The Well, There's Your Problem podcast just did an episode on a nuclear reactor accident that happened in Idaho, in 1960, that I'd never heard about. See, the Army decided that they couldn't let the Navy have all the fun with nuclear reactors and decided to build their own. And just like the Soviets, they decided to cheap out on the design, with fatal consequences. Fortunately, only three people died as a result of this reactor going up. See the stuff on the left side of the image? That's what was left of one of the guys after he was literally blown into the ceiling of the facility. You remember that scene in the HBO series where they had to send guys up on the roof to push debris off it, and they could only be up there for 90 seconds? That's about the same amount of time they had to scrape dude off the ceiling. And, yes, they had to scrape him off, because if they didn't and parts of his body fell into the reactor, the thing could go "Boom!" again. Oh, and one guy survived the explosion (for a while). The first responders found him, in very rough shape, as they entered the facility in response to an alarm. They quickly realized that some shit was up, and put in a call to have experts show up. In the meantime, they attempted to carry the survivor out of the building on a stretcher. They tripped and dropped him on their way out, but they then got him into an employee's van so they could take him to a hospital. As soon as they got him into the van, an ambulance showed up, so they pulled the guy out of the van, and put him in the ambulance. The ambulance was quickly stopped by the experts who'd been called. They yanked everyone out of the ambulance (save the guy who'd survived the explosion) because dude was lethally radioactive. I want to point out that all of this is happening in the middle of winter when it is 6 degrees in Freedumb Units outside. There's a lot of fucked up shit that happened, and we're still not 100% certain exactly what caused the explosion in the reactor. One of the theories involves a practical joke that went really fucking wrong. No shit.
Oh, I forgot to mention that the reactor that blew up in Idaho was the same type used in a secret base we built in Greenland.
The toll from that accident didn't stop with the immediate victims. There were consequences down the road for a lot of people. It's truly a cautionary tale.
