecked
was to reconnect the reactor's control rods to the drive mechanism,
which looked like a mix of an industrial plunger and
the Genesis device from Wrath of Khan. The first step
of the last step was to lower all five control rods,
but only three dropped cleanly to the core under their
own weight. The other two would need to be forced

(14:03):
in by the Genesis plunger. In the year before, there'd
been about forty cases of control rods sticking doing this.
It happened about four times in the last month alone.
Each time it was chalked up to misalignment or surface
corrosion or worn out bearings, or something called radiation induced
swelling of materials. If you know the Simpsons episode where
mister Burns put together a team of ringers for the

(14:24):
plant baseball team and Ken Gurphy Junior couldn't play because
he'd been over indulging on a nerve and brain to
on it and came down with a case of cranial gigantism,
it's a little like that. Burns McKinley had to stand
on the reactor core to lift out the rod so
they could be hooked to the drive mechanism. Like we said, simple,
like hanging a coat on a hook, except the coat
is seven feet tall and it weighs about eighty four pounds,

(14:45):
and today it wasn't cooperating. It's easy to imagine their
frustration standing on top of the reactor housing, tugging and
kicking and cursing the equipment leg was off working on
a different control rod. By the time Burns finally managed
to work the rod loose, all he needed to do
now was lift it to to the machine. About three
inches would do, according to the manuals. Anything more than
twelve inches would increase the rate of reaction enough to

(15:06):
put them at risk of an explosion, and what Burns
did next would be investigated for two years and create
decades of debate and speculation. He lifted the control rod
enough to hook it to the machine, and then some
about twenty six and a half inches in total. Now
imagine you're the assistant fire chief at the Test Sites
Fire and Security Department. When an alarm goes off, it's

(15:28):
the sl one. You sigh. You've already been out to
the sl one twice because of a faulty detector, and
now you're being called out again into the freezing January
night air to double check what is obviously another false alarm.
You pull up to the building again and everything seems fine. Again.
You see a little steam coming out of the building,
which makes sense because it's twenty below zero or minus

(15:48):
six fahrenheit, no reason for concern. As you enter the building,
the control room holst with a yellow glow from radiation
warning lights right October style. The thing is, you weren't
thinking about radiation on the way over. When the alarm
comes in. It just tells you where to go, not
what to expect. After a quick search, the control building
turned out to be empty, nothing but a bunch of

(16:09):
lunch pails and coats on hangers. So unless the men
ran into the desert without their coats, they had to
be in the reactor building. You turn off the alarm
and you check your radiation detector, and as soon as
it turns on, the reading immediately jumps off the scale.
You make a mental note to request a less effective
radiation detector and begin the long climb up the metal
staircase that winds around the building to reach the reactor
room on the second floor. By the time you get

(16:31):
to the top of the stairs, the radiation detector actually
shorts out and maybe melts a little in your hand,
and maybe a bit of your mustache falls off. The
rest of your men remember something they forgot back at
the truck and leave. The reaction would be perfectly understandable.
Low levels of radiation are honestly not all that dangerous
all things considered. Medium levels can lead to sickness, headaches, vomiting,

(16:51):
and fever, but high levels they'll kill you by damaging
or turning off your internal organs. They'll burn off your skin.
They'll even destroy your nervous system. And when this happen
weapons you'll experience seizures and tremors as the radiation rips
apart your blood cells, while your immune system causes uncontrollable bleeding.
And the worst part of it, if you get blasted
by radiation and it doesn't outright kill you, now you
have to wait, which could take years. Radiation could kill

(17:14):
you in many ways, but none of them are quick
or painless, but you more concerned about duty and the
safety of the maintenance crew. Continue alone. You open the
door to the reactor room to take a peek inside,
but instead of calling out for the missing men. You scream,
oh my God, while throwing up, and then you kool
aid man your way through the nearest wall into the
freezing night air, and your reaction will be perfectly understandable.

