The China Syndrome

[MudPuppy176]

Originally Posted by BajaGringo

I received my initial reactor training at Bettis Labs - Naval Reactors in Idaho, not far from the SL1 site. We were given a tour of the facility and as I recall, it happened during reactor maintenance, not operations. For reasons not known (or I can't remember) they pulled a rod (they were not motorized) and took the reactor super-critical.

As I recall, one of the maintenance workers was impaled by the rod itself...

One was impaled, I believe 3 died. The one impaled was launched into the ceiling by the control rod where his body was found. We saw the training video when I went through operator licensing. No one knew why he pulled the rod up, but he had to do it quickly to get the steam generation required to eject the control rod. I saw the video around 1983, kinda foggy by now....