Had the public known about the NERVA tests when they were going on, the tests would have been perceived as a nuclear catastrophe in the making. Which is exactly what did happen. “Los Alamos wanted a run-away reactor,” wrote Dewar, who in addition to being an author is a longtime Atomic Energy Commission employee, “a power surge until [the reactor] exploded.” Dewar explained why. “If Los Alamos had data on the most devastating accident possible, it could calculate other accident scenarios with confidence and take preventative measures accordingly.” And so, on January 12, 1965, the nuclear rocket engine code-named Kiwi was allowed to overheat. High-speed cameras recorded the event. The temperature rose to “over 4000°C until it burst, sending fuel hurtling skyward and glowing every color of the rainbow,” Dewar wrote. Deadly radioactive fuel chunks as large as 148 pounds shot up into the sky. One ninety-eight-pound piece of radioactive fuel landed more than a quarter of a mile away.
Once the explosion subsided, a radioactive cloud rose up from the desert floor and “stabilized at 2,600 feet” where it was met by an EG&G aircraft “equipped with samplers mounted on its wings.” The cloud hung in the sky and began to drift east then west. “It blew over Los Angeles and out to sea,” Dewar explained. The full data on the EG&G radiation measurements remains classified.
The test, made public as a “safety test,” caused an international incident. The Soviet Union said it violated the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which of course it did. But the Atomic Energy Commission had what it wanted, “accurate data from which to base calculations,” Dewar explained, adding that “the test ended many concerns about a catastrophic incident.” In particular, the Atomic Energy Commission and NASA both now knew that “in the event of such a launch pad accident [the explosion] proved death would come quickly to anyone standing 100 feet from ground zero, serious sickness and possible death at 400 feet, and an unhealthy dose at 1000 feet.”
Because it is difficult to believe that the agencies involved did not already know this, the question remains: What data was Atomic Energy Commission really after? The man in charge of the project during this time, Space Nuclear Propulsion Office director Harold B. Finger, was reached for comment in 2010. “I don’t recall that exact test,” Finger says. “It was a long time ago.”
Five months later, in June of 1965, disaster struck, this time officially unplanned. That is when another incarnation of the nuclear rocket engine, code-named Phoebus, had been running at full power for ten minutes when “suddenly it ran out of LH2 [liquid hydrogen and] overheated in the blink of an eye,” wrote Dewar. As with the planned “explosion” five months earlier, the nuclear rocket reactor first ejected large chunks of its radioactive fuel out into the open air. Then “the remainder fused together, as if hit by a giant welder,” Dewar explained. Laymen would call this a meltdown. The cause of the accident was a faulty gauge on one of the liquid hydrogen tanks. One gauge read a quarter full when in reality there was nothing left inside the tank.
So radiated was the land at Jackass Flats after the Phoebus accident, even HAZMAT cleanup crews in full protective gear could not enter the area for six weeks. No information is available on how the underground employees got out. Originally, Los Alamos tried to send robots into Jackass Flats to conduct the decontamination, but according to Dewar the robots were “slow and inefficient.” Eventually humans were sent in, driving truck-mounted vacuum cleaners to suck up deadly contaminants. Declassified Atomic Energy Commission photographs show workers in protective gear and gas masks picking up radioactive chunks with long metal tongs. Like many Atomic Energy Commission officials, Dewar saw the accident as “achieving some objectives.” That “while certainly unfortunate, unplanned, unwanted and unforeseen,” he believed that “calling the accident ‘catastrophic’ mocks the meaning of the word.” The cleanup process took four hundred people two months to complete.
So what happened to NERVA in the end? When Barnes worked on NERVA in 1968, the project was well advanced. But space travel was on the wane. By 1970, the public’s infatuation with getting a man to Mars had made an abrupt about-face. Funding dried up, and NASA projects began shutting down. “We did develop the rocket,” Barnes says. “We do have the technology to send man to Mars this way. But environmentally, we could never use a nuclear-powered rocket on Earth in case it blew up on takeoff. So the NERVA was put to bed.” That depends how one defines put to bed. President Nixon canceled the program, and it officially ended on January 5, 1973. Several employees who worked at the NERVA facility at Jackass Flats say the nuclear rocket program came to a dramatic, cataclysmic end, one that has never before been made public. “We know the government likes to test accidents in advance,” Barnes says. Darwin Morgan, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada Site Office, says no such final test ever happened. “Something like that would have been too huge of an event to have happened to ‘cover up,’” Morgan says. “I’ve talked to people in our classified repository. They don’t have anything.”