(17:39):
After your fellow emergency workers are finished slapping you in
the face to break you hysteria, you struggle for adjectives
to describe the horror you just witnessed, and you make
the call for backup, which came from everywhere. Alarms were
even sounded as far away as Washington. With the control
row removed and without anything controlling the nuclear reaction beneath
their feet, the fission had increased exponentially, leaving the men

(18:01):
very little time to escape the room before what came next.
The biggest understatement in this podcast is where I just
said that the men had very little time to escape
the room. The core quickly superheated even being submerged and cool,
and water wasn't enough to keep the fuel plates from vaporizing.
And here's something you probably don't know about water. When
it vaporizes super fast, expands up to seventeen hundred times

(18:23):
its original volume. That means every square foot of water
in the reactor became enough scalding steam to fill a condo.
The reactor had been built strong enough to keep it
from exploding under pressure, but all that steam of water
needed somewhere to go, so up it went. It hit
the lid of the reactor vessel at about one hundred
and sixty feet per second, and with about ten thousand
pounds of pressure per square inch. It's per square inch

(18:46):
that's more than three times more pressure than you'd feel
having a bullet impact your skin, but every inch of
your skin. This is the kind of pressure you normally
only will find twenty one thousand feet under the ocean.
To really appreciate what happened in that room, two things. First, blink.
The average blink takes somewhere between three hundred and four
hundred milliseconds, and everything I've described to this point, the

(19:09):
reaction in the core and what happened in the room,
happened in four milliseconds, like you could chew off a
finger and still countered out on one hand four point
zero milliseconds. That is, for one thousandths of a second.
Compared to the explosion of the reactor. A blink is
practically an eternity second. On a good day, the reactor
was designed to generate three megawats of power, that's roughly

(19:31):
enough to power about three thousand homes depending on the
season and the usage and the blah blah blah. But
without the calming effect of the now partially removed control rod,
the power spiked sixty three hundred times its normal limit,
creating twenty gigawatts of power. That's enough to power twenty
million homes. That's enough to send Doc and Marty back
and forth through time sixteen and a half times, I

(19:52):
say at least, because no machine on Earth was designed
to harness this kind of power, So twenty gigawatts is
really where the meter pegged and broke. And now I'm
about to describe leg burns and McKinley's injuries. And to
preface this, I'm going to say that when the men
were first found, they were misidentified. The rescue workers were
people who had met them, who knew them and had

(20:12):
spent time with them, but the injuries were so elaborate
they defied recognition. So if you're not down with gross,
you can pretty well fast forward through most of the
rest of the podcast until about the end where I
thank you for listening and give you a hint about
our next episode. You have been warned. So imagine being
thrown sideways across a room and into a wall, and

(20:34):
about the time it takes to blink, Burns was caught
by giant concrete retaining blocks, and his face, throat, rib cage,
left arm, left leg, and back were completely crushed on impact.
I don't know how you crushed both your face and
your back at the same time, but clearly some kind
of circusilace stuff was going on on top of that,
if you can picture it. His pelvis was found shoved

(20:55):
up into his abdomen, and I'll wager my physiology degree
that your hip bones were never men to touch your lungs.
Certainly he would have died from the cranial or spinal trauma,
but the impact in the concrete broke his ribs and
drove them inwards like a hand closing. The jagged edge
of one of those rib fingers pierced his heart. Of
all the things wrong with them, getting stabbed through the
heart was listed as the actual cause of death. Mc

(21:18):
kinley was also thrown across the room, but somewhere between
the reactor and the wall. As he spiraled and ragged
all through the air. He was shot down like a
clay pigeon at a target shooting range. A chunk of
radioactive reactor shrapnel hit him right in the head, but
it didn't pierce his skull. It must have been kind
of a glancing blow, which is good. But it did
tear off Ata's face, which was bad, which flew away

