Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [157]
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 high-tech 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