America's Forgotten Atomic Town

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This videos covers two fairly different periods of history in and around Idaho Falls - there isn't necessarily a *direct* link between the two events, but I still wanted to include the entire gamut of a history that I found pretty enthralling.

Also thank you to Pea Hicks for the cocktail party archival footage in the intro.

*The visuals or audio herein may not be utilised to train a machine learning algorithm of any kind without express permission of the Copyright holder (IMPERIAL)*

JJJreact
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0:00 The First Atomic Town
1:13 Selecting the Naval Grounds
5:51 Cocktails & Cesium
8:13 Ground News Ad
9:19 Cocktails & Cesium Pt. 2
13:22 There’s Something on the Ceiling
19:13 An Enduring Mystery

[No_Feelings]

I love how you really put into perspective the sheer horror of the situation those firefighters walked into. Many people focus on the atftermath, or the reactor itself, but not the men who are the only ones who know what truly happened.

[dante]

Never thought I'd hear "ASS-KISSING" and "VERY SHIT" spoken seriously in a Imprial video.

[eugenenalpin]

Wow. I've heard the tale of SL-1 many times before, but noone else has touched upon the politics and competition that took place before the disaster. Amazing job mate!

P.S. The reason why SL-1 was designed to be controlled by only one control rod is because it was an experiment by the US military into field-deployable nuclear power source, so they were trying to make it as cheap and simple as possible, which is certainly in-character for any military

[kevting]

Speaking of Atomic Town, I highly recommend 'Plutopia' by Kate Brown. A comparative study on two atomic cities: Richland, WA and Ozerk, Russia; both the world's first cities to exclusively produced plutonium. Yet the development and housing of the inhabitant are different based on 'permanent housing' and 'temporary workers' despite sharing equal access to the comfort of consumer goods. Its a fascinating look at both Cold War adversaries approach to their vision of the ideal community while concealing the truth of its purpose.

[weirdgurl]

Fun fact Idaho falls has a garden dedicated to it's sister city, Tokai Mura in Japan, Tokai Mura is known as the nuclear capital of Japan, and the most irradiated human in history Hisashi Ouchi.

[matthewgaines]

The social issues of the operators were played up to distract from the fact that the SL-1 design and operations were substandard. They wanted to deflect blame on the operators instead of the design of the reactor. The reactor design was flawed which resulted in flawed operational methods. There, 100% of the blame resides when one uses a root cause failure analysis approach.

[epeterd]

I find the accident explanation to be far more plausible than the "I'm gonna kill us all" explanation. Just because they were assholes doesn't mean they'd be crazy enough to set off a nuclear accident.

[fantasticbrit]

As an kid living just ten miles from Idaho Falls, I'm honestly surprised I've never heard this story as much of my family works at the site. Very good work!

[nathangoshawk]

This story sounds like the screenplay of a 1950's movie (black and white of course). Parties, beautiful women, personal animosity, unstable characters and some poor bugger pinned to the ceiling! It's amazing how cavalier the attitude was to safety back then, even in the development of peaceful applications.

[Congp]

It’s a real shame you don’t get more recognition for your work on these videos. I would say your up there with Lemmino in the quality of your videos.

[Takara-nbrw]

I have grown up in Idaho Falls and still live and go to school here! A ton of people work at the site but I never really knew the history behind it. Thank you for some insight into this little city!

[PhilEdwardsInc]

ashamed to say i'd never heard of this but glad i have now! fascinating!

[spectacles-dm]

Legendary work, as always. A super intriguing mystery well-told.

[nickfromidaho]

Never would have thought imperial would drop a video about my home town 😅

[christycullen]

Crazy how cavalier people had around nuclear power back then. If you want an indepth video about the actual reactor then watch Plainly Difficult. His breakdown of it is really good

[montananerd]

Fascinating! My parents lived there in the 60s & then went to Hawthorne NV, where the AFB was doing secret pane tests. They were just trying to find a nice quiet town lol. I am fascinated by IdahoFalls, as it seems to have way more going on than is normal for a 20k town. Internet celebs, internet scammers, murder, millionaire secret santa, cultists, major MLMs, and a huge Mormon population that absolutely does not explain this particular oddness. But they certainly do have a backstory, maybe that's the root lol...

[hb-mek]

Great video, Its always great to learn about the early days of nuclear and how many things have changed since then.

Another thing that I was suprised wasnt touched on was how common untrained operators were in those days. Back when the AEC was buying up farm land they were struggling to find qualified and trained individuals that were willing to move out to south-eastern Idaho, as a result a lot of the farmers sons were offered high paying and pretty important jobs and a large portion of them were trained as reactor operators even though they never had any university training and a lot of them had little to no schooling. A large section of the workforce back then was really underqualified to be operating such devices so its suprising that this was the only disaster that happened out there and it was relatively tame.

Also theory #2 is almost certainly the most likely cause, they were withdrawing the control rod to attach it to a new automatic control system, but as stated in the video with 300 pulls only 250 of them occured without any sticking, over 50+ times the control rod stuck in the reactor when it was attempting to be withdrawn and considering this was done in the dead of winter most people are confident it was simply him yanking the control rod too hard. Ofcourse that doesnt really get the media going as much so most of the reporting was done taking the personality conflict angle rather than the more likely scenario of it being a design flaw. A design flaw like that in such a critical component nowadays would be unheard of (I hope)

[Interweblurker]

"John the control rod is stuck"
"Thats what she said"
"Thats not funny help me get it out-"
*MELTDOWN*

[JohnTaylor-xgjn]

I worked at the INL for 10 years. It's really cool to see the story get told in this format on Youtube!

[Linuxabuser]

Dude I've been to Idaho Falls, its honestly so beautiful. The canyon is awesome and stretches for miles and its all around pretty cool.