Wood River Junction, a village in Richmond, is the sort of place where you might want live if you were looking for a quiet life.
It’s home to a sizeable turf farm if you want to watch grass grow. It has several hiking trails to explore.
But mostly it’s known for something that happened 60 years ago.
A What and Why RI reader wrote in, asking, “Was there really a nuclear explosion in Rhode Island years and years ago?”
There was, and Wood River Junction is where it happened.
The United Nuclear Corporation in Wood River Junction
In 1961, ads started to appear in The Providence Journal for an “unusual opportunity” – the chance to work just over the border in Connecticut with United Nuclear Corporation. The company was one of the nation’s major providers of nuclear fuels.
Two years later, it announced it was opening a multimillion-dollar facility in Rhode Island , which was heralded by politcos as a “tremendously exciting thing” for the state, bringing good-paying jobs and launching Rhode Island into the future.
The company finalized an agreement with the state within two months of the announcement, broke ground just a couple of months after that, and in just over a year opened its facility in March 1964, the state’s first entry in the atomic industry.
The 1964 nuclear accident
Robert Peabody, 37, must have been one of the first people to get a job at the facility. A father of nine children, from 16 years old to five months old, Peabody was a graduate of Stonington High School and had worked as an auto mechanic up until he took the job at United Nuclear.
With nine kids, he needed the money, so when he heard about the job, he decided to take an evening shift as a technician, according to the New England Historical Society. By day, he worked as a mechanic.
The job of United Nuclear was to take uranium scraps and process them to recover any enriched uranium they contained. The substance was dangerous, but the work was technically simple, so it didn’t matter when hiring Peabody that he wasn’t a chemist.
But it’s the kind of work that goes smoothly only if all the bottles are correctly labeled. And on July 24, 1964, they weren’t.
See, there had been a problem at the facility: a strange black goo was appearing around some of the equipment, according to reporting by Yankee Magazine. It necessitated a complicated cleanup that threw the whole facility into chaos, with any bottle that could be grabbed being used to contain liquids, labels falling off and long to-do lists of unfamiliar tasks for workers.
Even so, when Peabody started his shift that Friday and grabbed an “all safe” bottle of solution to bring upstairs to clean, it didn’t ring any alarm bells. Until he poured the solution into an 18-inch by 25-inch tank, according to United Nuclear’s report , and actual alarm bells started to screech through the building.
The bottle contained a highly radioactive solution, and when it hit the tank, a nuclear chain reaction started.
The Providence Journal headline described what happened as a “blast” and “nuclear explosion” the next day. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission called it a “criticality accident” in a report several months later.
But the bottom line is that when that solution hit the tank, Peabody was splashed with radioactive liquid, a dose that doctors later said was 10 times what it would take to kill a man.
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When the alarms started going off, he ran stripping his clothes off as he went. He made it out of the building before he collapsed, showing the brutal signs of radiation poisoning.
He was brought to Rhode Island Hospital, and put in the old x-ray room, where doctors and nurses tended to him with lead-lined gloves. His condition was initially described as “fair” but he died about 48 hours after the blast.
Given the state of his body, the Providence Roman Catholic Diocese issued special dispensation so he could be cremated, but his wife believed she never got her husband's true ashes back, as they weren’t radioactive, according to the New England Historical Society.
What happened to United Nuclear Corporation?
In the wake of the accident, the facility at Wood River Junction was closed for weeks as a cleanup happened. While it was closed, the governor offered his support that United Nuclear was doing “everything” they could to make sure the area was safe.
In December, they were given the green light from the Atomic Energy Commission to reopen as the plant had rectified the 14 items in noncompliance the NRC had found. At the end of the month, the $1-million plant resumed operations.
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No fines were ever levied. Following a lawsuit, Peabody's wife was paid a settlement of $22,000 to raise her nine children with.
Once reopened, the plant continued to operate until it was closed in 1981 because it was no longer profitable.
Today, the area is part of the popular Francis C. Carter Nature Preserve.
What and Why RI is a weekly feature by The Providence Journal to explore our readers' curiosity. If you have a question about Rhode Island, big or small, email it to klandeck@gannett.com . She loves a good question.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Was there really a nuclear explosion in Rhode Island? Here's the story of Wood River Junction
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