BONUS | The Doomsday Fifth Anniversary Meltdown of 2025

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 with lead, sealed under several feet of concrete, and placed in a metal vault, just to prevent it from killing you. Hello, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 dot com. Older episodes will eventually be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends, and tell your friends. A five star review helps like minded history buffs discover the show. On a more serious note, if you or 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, 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 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, 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.