50 YEARS AFTER AMERICA’S WORST NUCLEAR MELTDOWN
Human error helped worsen a nuclear meltdown just outside Los Angeles, and now human inertia has stymied the radioactive cleanup for half a century.
By Joan Trossman Bien and Michael Collins
Miller-McCune – August 24, 2009
For Release Saturday A.M., August 29, 1959
CANOGA PARK, CA
“During an inspection of fuel elements on July 26 at the Sodium Reactor Experiment, operated for the Atomic Energy Commission at Santa Susana, California by Atomics International, a division of North American Aviation, Inc., a parted fuel element was observed.
The fuel element damage is not an indication of unsafe reactor conditions. No release of radioactive materials to the plant or its environs occurred and operating personnel were not exposed to harmful conditions…
In each case, all seven tubes of the fuel element remained in the core. This fuel loading, nearing the end of its useful life, was scheduled to be removed in the near future.”
This press release — issued five weeks after the end of the United States’ worst nuclear reactor meltdown — was the public’s first notification that something unusual had happened up on “The Hill.” For the next 20 years, it remained the only public notification about the accident at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory on a mountaintop in California’s eastern Ventura County, on the border with the San Fernando Valley.
In fact, from July 12 through July 26, 1959, an unknown amount of radioactive gases were intentionally vented to prevent the Sodium Reactor Experiment from overheating and exploding.
Unlike most conventional reactors that circulate water to be heated by the fuel rods in the core in order to turn steam turbines, the SRE used sodium because it could operate under lower pressure. Pure sodium — not to be confused with table salt, or sodium chloride — was a risky metal to use since it catches fire when exposed to air and explodes when mixed with water.
Due to the experimental nature of the SRE, it was built without a containment structure — the distinctive large dome associated with nuclear power plants — so any radiation vented hot out over the San Fernando Valley, which the city of Los Angeles was busily annexing. What exactly vented remains in contention.
“We know there was a fuel meltdown,” said William Taylor, the current spokesman for the U.S. Department of Energy. “We don’t know how much [radiation] or if any was released.”
According to an analysis of a five-year study by a panel of independent scientists convened years after the incident, the SRE accident spit out up to 459 times the amount of radiation released during the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island.
