What really happened in the first nuclear accident in history?

A love affair seemed to be the trigger for one of the greatest weapons bombs in history. This happened on January 3, 1961, the story involves Jack Byrnes (22 years old), Richard McKinley (26) and Seabee Richard Legg (26), the three protagonists of a love story.

It must be borne in mind that this nuclear disaster occurred much earlier than others much better known, and this does not mean that it was less dangerous or insignificant. The most striking thing is that to this day no one knows exactly what happened in that nuclear plant located in some unknown and lonely point of the Lost River desert, in Idaho, United States.

At the moment, the official version pointed out that these three men, Byrnes, McKinley and Legg frequented undesirable places until the wee hours of the morning and during their free time.

The conflict centered between Byrnes and Legg, with McKinley being the person in the middle when the disaster struck. The two men, as explained by ‘The New York Post’, were rivals who permanently made their lives impossible, to the point that one of them (Legg) had told the other’s wife (Byrnes) that he was he had been unfaithful to a prostitute. Although it was not true, in the locality they were known to attend shows of ‘strippers’.

Then, that January afternoon, Brynes’s wife phoned her husband to ask for a divorce. In a fit, the operator lifted the core control bar, which weighed no more and no less than 38 kilos. McKinley was the only silent witness to everything that happened that winter afternoon at the reactor.

The employee’s error started a uranium fuel reaction that caused temperatures inside to reach 2,000 degrees, breaking the core water tank.

All three were killed instantly by the explosion, except for McKinley’s wife (who curiously was the only spouse who had nothing to do with the story), who was transported by ambulance. The men’s bodies contained such an index of radioactivity that some of their organs had to be buried with other remains from the nuclear plant. The rest of his body was given to his relatives in lead and concrete coffins.

However, various US nuclear safety analysts and Atomic Energy Commission researchers suspect that this was the true story, indicating that the reactor itself had design flaws. “It was all a smokescreen,” says Tami Thactcher, a former security analyst at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), to the New York newspaper. “It was never recognized that the reactor rod was stuck and that the workers tried to remove it. Until today the INL has maintained the theory that it was a human factor that triggered the explosion ”.

In reality, the entire Idaho area has a great nuclear history behind it; Not for nothing is the town closest to the plant called Atomic City, which holds the record of having been the first city illuminated by atomic energy for one hour. (I)