Blue Flash at DP Site

In the closely guarded technical area of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory is a building on the mysteriously named DP Site. In one of its rooms Technician Cecil W. Kelley, 38, was working alone last week, adding a solvent to a 225-gal. tank. It was a routine part of a process to recover plutonium from waste materials. During his ten years at Los Alamos he had done the same chore about 75 times. This time was different. When he turned on the stirring apparatus, a bright blue flash bloomed out of the tank.

Roderick Day, a technician working in the next room, saw the flash, felt a slight shock, heard a slight noise, then a louder, rumbling one. He dashed into the tank room, saw that Kelley had run outdoors and collapsed a few feet from the door. "I'm burning up!" cried Kelley. Day carried him to a shower room, pulling some master switches on the way, and showered him with water. Then an ambulance took him to the hospital.

Nothing could be done for Technician Kelley. He had received between 6,000 and 18,000 rem (roentgen equivalent man) of radiation, at least ten times the dose that is generally considered deadly. Nine hours after the accident, Kelley became coherent enough to explain that he mistook the blue flash for a short circuit in the stirrer switch. A day later he died. Dr. Thomas Shipman, head of the laboratory's health division, said that the radiation had done fatal damage to his central nervous system.

The original cause of the accident is still unknown. Presumably, enough plutonium somehow got into the tank to support a fission chain reaction. The resulting burst of radiation ionized the air and caused the blue flash. The reacting liquid probably boiled, separating the plutonium and stopping the reaction in a few seconds. That was too late for Kelley.

It was the third fatal radiation accident at Los Alamos, and the only one since 1946. Considering the laboratory's job (designing and making nuclear explosives), Dr. Shipman considers the record "fabulously good." People should get over the exaggerated fear of radiation, he insists. "We're going to have to live with it a long time--more and more as time goes on. It should not be invested with such an aura of mystery. You're just as dead if you get hit by a taxi."

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