Chalk River NRX, Minute by Minute

Описание: December 12, 1952. Chalk River Laboratories, Ontario. At 15:07, a routine coolant-flow test at low power turned into a 62-second runaway that peaked at 80 MW—nearly triple the reactor's rated output. Within minutes, radiation alarms sounded across the site. By evening, the NRX building was flooded with a million gallons of contaminated water containing 10,000 curies of fission products.
This is the documented story of the world's first severe reactor accident: how a miscommunication over a phone, a design flaw in rod indicators, and temporary cooling lines combined to create a power excursion that doubled every two seconds. How engineers built the first large-scale reactor dismantling operation, including a young Lt. Jimmy Carter supervising header removal in strong radiation fields. And how strict dose management during cleanup resulted in no detectable long-term health effects among hundreds of workers—a finding that shaped occupational safety standards for decades.
Based entirely on archival reports, AECL documents, and epidemiological studies, this documentary reconstructs the accident minute by minute, from the basement valve error at 15:07 to the hydrogen explosion at 15:11, through the 14-month cleanup and rebuild.
NRX returned to operation in 1954 and ran for another 41 years, its lessons hardwired into every reactor safety system built since. As W.B. Lewis noted: despite 900 shutdown devices, actual safety depended on "the reliability of a few valves, a few pushbuttons—and the people who used them."
Sources: AECL-232 (1953), Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission archives, epidemiological follow-up studies (1982), progress reports from cleanup operations.
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