By Sven Berg
The Idaho Falls Post Register
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho — Count Egon Lamprecht among the thousands of experts still perplexed and haunted by SL-1.
Like other experts, Lamprecht has analyzed every detail of the world’s first nuclear accident, which on Jan. 3, 1961, killed three men on what’s now the site of Idaho National Laboratory.
Like them, he knows the improper removal of a control rod from the infamous Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, or SL-1, led to a flash heating of water that raised the reactor 9 feet out of its base. In four milliseconds, hundreds of gallons of water were turned into super-heated steam.
Perhaps most importantly, Lamprecht also wants to know why the control rod was removed.
But Lamprecht, a 74-year-old Idaho Falls man whose favorite hobby is collecting and restoring classic cars, is different from the rest of the experts in one important way: He was there.
The day of the SL-1 accident, Lamprecht was working as a firefighter for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, which operated a series of experimental nuclear reactors at the INL site.
That day, whose tragic end is now well-known, had a less well-known, strange beginning.
Twice that day — once in the morning and once in the afternoon — the same alarm at SL-1’s office and reactor complex malfunctioned and issued a false alarm. At 9:01 p.m., the fire station received a third alarm from the same complex. Lamprecht and five other firefighters responded, expecting yet another false alarm.
But this time, a different alarm was sounding. As the firefighters entered SL-1’s control building and approached the reactor, they noticed a blinking red light, warning them of radiation.
“That should’ve tipped us off,” Lamprecht said, adding that his crew had not been trained to deal with high-radiation situations.
As the firefighters entered the reactor building, the needles on their radiation detectors twitched upward, indicating an exposure level of 25 rems — a standard measure of radiation exposure — per hour. The men were thus exposed to almost 70 times the average annual radiation dose in only one hour.
They climbed the stairs to SL-1’s floor level, anxiously watching their radiation detectors. About halfway up the stairs, the detectors’ needles pegged at their maximum reading of 200 rems per hour, Lamprecht said.
“We kept climbing the stairs — dumb us,” Lamprecht said.
Reaching the reactor room’s floor level, the firefighters peered into SL-1’s reactor room. Two men’s bodies lay on the floor, facing away from them, dead and riddled with radioactive shrapnel. They didn’t see the third body, pinned to the ceiling some 12 feet above them by a metal plug.
Finally, good sense got the better of the firefighters. They moved out of the building.
Help soon arrived in the form of medical experts. Outside in bitter cold, the firefighters were stripped naked and scanned for radioactivity. Lamprecht said he had to scrub away a “hot spot” on his left shoulder before being cleared.
As a two-year investigation unfolded in the wake of the SL-1 accident, Lamprecht and his fellow firefighters went back to work.
Lamprecht retired from the site in 1995. One of two remaining survivors of the group of firefighters who first responded to SL-1, he’s still poring over research of the accident. He gives occasional speeches on his experience and has even appeared in a History Channel documentary on it.
In the nearly five decades that have passed since the SL-1 accident, several theories have emerged about why the reactor’s control rod was removed.
“We’ll never know for sure beyond a shadow of a doubt what happened, because, unfortunately, all three people died,” Lamprecht said.
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