For years, beginning in the early 1950s, Taylor designed nuclear bombs for the Pentagon until he began to doubt the motives of the Defense Department. He left government service, at least officially, and joined General Atomics in San Diego, the nuclear division of defense contractor General Electric. There, he began designing nuclear-powered spaceships. But to build a spaceship that could get to Mars required federal funding, and in 1958 General Atomics presented the idea to President Eisenhower’s new science and technology research group, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. The agency had been created as a result of the Sputnik crisis, its purpose being to never let the Russians one-up American scientists again. Today, the agency is known as DARPA. The D stands for defense.
At the time, developing cutting-edge space-flight technology meant hiring scientists like Wernher Von Braun to design chemical-based rockets that could conceivably get man to the moon in a capsule the size of a car. Along came Ted Taylor with a proposal to build a Marsbound spaceship the size of an office building, thanks to nuclear energy. For ARPA chief Roy Johnson, Ted Taylor’s conception was love at first sight. “Everyone seems to be making plans to pile fuel on fuel on fuel to put a pea into orbit, but you seem to mean business,” the ARPA chief told Taylor in 1958.
General Atomics was given a one-million-dollar advance, a classified project with a code name of Orion, and a maximum-security test facility in Area 25 of the Nevada Test Site at Jackass Flats. The reason Taylor’s spaceship needed an ultrasecret hiding place and could not be launched from Cape Canaveral, as other rockets and spaceships in the works could be, was that the Orion spacecraft would be powered by two thousand “small-sized” nuclear bombs. Taylor’s original idea was to dispense these bombs from the rear of the spaceship, the same as a Coke machine dispenses sodas. The bombs would fall out behind the spaceship, literally exploding and pushing the spaceship along. The Coca-Cola Company was even hired to do a classified early design.
At Area 25, far away from public view, Taylor’s giant spaceship would launch from eight 250-foot-tall towers. Blastoff would mean Orion would rise out of a column of nuclear energy released by exploding atomic bombs. “It would have been the most sensational thing anyone ever saw,” Taylor told his biographer John McPhee. But when the Air Force took over the project, they had an entirely different vision in mind. ARPA and the Air Force reconfigured Orion into a space-based battleship. From high above Earth, a USS Orion could be used to launch attacks against enemy targets using nuclear missiles. Thanks to Orion’s nuclear-propulsion technology, the spaceship could make extremely fast defensive maneuvers, avoiding any Russian nuclear missiles that might come its way. It would be able to withstand the blast from a one-megaton bomb from only five hundred feet away.
For a period of time in the early 1960s the Air Force believed Orion was going to be invincible. “Whoever builds Orion will control the Earth!” declared General Thomas S. Power of the Strategic Air Command. But no one built Orion. After atmospheric nuclear tests were banned in 1963, the project was indefinitely suspended. Still wanting to get men to Mars, NASA and the Air Force turned their attention to nuclear-powered rockets. From now on, there would be no nuclear explosions in the atmosphere at Jackass Flats — at least not officially. Instead, the nuclear energy required for the Mars spaceship would be contained in a flying reactor, with fuel rods producing nuclear energy behind barriers that were lightweight enough for space travel but not so thin as to cook the astronauts inside. The project was now called NERVA, which stood for Nuclear Engine Rocket Vehicle Application. The facility had a public name, even though no one from the public could go there. It was called the Nuclear Rocket Test Facility at Jackass Flats. A joint NASA/Atomic Energy Commission office was created to manage the program, called the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, or SNPO.
For T. D. Barnes, working on the NERVA nuclear reactor was a bit of a stretch — his area of expertise was missile and radar technologies. But when things got slow over at Area 51 in the late 1960s, Barnes, a member of EG&G Special Projects team, would be dispatched over to Area 25 to work on the NERVA program. Even though NERVA had been sold to Congress as a public program, all its data was classified, as were the day-to-day goings-on in Area 25. Barnes’s workstation could not have been more hidden from the public. It was underground, built into the side of a mountain that rose up from the flat desert landscape. Each morning Barnes and his fellow Q-cleared coworkers who lived in and around Las Vegas parked in employee parking lots down at the entrance to the Nevada Test Site, at Camp Mercury, and were then shuttled out to Jackass Flats in Atomic Energy Commission motor pool vans. “Some of the people working on NERVA lived in Beatty and Amargosa Valley and drove to the tunnel themselves,” Barnes adds.
