Chip Downing

On December 12, 1952, a nuclear reactor in Canada went out of control. Someone had to go inside and take it apart. One of the young men who did it would later become President of the United States. The reactor was called NRX, at the Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario. It was one of the most important research reactors in the world at the time. That day, a series of mistakes caused its power to surge. Part of the core overheated and melted, and about a million gallons of radioactive water flooded the basement. It was one of the first serious nuclear accidents in history. The reactor had to be dismantled before it could be repaired. But the radiation inside was so strong that no one could stay near it for long. At the time, the United States Navy was working on the first nuclear-powered submarines, and its engineers had a strong interest in learning from the accident. A young Navy lieutenant who was working on the program was sent to Chalk River with a team of American sailors to help. He was 28 years old. His name was Jimmy Carter. The plan was carefully worked out. Each man could only be exposed to the radiation for about 90 seconds. So the team built a full-size copy of the damaged part of the reactor on a nearby tennis court. Over and over, they practiced every movement until they could do their part perfectly and fast. Then, one at a time, they went in. Carter later described being lowered into the damaged reactor in a protective suit, working as fast as he could on his task, and then being pulled out. In those 90 seconds, he said, he absorbed the maximum amount of radiation considered safe for a whole year. For months afterward, his urine was tested for radioactivity. Years later, he would joke that he and his men were "hot" for a while afterward. But at the time, nobody knew exactly what the long-term effects of that much radiation would be. The young sailors volunteered anyway. They knew the reactor had to be fixed, and they knew someone had to do it. The work took weeks. Team after team went in, each man doing one small job in his 90 seconds before the next man took his place. Slowly, piece by piece, the damaged parts were removed. The reactor at Chalk River was eventually rebuilt and ran for decades afterward. He later said the experience changed the way he thought about nuclear power and nuclear weapons for the rest of his life. He had seen with his own eyes what happens when something that powerful goes wrong. Carter rarely made a big deal of it. In his memoir, he described it in a few plain sentences, the way a man describes a job that simply had to get done. Many Americans who voted for him never knew it had happened. The following year, his father died, and Carter left the Navy to go home to Plains, Georgia, and run the family peanut farm. He went into local politics, then became governor of Georgia, and in 1977 he became the 39th President of the United States. After the White House, he spent decades building homes with Habitat for Humanity, monitoring elections, and fighting diseases in some of the poorest countries on earth. In 2002 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024. He was 100 years old, the longest-lived president in American history. Few people knew that before any of it, as a young officer, he had once been lowered into a broken nuclear reactor with 90 seconds to get the job done. Did you know this part of Jimmy Carter's life?