(21:38):
at great speed and landed somewhere with a wet splack.
Here's where things get technical. You've probably heard of abrasions before,
but have you ever heard of an evulsion. An abrasion
is an awe. An evulsion is where part of the
body is deeply peeled away or torn away by trauma,
and I don't mean like an arm blue off. Avulsions
most commonly refer to a surface draw where all of

(22:01):
the skin's different layers are removed, creating a kind of
a peekaboo flap for all of the deeper subcutaneous tissue, muscle, tendons,
and bone. It's kind of a rare chance for your
skeleton and organs to get a little sunlight. But technically speaking,
McKinley's injuries were even more intense than they sound, so
what he had was a specific subtype of evulsion called degloving,

(22:22):
and I'll just say it's extensive and bad and the
best reason not to go to medical school and not
the kind of thing you want to google image search.
The name was inspired by the process of removing a glove.
McKinley had major injuries to his scalp, face, eyes, left hand,
and left leg. You must have looked like all the
best props from a Halloween store. Call together. And if

(22:44):
your shoulders haven't been creeping up into your ears for
the last few minutes, it's time we play a game
of would you rather? Would you rather suffer burns full
body smushing McKinley's horrific and lethal game of catch or
risk it all on what happened to Leg? Either just
tweet us or shout your answer into your listening device

(23:05):
of choice. And now, without further ado, I will explain
why Burns and mc kinley were the lucky ones, which
sounds weird to act. Remember that ridiculous pressure wave I
described when the water hit the reactor lid. This ridiculous
amount of force was able to lift all twenty six
thousand pounds of the core thirteen feet straight up. Sadly,

(23:26):
for Leg, The reactor didn't stop its upward movement because
of Newton's law of gravity. It stopped because of Newton's
first law of motion, which, if you'll remember correctly, was
the one where an object will stay in motion until
it is affected by another force. And in this case,
the restricting force was the ceiling, which the reactor hit
hard before falling back to its original point, only a

(23:46):
much worse shape. If the jump sheared all of its
connections to the piping and instrument systems. The collision left
the ceiling deeply punched in and peppered with shield plugs
and rod fragments, and Leg was no longer standing on
the reactor lid. The top of his head had been
sliced off, exposing his brain, His face was collapsed inward,
the upper half of his body had been twisted one

(24:08):
hundred eighty degrees against the lower half, and his left
leg was cut almost in two like the way you
cook a hot dog. And here's where it gets gross.
His internal organs had been displaced and destroyed because of
his greatest injury. See when the reactor returned to Earth
and Leg was no longer on it, it was because
he had been pancaked into the ceiling, probably with a
mighty wet scrooge, and stapled into place, impaled through the

(24:32):
groin by a shield plug. The plug entered through the
groin but exited through his shoulder. So'll figure that one out,
or roll around on the floor cradling your junk. There's
no real wrong answer here, So to recap, Burns had
been killed by his injuries. Leg had been killed spectacularly
by the worst groin injury in the history of medical science.

(24:55):
And as easy as it is to think, surely these
men died in the most ridiculously agonizing ways in the
storied history of human death. But McKinley, and this is
the most amazing part, McKinley was still alive, which would
have put a smile on the remaining half of his
face if he probably wasn't in a coma. More emergency
workers and staff arrived with even better equipment. One of

(25:15):
the men racing to the scene was Ed Viario, a
health physicist responsible for the sl one reactor. Viario and
another man were next to climb to the reactor building,
this time wearing fully pressurized body suits and with gamma
ray detectors. When the men approached the reactor room, their
detectors hit five hundred Redkin per hour, which is enough
to kill the lesson two minutes. Now. Ordinarily, Army engineers

(25:37):
would have just bulldozed a mountain over the whole site
and called it a day. But when the man found
McKinley moaning and twisting his body as if he was
still trying to operate the reactor, the mission changed from
a recovery to a rescue. By ten thirty that night,
five men wearing radiation badges and full pressure suits attempted
to remove McKinley from the building. They each took turns
dragging him closer to freedom, but because they kept voiding

