Chapter 8: Hell on Earth

After high school ended Tara and I were on summer break. It was June 22nd when the event happened. Dad was working as usual at the Feather River Nuclear Power Plant). There was a sudden and unprecedented series of failures inside the reactor. The nuclear pile was running wild, headed for a meltdown. Dad had only minutes to act. Risking his life, he ran into the reactor room. A simple stuck mechanical latch was preventing the reactor shutdown mechanism (a rack of neutron-absorbing control rods) from deploying.

The only way to release the latch was brute force. But that latch was directly in line with a lethal stream of intense radiation from inside the reactor vessel. Dad picked up a heavy wrench. At the last moment, he switched hands, and swung the wrench against the latch over and over with his non-dominant (left) hand. Each swing unavoidably brought his hand right through the intense radiation flow. On the tenth bang, the latch released, and the rack of control rods rattled down into the reactor, stopping the immediate crisis from progressing farther.

Back in the control room, Dad was able to text us, reporting there was a problem at the plant, and he would be hours delayed coming home. During those next five or six hours, he sat monitoring at his workstation while his hand blistered and bled. According to the dosimeter on his lapel, he had received a level two (of five) exposure. Enough to potentially shorten his lifespan, but not enough radiation to cause immediate sickness.