All NERVA employees entered work through a small portal in the side of the mountain, “shaped like the entrance to an old mining shaft, but spiffed up a bit,” Barnes recalls, remembering “large steel doors and huge air pipes curving down from the mesas and entering the tunnel.” Inside, the concrete tunnel was long and straight and ran into the earth “as far as the eye could see.” Atomic Energy Commission records indicate the underground tunnel was 1,150 feet long. Barnes remembered it being brightly lit and sparkling clean. “There were exposed air duct pipes running the length of the tunnel as well as several layers of metal cable trays, which were used to transport heavy items into and out of the tunnel,” he says. “The ceiling was about eight feet tall, and men walked through it no more than two abreast.” There was also a tarantula problem at Jackass Flats, which meant every now and then, Barnes and his colleagues would spot a large hairy spider running down the tunnel floors or scampering along its walls.
Deep in the tunnel Barnes would come up against a last set of closed doors. When they opened, they revealed a succession of brightly lit rooms filled with desks. Barnes explains, “Moving closer to ground zero where the tunnel ended, we entered a large subterranean room stacked floor to ceiling with rows of electronic amplifiers, discriminator circuits, and multiplexing components and banks of hightech equipment lining the walls.” Standing in front of the row of electronics was an engineer “usually with a cart full of electronic test equipment calibrating and repairing electronic circuits,” Barnes explains. These workers were all preparing for what was actually going on aboveground, and that was full-power, full-scale nuclear reactor engine tests. In order for NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission to be able to verify that NERVA could actually propel a spaceship filled with astronauts the 34 million to 249 million miles to Mars (the distance depends on the positions of the two planets in their orbits), those federal agencies had to witness NERVA running full power for long periods of time here on Earth first. To test that kind of thrust without having the engine launch itself into space, it was caged inside a test stand and positioned upside down.
For each engine test, a remote-controlled locomotive would bring the nuclear reactor over to the test stand from where it was housed three miles away in its own cement-block-and-lead-lined bunker, called E-MAD. “We used to joke that the locomotive at Jackass Flats was the slowest in the world,” Barnes explains. “The only thing keeping the reactor from melting down as it traveled down the railroad back and forth between E-MAD and the test stand was the liquid hydrogen [LH2] bath it sat in.” The train never moved at speeds more than five miles per hour. “One spark and the whole thing could blow,” Barnes explains. At −320 degrees Fahrenheit, liquid hydrogen is one of the most combustible and dangerous explosives in the world. James A. Dewar, author of To the End of the Solar System: The Story of the Nuclear Rocket, gets even more specific. “One hundredth of what one might receive from shuffling along a rug and then touching a wall can ignite hydrogen,” Dewar wrote in 2004. To help visualize what the facilities aboveground at Jackass Flats looked like, Barnes likens them to Cape Kennedy. “Imagine a one-hundred-twenty-foot-tall aluminum tower rising up from a plateau of cement surrounded by a deep, concrete aqueduct. Add some huge, spherical thermos-like
dewars sitting around, each containing something like two hundred and sixty thousand gallons of liquid hydrogen, and you can visualize the spacelaunch appearance of things,” Barnes explains. In Atomic Energy photographs from the 1960s, a single set of train tracks can be seen running along the bottom of the cement aqueduct and disappearing into an opening underneath the tall metal tower. “The railroad car carried the nuclear reactor up to the test stand and lifted it into place using remotely controlled hydraulic hands,” Barnes explains. “Meanwhile, we were all underground looking at the reactor through special leaded-glass windows, taking measurements and recording data as the engine ran.” The reason the facility was buried inside the mountain was not only to hide it from the Soviet satellites spying on the U.S. nuclear rocket program from overhead, but to shield Barnes and his fellow workers from radiation poisoning from the NERVA reactor. “Six feet of earth shields a man from radiation poisoning pretty good,” says Barnes.