(25:58):
the warranty on every geiger count they owned, they estimated
the radiation in the room was about one thousand Renkins
per hour, which is a little like getting twenty five
dental X rays a second. For every second you spend
in the room, four hundred and fifty renkins is called
a median lethal dose. Six hundred will destroy your gastro
intestinal track and kill you dead and anywhere from two
to twelve weeks. So this was the sandbox they were

(26:19):
playing in. Anyone entering the building was allowed a maximum
of sixty five seconds exposure. By Ario took a stop
watch in a giant wrench to bang on the wall
to make sure rescuers knew when their exposure time was up.
Knowing they only had a minute, the first men ran
into the room and immediately slipped and fell. The floor
had been covered in water and iron pellets used for
thermal insulation and radiation shielding. These worked best inside the reactor,

(26:41):
but now they were unexpectedly scattered all over the ground
like props in some kind of home alone role play.
Panicky breathing fogged their face masks, and as they hurriedly
tried to load McKinley onto a stretcher and haul them
outside before someone had to come and put their bodies
on a stretcher, their respirators malfunctioned. They were forced to
remove their masks and inhale the unfiltered, contaminated air of

(27:01):
the reactor room in order to check him. By Ario
knew McKinley had already absorbed a lethal dose of radiation.
It would never survive his injuries, but rather than mercy
killing him with the timing wrench, he had a driver
wrap him and lead blankets and drive him out into
the sagebrush desert in one of those old timey ghostbuster
style ambulances till they could figure out what to do
with him. He died almost the moment he reached the ambulance,

(27:22):
and the nurse who helps guide his body into the
ambulance would join him two years later to think about
how ridiculously radioactive his body was. Using dental X rays
as a unit of measurement, a dental X ray will
give you about one hundred micro siverts of radiation, McKinley's
body was barfing out about four and a half million microceiverts,
which works out to about forty five thousand simultaneous dental

(27:43):
X rays. Rather than putting a brick on the gas
pedal and making him Canada's problem, McKinley was covered in
lead blankets and left in the ambulance. To reduce the
radioactive load, they removed his clothing and use tools to
cut off his overalls, which were soaking from the reactor
and it frozen solid in the freezing night air. Meanwhile,
back at the SAE, emergency workers still had no idea
where leg was, but knowing that everyone was probably dead,

(28:05):
they were able to work slower and more carefully, and
here was the plan to find him. A photographer would
run into the reactor room, snap as many random picks
of the space as they could in thirty seconds, and
run back out any longer than that in the radiation
would probably destroy the film in the camera. Once the
pictures were developed, they could take their time trying to
identify his secret hiding spot. And I can only imagine

(28:25):
the look on their faces when they discovered the image
of Leg splorked into the ceiling, hanging there like a
dead bug. The damage to the reactor had been severe
and they didn't know if it could go critical again,
so they wanted to keep anything from falling into it.
They were concerned that if a piece of light peeled
free and fell into it, it might cause the reactor
to China syndrome its way through the floor. To make
things more difficult, the space directly above the reactor was

(28:47):
bathed in the most intense radiation levels, so a plan
was devised. They would bring in an industrial crane to
squeege Leg from the ceiling like a fruit roll up.
I'm only kidding. What they actually did was at least
a hundred times worse. They forced open a large freight
door in the side of the silo to allow a
crane into the building, and the crane carried a five
y twenty foot stretcher, which was positioned over the reactor

(29:08):
but directly beneath the body. Two man teams in pressure suits,
again working no more than sixty five seconds at a time,
ran into the reactor room with sharp hooks on poles
to try and pull mc kinley's body free. The stretcher
was there to catch what the men clawed down. The
crane operator worked behind the lead shield, guided by radio
and probably with some kind of lead basket in his
lap to throw up in. One stoic rescuer with a

