When Science Goes Wrong (26 page)

Calling something ‘highly speculative’ is, of course, an invitation to speculation, and there has been plenty of that in the years since the SL-1 accident. For the most part, it has revolved around an unproven theory that Jack Byrnes perpetrated the explosion as a murder/suicide – his motive being to bring to an end a desperate love-triangle involving himself, his wife and his fellow crew member, Dick Legg.

Even while the original inquiry was going on, and radiation specialists were analysing the remains of the reactor, investigators were also checking into the backgrounds and family circumstances of the three dead men. None of their findings made it into the report, but they soon became the subject of gossip around the Testing Station. In July 1962, Leo Miazga, an investigator for the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), filed a supplemental report describing what he had learned about the crew members and their families. Miazga’s report was never made public, but recently a copy was obtained by Colorado-based journalist William McKeown, who wrote a book about the SL-1 accident.

According to McKeown, Miazga’s report documented the breakdown of Jack and Arlene Byrnes’s marriage. Jack had been spending less and less time at home, and on the evening of the accident he had taken his personal items with him in his car as if he was moving out. When Arlene called Jack at work later that evening, it was to discuss ending their marriage. Thus Jack Byrnes may have been in a distracted mood – or worse – during the later part of the work shift.

Miazga did not find evidence to link Dick Legg to Arlene. Still, it was clear that Byrnes and Legg did not get along. In fact, they had engaged in a drunken fistfight during a bachelor party in May 1960, eight months before the accident.

The first that the wider public heard about a possible love triangle as the cause of the accident was in 1979, when a Vermont newspaper, the
Brattleboro Reformer
, ran a story about an AEC memo on the topic of nuclear safety. The memo had been written in 1971 by Stephen Hanauer, then an AEC staff member. Hanauer had cited the love-triangle story to illustrate the notion that nuclear-reactor accidents could be caused by internal sabotage. Hanauer’s memo was leaked to the
Reformer
by Robert Pollard, a nuclear regulator who became an antinuclear campaigner. The
Reformer
’s story was picked up by the national press, and two years later a television documentary about the accident mentioned the love-triangle theory. McKeown’s book gives it a great deal of play without drawing any firm conclusions. When I spoke with Stephen Hanauer, now retired, in 2005, he portrayed the love triangle as a mere piece of gossip that he had picked up, not something that was backed by any kind of solid evidence.

There always will be the temptation to attribute accidents to the foibles of individuals – especially deceased individuals – because doing so may be seen as relieving planners, designers and administrators from responsibility. A case somewhat similar to the SL-1 accident occurred in 1989, when an explosion destroyed a gun turret on the US battleship
Iowa
during training exercises, killing 47 sailors. The Navy initially called the explosion a suicidal act by one of the gunners, Clayton Hartwig, who was said to have been depressed because a sexual relationship with another sailor had gone sour. Later, the evidence for this explanation fell apart, and the Navy apologised to Hartwig’s family. The explosion was probably caused by accidental over-ramming of the gun’s propellant charges, perhaps combined with faulty packing of the charges.

Whatever the reason why Jack Byrnes raised SL-1’s central control rod so far, it was quickly recognised that allowing the movement of a single control rod to trigger an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction was a serious design flaw. This flaw came about primarily on account of the small size of the SL-1 reactor, which used a total of only five control rods. Every subsequent reactor design has required the lifting of several control rods to cause a runaway reaction. Still, even with such reactors it is possible to trigger nuclear excursions by inappropriate lifting of multiple rods. In fact, an accident of that kind happened in Canada nine years before the SL-1 accident. During a crisis triggered by other events, an operator at the Chalk River reactor in Ontario erroneously pressed a button that raised several banks of control rods. As a result, a nuclear excursion began that blew the four-ton lid of the reactor vessel into the roof of the building. The accident contaminated the entire plant, but no one was killed.

