On a bitterly cold night, the nuclear reactor blew

POCATELLO, Idaho - When Egon Lamprecht arrived at the site of the 1961 Idaho nuclear-reactor disaster that killed three people, he and his co-workers thought they were answering a false alarm.

Lamprecht, now retired at 64, served 27 years as a firefighter and 10 years training emergency respondents at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. He knows facts about the history of Idaho's nuclear lab that most have forgotten.

You'd never guess by looking at him that he was once exposed to radiation exceeding levels thought unsafe for humans. He's bright-eyed and fit, and spends his time working on the 1931 Ford Model A Tudor street rod in his garage or spinning the wheels on his 1986 Corvette.

Lamprecht was the only one of six firemen who responded to the country's only fatal nuclear reactor accident to write a personal account of that cold, memorable night. He said all the rescue team's six members are still living. The oldest is 96.

The SL-1 reactor was a small, portable device designed to supply heat and power to military field operations. Military personnel were being trained to use it the night of the accident.

Lamprecht's team had responded to alarms at the SL-1 building at 10:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. on Jan. 3, 1961. Each time, they found a blinking light inside the furnace room had triggered a false alarm.

The same alarm went off at 9 p.m. and the firefighters, somewhat grudgingly in temperatures nearly 20 below zero, returned to the furnace room expecting the faulty light again.

But upon entering, they could hear radiation alarms within the building. And the light wasn't blinking. They phoned the reactor control room, but none of the three men on reactor duty answered. So the team headed toward the reactor area.

"We were the only ones who knew there was a problem," Lamprecht recalls.

As they headed upstairs toward the control room, their hand-held radiation monitor quickly went off the scale: from 25 to past 200 rem per hour in only a few steps.

They went back out to their trucks to get another monitor, assuming theirs was malfunctioning. But the second monitor also failed to register the high levels of radiation, up to 600 rem per hour. The modern limits for rescuer exposure are 25 rem to save property and 100 rem to save lives.

"You would never in this day even think about going in there," Lamprecht said. "You would have backed out of there and never come back."

But the team entered the reactor area and became the first to see what would go down as the most frightening, and in some ways the most mysterious, event in the site's annals.

Two men lay dead on the floor. The rescuers didn't at first see the third victim, pinned to the ceiling by a reactor control rod that caused the blast. They dragged the first man outside. To this day, nobody knows whether he had survived the explosion itself.

There was no question, Lamprecht said, that the other two were dead on arrival. His team got the two men on the floor out to rescue vehicles, and had to leave the impaled victim for a crane-and-cherry-picker recovery later.

Then they hit the showers, where Lamprecht recalls scrubbing off a spot of radioactive contamination until his skin bled.

Otherwise, the rescuers appeared fine. However, paranoia immediately after the accident prevailed in the area, he said.

"I lived in Blackfoot then. My barber would not cut my hair."

Investigations following the explosion failed to conclude what happened that night, except that a control rod got pulled out too far and caused an instantaneous steam explosion.

Workers had earlier reported the reactor control rod was sticking. But to complicate matters, two of the three men who died that night were in love with the same woman.

"Yes, there was a love triangle," Lamprecht said. "My final statement to that is dead men never talk. We will never know."

Lamprecht said the accident, though tragic, proved invaluable as a learning experience.

"We learned so much about what radioactivity does to the human body," he said, adding that some improvements resulted from the accident.