(29:31):
gift for understatement and the strongest stomach in the history
of the Armed Services, described Leg's body as not easily recognizable.
It actually took six days to scrape all of them down.
The strangest thing was that his body showed every kind
of physical trauma except for decay. Any microbes that would
normally begin decomposing a body after it dies were quite
dead themselves. He's basically been irradiated, the same way they

(29:53):
sterilized foods to kill insects and microorganisms to extend shelf life.
But in all seriousness, what should you do if you
in this situation in an actual emergency like a nuclear
power plant accident or the touchdown of a nuclear missile.
The Centers for Disease Control has strong recommendations and the
best advice get yourself inside a building and hunker down.
Any little bit of dirt and dust thrown into the

(30:15):
air becomes radioactive and then falls back from the sky,
contaminating everything it touches and can spread. In the same
way dust or mud gets tracked into your house, it
quickly and silently spreads to other people and objects. To
get into the appropriately skeeved out headspace for thinking about
radioactive contamination, think of it like you were wearing a
dusting of spiners. You want them off your body as
quick as possible. Just removing your outer layer of clothing

(30:37):
can remove up to ninety percent of radioactive spiders. You
want to bag up those rags and stay away from
them too. Again, because spiders. You're gonna want to scrub
like silkwish shower yourself, but don't use conditioner. It turns
out conditioner can bond radioactive elements. To your hair. It's
honestly not even a bad idea just to shave your
head at this point, as radioactive material settles on the

(30:59):
outside of buildings, the best thing you can do is
stay as far away from the walls and roof of
the building as you can. Now. Same scenario, you're outside
and you just saw a cloud that looks like a mushroom,
but there's no shelter around. At a minimum, cover your
mouth and nose with a mask, a cloth, a towel,
or anything you can find to scream into. The idea
is to reduce the amount of radioactive material you breathe
in or absorb through your skin. In the best case scenario,

(31:21):
you find a nice thick blanket to cover yourself with
while you find a new home, say down a sewer
or inside of a hollow tree. Because radioactivity loses potency
over time, you're going to want to stay in that
sewer tree for at least twenty four hours. Staying inside
for at least twenty four hours is a good rule
of thumb you can use to protect you and your family.
In a US government film later made about the sl

(31:42):
One accident, the narrator said that the bodies had been
successfully decontaminated and returned to their families, which wasn't entirely true.
Particles of nuclear fuel had penetrated into each of their bodies,
essentially reducing them to nuclear waste. But before that nuclear
waste could be interred, it had to be autopsied. The
autopsy process wasn't that much different or less dangerous or

(32:02):
less gross than the recovery process. A picture a line
above coroners and protective suits waiting in the line outside
a morgue while a doctor banged a wrench against the
wall every sixty five seconds using all available tools. Attached
to ten foot poles, the doctors opened the bodies and
removed the organs before using radiation detectors also on ten
foot poles to help them decide what was too radioactive

(32:23):
to keep. Huge swaths of skin and organs were put
into steel drums. McKinley lost an arm, burns lost both legs,
leg lost both arms, both legs, and his head. The
site for containing radioactive waste was twenty six kilometers or
sixteen miles away, and to brief from the accident, was
way too dangerous to move that far out over open roads,
so instead a new site was commissioned about half a

(32:44):
mile northeast of the sl one. There was no record
of ever finding the other half of McKinley's face, so
what happened? A lot of the standard's safety measures would
take for granted, were absent from the SL one design.
It was designed without a concrete containment structure and was
wrapped in simple shit sheet metal. It was only ever
intended to be used in remote isolated areas, so if
something went wrong and a bunch of seals and three

(33:06):
eyed penguins paid the price, and so be it, that's
their attitude, not mine. Obviously, the removal of the control
rod doomed everyone, but the whos and whys would dog
investigators for decades. One theory was that because the control
rods were shown to corrode and flake over time, it
made them less effective, meaning that as more material flaked
off the outsides, that meant the reactor had become more excitable.

