W1A was Navy shorthand for the Worthington Aircraft Carrier Design 1 Nuclear Reactor at the Energetics Department in the middle of the Idaho sage desert near Falling River, Idaho. I worked there for two years as an OJT instructor after completing my six-month training program. I was an ELT, short for Engineering Laboratory Technician. I sampled the primary (reactor) and secondary (steam generating) water systems and also monitored radiation levels.
One evening on swing shift the machinist mates were working on some valves at the charging station, the place additional water could be pumped into the high-pressure reactor system. George Tannerman, another ELT who was senior to me, was working with the machinist mates and I was back a few feet, observing. Suddenly, one of the valves let loose a spray of water. The next ting I knew I was holding a plastic bag over the valve and the water was filling the bag as the MMs shut other valves to cut off the flow.
Later, once things calmed down, my boss, the Leading ELT, Larry Thompson, said he was going to nominate me for the Olympic Spill Diving Team.
“Why? What do you mean?” I asked.
“You ran right up over Tannerman’s back to bag that valve” he said. But I had no memory of it. One minute I saw the water spraying and it seemed a second later I was holding a bag over the valve. Was it an “adrenalin blackout?” I don’t know.
A few hours later the spill was pretty much cleaned up, but the area was still roped off as a radioactive contamination area, even though we had done some wipe testing and had found no contamination. I pointed out that a spill requiring more than one shift to clean up required an incident report to Naval Reactor Group. That got a few people slapping their foreheads and the higher ups decided to drop the ropes and return things to normal. Sometimes people need a little prodding to make a decision.
Shocked in the Suburbs 