The worst reactor accident in the United States, the partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979, was caused by loss of coolant to the core, not by problems with the control rods. There was only an insignificant release of radioactivity to the environment, and no one was killed or injured. The world’s worst nuclear power plant accident – and the only accident at a commercial plant that has ever resulted in radiation-induced deaths – was the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl-4 reactor in Ukraine. This was caused by operator errors during a test of the reactor’s response to a loss of electrical power supply, combined with design deficiencies. More than 50 people – mostly emergency workers – died of radiation injuries in the aftermath of the accident. Some experts believe that larger numbers of people in the general population are dying or will die from radiation-induced illnesses.

The SL-1 accident may have had other victims. Hazel Leisen, the nurse who tended to Richard McKinley while he was in the ambulance, died of cancer a few years after the accident. Ed Vallario, the health physicist who led the rescue attempt, and two of his helpers, also died of cancer, although Vallario didn’t fall ill until more than 30 years after the accident. The statistics of small numbers don’t permit any firm conclusion as to whether or not the four cancer deaths resulted from the radiation exposure these individuals received in 1961.

MICROBIOLOGY: Gone With The Wind

ON APRIL 4, 1979, Anna Komina began to feel unwell. Her symptoms were not very specific: a feeling of faintness and dizziness, combined with a shortness of breath. After a day or so, she felt better, but on April 8 she collapsed. A doctor was called. He found that her blood pressure was dangerously low, and he summoned an ambulance. The emergency medical technicians struggled for several hours to raise her blood pressure to the point that she could be safely transported to the hospital. Two days later, she died.

Komina, who was 54 years old at the time of her death, was a resident of the city of Sverdlovsk, 850 miles east of Moscow, on the far side of the Ural Mountains. (The city is now known by its pre-revolutionary name of Ekaterinburg.) She lived in a modest cottage in an industrial southern district of the city known as Chkalovskiy, along with her husband, son, daughter-in-law, grandson and two pigs. She worked at a nearby ceramics factory, where her job was to check the temperature and pH of the water supply.

After Komina died, her body was autopsied. Her death was officially attributed to bacterial pneumonia. Then the body was doused in chlorinated lime, placed in a steel coffin, loaded onto a truck, taken to a special section of a local cemetery and buried – all at state expense. Komina’s husband was not invited, or even informed of the burial. He found out anyway and went to the cemetery, but the police would not let him in. Not long afterward, he died of grief.

Komina was not the only citizen of Sverdlovsk to die unexpectedly during the spring of 1979. During the six-week period starting on April 6, at least 76 other women and men came down with symptoms similar to hers. Massive doses of antibiotics and other medicines saved 11 of them, but at least 66 six persons died – some so quickly that they did not make it to the hospital alive. What killed them was anthrax.

The first that anyone in the West heard about the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak was in October of 1979, when a Russian-language newspaper catering to the émigré community in Germany ran a brief story alleging that thousands of Russians had died of the disease. In the same month, the US Central Intelligence Agency received descriptions of the outbreak from recent Russian émigrés. The mention of Sverdlovsk as the site of the outbreak raised a red flag, because the CIA suspected that a Soviet bacteriological institute in that city was engaged in germ-warfare research. The institute was housed in a high security area known as Compound 19 in the northern part of Chkalovskiy district. Nevertheless, the CIA analysts initially discounted the idea that the release of a disease agent from that facility might have caused the outbreak. ‘The probability is low that the Soviets were working with a quantity of highly lethal pathogens sufficient to cause 40 or more deaths without possessing either an effective vaccine or antidote,’ the analysts wrote in a top secret report.

The Sverdlovsk outbreak gained much wider publicity early the following year, when Germany’s mass-market tabloid, the
Bild Zeitung
, ran two reports about it.
Bild
never missed an opportunity to attack the Soviets, and it milked this story for all it was worth. The outbreak was caused by the explosion of anthrax-containing munitions at a germ-warfare institute, the newspaper announced, with subsequent release of the deadly bacterium into the atmosphere. Hundreds of people were affected: within seconds of inhaling the organisms they developed breathing difficulties, and death followed in a few hours. The CIA,
Bild
reported, had confirmed that a germ warfare institute was the source of the anthrax release.

