HOT ZONE
The reactor housing where the meltdown occurred in 1959 sits abandoned in an isolated canyon. Phil Rutherford, Rocketdyne’s manager of environmental remediation, walks through the lime green structure and waves a tan, football-size gamma Geiger counter. It registers lower than average background radiation. “We’ve made amazing progress over the years,” Rutherford says. “We had over two dozen buildings involved in nuclear research. Of those, 22 have been cleaned up and 17 have been released for other uses as clean. We’ll be finished by 2006.”
Rocketdyne complains that the antinuclear activists, far from being effective advocates for rehabilitating the contaminated spots at Santa Susana, are actually slowing down the process. “As long as they can point and say, ‘Look how bad this stuff is, look how contaminated it is,’” says Lafflam, “it’ll never be cleaned up.” Even though the cleanup work is supervised by government agencies, he says, the activists still question their results. “They try to poke holes in it continually: ‘You’re not doing enough. How clean is clean? Are you doing it the right way?”
“Why would we spend 19 years of our lives to get that facility cleaned up if they would do it without our pestering?” says Joe Lyou of Committee to Bridge the Gap. His colleague Dan Hirsch has dogged the cleanup efforts since 1979, when he was a lecturer at UCLA and one of his students showed him an instructional film obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that depicted workers at the facility cleaning up after the 1959 reactor meltdown.
The handling of the incident is a telling example of the attitudes in the days of atomic energy’s infancy. On July 13, an experimental sodium-graphite reactor at the lab experienced a “power excursion” that caused its output to surge out of control. The reactor—part of an Atomic Energy Commission program to develop civilian nuclear-power sources—had been acting up for weeks, and the technicians moved swiftly to stop it.
“They tried to scram the reactor,” says Hirsch, “meaning jamming the control rods in to shut it down—basically putting the brakes on. But the power was still going up even as the control rods were being pushed in. They managed in the end to shut it down, miraculously. About an hour and a half later, after being unable to determine what caused the excursion, they started the reactor up again.” An AEC report later stated that “continuing to run {the reactor} in the face of a known tetralin leak, repeated scrams, equipment failures, rising radioactive releases and unexplained transient releases is difficult to justify.”
On July 26, the reactor again surged out of control, causing 13 of its 43 uranium fuel rods to rupture or melt. Radioactive gases spewed from the building. “It is incomprehensible to me that the radiation that was released stopped at the site boundary,” says Hirsch. “The meltdown occurred in a reactor that had no containment structure. When we think of reactors, we think of Diablo Canyon and San Onofre, with these huge concrete domes to protect against radioactivity being released. But the sodium-reactor experiment and all the other reactors that were on the property had no containment dome, so the radioactivity in the accident was released into the atmosphere and settled on the communities below the site. The question we cannot answer is how much that was and how much it affected people.”
Over the course of the following year, radioactive xenon and krypton gases were released as technicians struggled to clean up the reactor. “The radiation monitors went off the scale during the accident, so we have a very poor idea of how much stuff got out,” says Physicians for Social Responsibility’s Parfrey. “The company says that 10,000 curies of radioactive iodine were re¬leased. Radioactive iodine may cause thyroid cancers in people who inhale or ingest it.”
The accident was not publicly acknowledged until five weeks later in an impenetrable AEC press release that stated “no release of radioactive materials to the plant or its environs occurred, and operating personnel were not exposed to harmful conditions.” In fact, at the time, it was one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. “[Rocketdyne] never really got around to telling the public that the core melted and that this was a very serious nuclear accident,” says Hirsch.
In the meantime, the toxic mess had to be removed. In the film discovered by Hirsch’s student, workers crawl over the top of the reactor trying to extract the melted fuel. Another peers into the melted core using a periscope-like device called a boroscope. Others are shown grappling with huge wrenches and riding a truck carrying spent fuel. Although the workers wear protective suits, Hirsch contends that they surely received significant doses of radiation. Viewed in a post-Chernobyl/Three Mile Island context, the images are disturbing, reminiscent of the photos taken on the factory floors of the women in the ’20s who, innocent of the peril, painted luminescent numbers on watch faces with, radioactive radium.
Cleaning out the melted fuel from the reactor core would ultimately take more than a year and a half.
JIM GARNER WORKED IN THE LATE 70S for a company; called Brownyard Steel Fabrication, which was doing con¬tract work for Rocketdyne at the Santa Susana lab. He recalls standing in a steel vault 60 feet underground, tearing out old ironwork and putting new pieces in. “I was down there with a cutting torch, a hard hat, a pair of burns glasses, gloves and a T-shirt. I kept hearing a funny noise; and looked around, and there were two gentlemen about ten feet away from me with full-on hazardous-material; fresh-air breathers and Geiger counters. I asked my foreman, ‘What’s going on? Who are these people?’ His reply was, ‘Don’t worry about it. They work for Rocketdyne. Just go back to work.’ Later; I find they’re taking radiation levels and that there was also al gamma radiation detector installed at the bottom of that vault. I also found out that they were taking helicopter readings on how hot that area was.”
Garner is utterly convinced his cancer was caused by Rocketdyne. “They put me in jeopardy, deliberately. They knew what was there. They did not protect me whatsoever. They did not care whether I lived or died.”