(33:27):
The rods didn't have to be removed quite as far
to crase a surplus of nuclear reactions because the protective
material had been flaking off. But why point fingers at
equipment when you have staff? Another theory was because McKinley
was still a trainee. He may have accidentally done something
to trigger the disaster, but his body had been found
farthest from the reactor, so not likely. No, it was
definitely Burns who lifted the rod, and a million different

(33:49):
ways of accidentally lifting it were tested. My favorite theory
was whether goosing was to blame. If you don't know
what that is, it's the idea of someone stealthily sneaking
up from behind and pinching or poking Burns the butt.
The question was whether he would have jumped or straightened up,
killing everyone in the room. They actually tested this on
almost a dozen unexpecting investigators that they couldn't recreate the results.

(34:10):
The most popular and exciting theory was that Burne had
done it on purpose. The Atomic Energy Commission investigation stated
that Burne's marriage had been in trouble for some time,
and the Christmas break had only made things worse. He'd
been spending less and less time at home, and around
seven o'clock on the night of the accident, the testing
station operator A placed to call through to the control
room at the sl one. It was Burne's wife, Arlene.
They spoke briefly before he hung up and returned to work,

(34:33):
although he barely reacted to all accounts, Arlene had decided
that that evening was the perfect time to let him
know that she was looking for a divorce. The commission
also believed that it was possible leg had been sleeping
with Burne's wife. So the question becomes, what does all
this do to a state of mind? There's no way
to say. Just because he wasn't freaking out in screaming
says nothing about his mental state, because mental state is

(34:53):
never perfectly obvious. At a minimum, Burns was probably not
focusing as well as he could of that night. But
was he in a tub of ice cream and bridget
Jones's diary state of mind or a I'm going to
murder suicide my whole cruise state of mind? We'll never know.
One thing's for sure. Unless you're a circus strong man
or a professional wrestler, you don't just pull eighty four
pounds straight up by accident, just saying. Some investigators said

(35:17):
it would require an intentional or highly reckless act in
order to manually overlift a stuck rod enough to cause
the accident, sabotage or suicide by one of the operators,
or even a murder suicide may sound crazy, but investigators
learned that the idea of an operator going rogue and
blowing up a plant wasn't. When former crews were asked,
did you know the reactor would go critical if the
central control rod removed? They answered, of course. We talked

(35:39):
about it often. What we would do if we were
at a radar station and the Russians came, We'd yank
it out like a pin from a grenade, a nuclear grenade.
When Three Mile Island had popped off back in nineteen
seventy nine, people win nuts. The China Syndrome movie had
just come out, so they were really nervous, so they
grabbed their kids at a school and headed for the hills,
fearing the nuclear material would melt all the way to
the Earth's core. But in nineteen sixty one in Idaho,

(36:01):
the reaction of local residents was described as minimal and
seemed to be able to muster or any considerable alarm
that the ESSAU one posed any serious threat to their safety,
even though the removal of the radioactive waste and disposal
of the three bodies eventually exposed seven hundred and ninety
people to harmful levels of radiation. It would take two
years to finish an investigation into an accident that lasted

(36:22):
all of two seconds. No actual guilt or blame could
be found, and it would be irresponsible to lay it
on the operators in the absence of hard evidence. Without
a living witness to judge Burn's state of mind, and
most of the physical evidence deadly to the touch and
buried under tons of idaho and basalt in the sagebrush desert,
there's no way to say. All we can know for
sure is that, by all accounts, these men were dicks,

(36:44):
but that aside, they did legitimately die in service to
their country. Special and completely unprecedented burial precautions were taken
before each funeral. An extra deep grave was excavated and
a foot thick layer of the concrete was poured as
a pad. Each of the bodies had been wrapped like
a mummy, and cotton sheeting, then plastic, followed by several