When running at full power, the nuclear engine operated at a temperature of 2,300 Kelvin, or 3,680.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which meant it also had to be kept cooled down by the liquid hydrogen on a permanent basis. “While the engine was running the canyon was like an inferno as the hot hydrogen simultaneously ignited upon contact with the air,” says Barnes. These nuclear rocket engine tests remained secret until the early 1990s, when a reporter named Lee Davidson, the Washington bureau chief for Utah’s Deseret News, provided the public with the first descriptive details. “The Pentagon released information after I filed a Freedom of Information Act,” Davidson says. In turn, Davidson provided the public with previously unknown facts: “bolted down, the engine roared… sending skyward a plume of invisible hydrogen exhaust that had just been thrust through a superheated uranium fission reactor,” Davidson revealed. Researching the story, he also learned that back in the 1960s, after locals in Caliente, Nevada, complained that iodine 131—a major radioactive hazard found in nuclear fission products — had been discovered in their town’s water supply, Atomic Energy officials denied any nuclear testing had been going on at the time. Instead, officials blamed the Chinese, stating, “Fresh fission products probably came from an open-air nuclear bomb test in China.” In fact, a NERVA engine test had gone on at Area 25 just three days before the town conducted its water supply test.
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.”
The record suggests otherwise. In studying Area 25 to determine how former Atomic Energy Commission workers and contractors with cancer may have been exposed to potentially lethal doses of radiation there, investigators for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health determined that “two nuclear reactors” were in fact destroyed there. “Due to the destruction of two nuclear reactors and transport of radioactive material, the area was extensively contaminated with enriched uranium, niobium, cobalt, and cesium,” the authors of the report concluded in 2008.
The full data relating to the last tests conducted on the NERVA nuclear rocket remain classified as Restricted Data and the Department of Energy has repeatedly declined to release
the documents. Atomic Energy Commission records are “well organized and complete but unfortunately, most are classified or kept in secure areas that limit public access,” Dewar wrote. As for the records from the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, Dewar said that “many SNPO veterans believe its records were destroyed after the office was abolished in 1973” and that “in particular, the chronology file of Harold Finger, Milton Klein and David Gabriel, SNPO’s directors, would [be] invaluable” in determining the complete story on NERVA. When reached for comment, Harold Finger clarified that he left the program as director in 1968. “I have no knowledge of any meltdown,” Finger said, suggesting that his former deputy Milton Klein might know more. “I left the program as director in 1971,” Klein said, “and do not have any information about what happened to NERVA in the end.”
In January of 2002, as part of the Nevada Environmental Restoration Project, the National Nuclear Security Administration conducted a study regarding proposed cleanup of the contaminated land at Area 25. The report revealed that the following radioactive elements were still present at that time: “cobalt-60 (Co-60); strontium90 (Sr-90); yttrium-90 (Y-90); niobium-94 (Nb-94); cesium-137 (Cs137); barium-137m (Ba-137m); europium-152, -154, and -155 (Eu152, Eu-154, and Eu-155); uranium-234, -235, -238 (U-234, U-235, U238); plutonium-239/240 (Pu-239/240); and americium-241 (Am241),” and that these radioactive contaminants “may have percolated into underlying soil.”
Twenty-eight years after NERVA’s questionable end at Jackass Flats, shortly after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the radiated land at Area 25 started to serve a new purpose when the Department of Homeland Security and the military began training exercises there— including how to deal with cleaning up after a terrorist attack involving a nuclear weapon. T. D. Barnes served as a consultant on several of these endeavors.
NNSA spokesman Darwin Morgan discussed the WMD training that goes on at the test site in a government film that plays at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas. “It’s a PhD experience for first responders,” Morgan said of the test site, “because the site offers real radiation they can’t get anywhere else.” Still, the National Nuclear Security Administration declined to elaborate on how, exactly, this “real radiation” that contaminated Area 25 occurred.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Page 34