Meltdown Dustup

EnviroReporter.com – July 22, 2009

The worst meltdown in U.S. history happened 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles from July 13-26, 1959. A reactor spewed hundreds of times more radiation than Three Mile Island did in 1979. The effects of this covered-up meltdown still reverberate throughout Southern California today.

READ “Wrinkles in Runkle Canyon – 50 Years After a Santa Susana Nuclear Accident Holds Up Land Development” in the LA Weekly where EnviroReporter.com‘s Michael Collins takes you in the Atomics International reactor for a front row seat to America’s first and worst nuclear reactor disaster, reveals which way the cancerous fallout fell across Southern California, and exposes how disaster still resonates today. Runkle Canyon borders the former nuclear area of the huge outdoor lab and is where KB Home hopes to build hundreds of homes but have been stymied since 2006 by a group called the “Radiation Rangers.”

READ “Meltdown Man” – EnviroReporter.com‘s John Pace Interview. Pace is the only known person alive today who was at the Sodium Reactor Experiment in 1959 during the meltdown.

READ “Ghost of a Rose” – EnviroReporter.com‘s Michael Rose Interview. Rose is the man who espied a political pamphlet in 1979 that made mention of the meltdown, the discovery of which led to the publicity of the meltdown in 1979 and all the subsequent coverage since.

READ “Very Dirty Laundry” – 2006 article about a state-funded study that found that the reactor meltdown caused cancer in 260 to 1,800 people within a 62-mile radius and released 459 times more of deadly iodine-131 and cesium-137 than the Three Mile Island meltdown did in 1979.

READ EnviroReporter.com‘s investigation of Rocketdyne, as the Santa Susana Field Laboratory is oft-times called, begun in 1998 for Los Angeles magazine and the LA Weekly.

SEE eye-witness photographs of the reactor during this critical time including never-before published photos taken by John Pace of desperate days at the crippled core.

SEE 7 galleries of the reactor’s construction from Atomics International which show the reactor built without a containment dome. Demolition galleries are also included.

SEE 15 galleries of Area IV where most of the nuclear work was done at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.

LISTEN to “Wrinkles in Runkle Canyon” on this downloadable MP-3 produced by AirLA.org.

WATCH “Engineering Disasters” on The History Channel‘s Modern Marvels show about the meltdown. Available at right as well. Former worker John Pace is seen throughout this excellent documentary partially culled from films made at the time of the disaster in order to train other nuclear reactor crews what to do in similar situations.

WATCH construction of the reactor in an Atomic Energy Commission film from the mid 1950s. The SRE was built without a containment structure like the ones seen today at the nearby Diablo Canyon and San Onofre nuclear generating stations.

WATCH the SRE recovery film provided by the Department of Energy which owned the reactor. The reactor was shut down for 14 months with debris from the core taking 7 weeks to remove by a crew totaling 31 men.

WATCH the reactor decommissioning film called “Sodium Reactor Experiment” which begins with the host intoning “All things have their cycle of life, of usefulness. So it is with an experimental reactor.”

The following excerpts are from the cover story “HOT ZONE“ published in the June 1998 issue of Los Angeles magazine.

ON A HOT JULY NIGHT IN 1959, on flickering RCAs and Philcos and DuMonts, the residents of Simi Valley watched as Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon toured a Moscow exposition’s exhibit of a model American home. When the Soviet premier and the vice president paused in the kitchen, the televisions suddenly erupted with belligerent voices. “We have means at our disposal which can have very bad consequences,” Khrushchev bellowed through an interpreter. “We have too,” Nixon shot back. “Ours are better,” Khrushchev retorted.

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