Bild
is not known for scrupulous fact-checking, and many details of its account were clearly wrong. Nevertheless, it was true that, by early 1980, the CIA had become more suspicious that the anthrax outbreak originated in Compound 19. For one thing, the agency learned that Soviet Defence Minister Dmitri Ustinov had made a visit to Sverdlovsk at the time of the outbreak, suggesting some involvement of the military. Also, when CIA analysts went back and scrutinised photographs of Sverdlovsk taken by spy satellites at the time of the outbreak, they noticed some odd things, such as roadblocks and what looked like decontamination trucks. Further, roads that had previously been dirt had suddenly acquired freshly tarred surfaces. These might all be signs of an organised response to an epidemic caused by airborne pathogens.

In March of 1980, the US State Department made their suspicions public in a statement which, though couched in terms of ‘indications’ rather than factual allegations, amounted to a serious indictment of the Soviet Union, because that nation, along with the United States and most other countries, had signed a Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. This convention, which had gone into force in 1975, banned the development and production of bacteriological weapons. The treaty didn’t prohibit the Russians from doing research into
defences
against biological agents, such as vaccines, but the airborne release of enough anthrax to kill people over a wide area suggested that the bacteria were being produced in quantities far beyond what was necessary for vaccine development.

As might be expected, the Soviet response was one of indignation and injured innocence. Yes, there was an outbreak of anthrax, they said, but it was an entirely natural one. It had started among farm animals, and had spread to humans when meat from the slaughtered animals had been sold on the black market and eaten.

The anthrax organism,
Bacillus anthracis
, is present in many soils in the form of inert spores. It’s not unusual for grazing animals to become infected by ingestion of these spores – outbreaks or sporadic cases of gastrointestinal anthrax occur among farm animals in Russia from time to time. And humans can indeed develop gastrointestinal anthrax from eating infected meat. They can also develop skin lesions (cutaneous anthrax) from handling infected animal products such as hides.

Still, a couple of facts made the Soviet explanation a bit difficult to accept. For one thing, farm animals would not yet have been put out to pasture at the beginning of April – Sverdlovsk is in Siberia, after all – so their opportunities to acquire an infection were limited. Also, some of the symptoms reported among the human victims, such as shortness of breath, were more suggestive of inhalation anthrax – a rarer and more dangerous form of the disease in which the anthrax organisms enter the body through the thousands of tiny air sacs in the lungs.

Eventually, the CIA analysts settled on a kind of compromise hypothesis. The large cluster of human cases in early April must indeed have been caused by an airborne release of anthrax spores, they concluded, but the ‘tail’ of cases that occurred over the following six weeks probably had some other explanation. That was because, according to most medical authorities, the incubation period for anthrax is very short, so if a person doesn’t fall ill within two or three days of exposure, he or she will never do so. Perhaps these late cases were indeed gastrointestinal anthrax, caused by consumption of meat from animals that had themselves inhaled anthrax during the initial exposure event.

Lacking sufficient expertise in the field, the CIA consulted with a number of American scientists about the Sverdlovsk episode, including the Harvard molecular biologist Matthew Meselson. Meselson was one of the scientists who made notable contributions during the golden age of molecular biology in the 1950s and 1960s. He is most famous for a set of experiments, conducted with Frank Stahl, which proved that the double helix of DNA copied itself in the fashion predicted by Francis Crick and Jim Watson – by separating its two strands, each of which then provided the template for a new partner. He is the kind of scientist whom everyone assumes has won a Nobel Prize, but actually he hasn’t – not yet, at least. Now in his late 70s, he still runs an active research programme which is now focused on understanding why evolution favours sexual over non-sexual reproduction.