(37:07):
hundred pounds of lead sheeting. They were then placed in
hermetically sealed metal caskets, welded shut and sealed for all time.
The caskets were then placed atop the concrete base and
sealed in concrete inside of a metal vault, reaching ten
feet into the ground. Above that, an additional slab of
concrete was poured, and above that three more feet of earth.
And the following note of interment quote victim of nuclear

(37:30):
accident body is contaminated with lifelong radioactive isotopes. Under no
circumstances will the body be moved from this location without
prior approval of the Atomic Energy Commission in consultation with
this headquarters. John Burns is buried in his hometown of Utica,
New York, because of his service. Richard McKinley was interred
at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. If you're looking,

(37:52):
his body is very close to the main visitor center
parking lot. Richard C. LAG's body was folded with dignity
like a flag and buried in Kingston, Michigan. The funeral
themselves were limited to eight minutes, with the grieving families
kept at least twenty feet away from the vaults, but
Legg's family wasn't having it. They demanded the casket be
removed from the vault for last rites, which was allowed

(38:13):
since the radiological exposure was basically doubled. The service was
cut in half to four minutes. If you've ever been
to a funeral that required the use of a Geyrd counter,
please let us know. It took four hundred and seventy
five people eighteen months to remove all the contaminated waste.
Testing of the air, water, soil, animal's milk, and vegetation
revealed very little contamination and life went on as normal

(38:35):
in the surrounding areas. The sl one program was scrapped,
but a lot was learned. The whole experience was a
real eye opener, but also a face melter. Since the disaster,
new reactor designs have eliminated the need for hands on
interactions of control rods, and new safety measures meant no
control rod could be physically pulled past a certain point.
Procedures and training got more intense too, and planning for

(38:56):
emergencies increased. Throughout its history, the US Nuclear Laborage tore
at Idaho Falls, currently known as the Idaho National Laboratory,
have been home to fifty two different nuclear reactors and
is the largest concentration of nuclear reactors anywhere in the world,
and of course, that meant nuclear waste continued to pile
up on the site. For decades. Today, all three of
the reactors have been decommissioned, but maybe in some future

(39:18):
episode will be covering the story of the three hundred
thousand people who rely on the Snake River aquifer for
their drinking water, which, as it turns out, happens to
sit directly beneath the sl One burial site. Well, we
hope you enjoyed our episode on the world's first peace
time nuclear accident and the only fatal nucleaccident in US history.

(39:39):
A disaster like this is almost always due to a
series of contributing factors. In this case, the error may
have been caused by the flawed technical design of the reactor,
or it may have been the act of a flawed
human being. But without the equipment and operator exposing each
other's flaws and taking advantage for the worst possible result,
none of it may have ever happened at all. So,

(40:00):
dear listeners, what's the worst thing You've ever seen? At work?
You can find us on Twitter and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast,
or fire us an email to doomsday Pod at gmail
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A five star review helps like minded history buffs discover
the show. On a more serious note, if you or

(40:21):
someone you care about is experiencing thoughts of self harm
or suicide, please understand you are not alone and there
are good people who are ready and happy to help.
They're only a Google search away, or you can call
the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at one eight hundred two
seven three talk. We need to keep every listener we can.
If you want to help support the production of the show,

(40:42):
you can find us at Patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo.
If you're after a cool episode's Pacific swag, you're welcome
to join us at Evil Reindeer shop dot com. But
if you can spare the money and had to choose,
we actually ask you to consider making a donation of
Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of
canadianvallumelunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the

(41:02):
aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first
and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to
people in life threatening situations, and to date they've helped
three point six million people across seventy five different countries.
You can learn more and donate at Globalmatic dot ca.
And on that note, our next episode may actually be
worse if you like your body counts egregious. That is,

(41:24):
on the next episode Snakes and ants and lava. Oh my,
we're visiting a disaster so unique we had to invent
a whole new term just to describe it. It's the
Saint Pierre Volcanic bioswarm of nineteen o two. We'll talk soon.