Vintage wagons in scrapyards

Are those of you snagging your wagon, Jack?

 

No. It’s a story I ran across in my research. This was an Idaho AEC car I think. They found a mechanics invoice from norther Idaho in the car billed to the govt. dated in the 70’s.

 

Oooh, I have a sad story about Arco. My dad was a Seabee and Civil Engineers Corps Officer, and you don't have a 25-year military career without knowing others in the same part of the military. OK, so the military (primarily the Army) was working on a small nuclear reactor design at Arco, and when this happened, there were three on duty--two Army soldiers and a Sailor, actually a Seabee. And the incident was an explosion of the reactor, due to a cadmium rod getting pulled out too fast, causing a runaway reaction. When that happened, the Seabee was the one trying to remove one of the rods manually, and when it let go and popped up, the resulting steam buildup from the runaway reaction blew off the top of the reactor, and speared the Seabee to the containment room ceiling with the cadmium rod. My dad knew that Seabee personally.

 

The SL-1 incident. If you watch the govt. videos from 62 you will see some of the gray/white 58 deliveries in the evacuation and clean up. The Atomic research and development was heavy in those days all thru Idaho, Nevada and Utah where mine came from.

thanks for that info, I’m still trying to find someone linked to the salt lake area ones.

 

SL-1, thank you. I was trying to remember that. I read about the incident in junior high, and when my dad saw me reading the book, that was when he told me the story.

 

One of the things I read that horrified me (I read the book after I'd learned about ionizing radiation in Science class) was that the Plutonium pellets that made up the rods, were just strewn all over the reactor room floor, and the rescue crews had to shovel the pellets up into buckets, run them outside to containers. I'm wondering if the photo in the upper left of the center group were the receptacles for the pellets?

 

Link to the short version of SL-1

 

I didn't see this video, but I did watch this one:

 

A Ford Cortina:

 

Wonder if that poor wagon was ever driven like this Cortina.