MELTDOWN MAN
The EnviroReporter.com interview – June 25, 2009
John Pace is the last known surviving person who was at the Sodium Reactor Experiment during those fateful weeks in July 1959 when the America’s worst nuclear meltdown occurred. Just twenty when he started working at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, Pace, 70, is now retired and lives with his wife in Rexburg, Idaho. He gave this exclusive interview to EnviroReporter.com on June 25, 2009 during which time, sadly, Michael Jackson died.
EnviroReporter.com: What did you do as the kid on the crew at the Sodium Reactor Experiment?
John Pace: I was hired on as a trainee to learn how to become an atomic reactor operator and also a mechanic. That means learning the ropes in how to run a reactor and helping them with working on the reactor with changing and transferring fuel rods and working on maintenance, chart reading, checking the weather, which way the wind was blowing – all the odds and ends is what they hired me for at that age. I don’t want to use the word ‘gofer.’ In those days, they had a lot of gauges they had to read outside and up on the hill there where the weather station was at. My duty on my shift was to go take a clipboard with me and at certain times go around and read and see what the various gauges are doing and see which way the wind was blowing, the weather; depending on their needs and what they needed at that time. That’s what I was originally hired for and then to help them transferring fuel rods, worked out in the high bay area and on mechanical-like things.
Why were you checking the weather?
To know which way the wind was blowing when we released the gases out of the reactor, we knew which way they were blowing. We preferred to have them blowing towards the ocean. In those days, at the time of the meltdown, it went the opposite way towards Los Angeles and the [San Fernando] Valley. I know it went exactly over LA. It was just a normal westerly wind blowing over the San Fernando Valley and beyond.
If you were checking the weather regularly to see which way the wind was blowing does that mean that you were regularly venting gases?
All the time. It was an experimental reactor. They would get the reactor up on and running and when it was running do some more tests on it and the fuel rods. Then you had to bring the reactor back down and vent the gases out of the reactor. Normally they would have holding tanks they’d put those gases in and separate them for a week, generally speaking, before they released the gas so it wouldn’t be hot going out. It was normal procedure. When the reactor went down, that was a completely different story. It happened all of a sudden and they didn’t let it decay a bit; they had to do it right then otherwise you’d have another Chernobyl there and everyone get exposed.
They had to scram the reactor on the 13th. At that time, they had to release all the gases from the reactor to keep it from running away 100% like Chernobyl. Those are the gases everyone is worried about because they didn’t have time to detain the gases at all so they let it out on the 13th there.
How did you guys stay out of the way of those gases?
I wasn’t there until a few hours after it happened. The next shift, I was there. I was home at the time it actually happened. I found out that the reactor had run away from them and they had to release the gases. When they did that, they didn’t have time to check which way the wind was blowing. It was an emergency; you had to do something. So they released the gases and they discovered after leaking the gases that the winds were headed towards the San Fernando Valley. Those of us who were working there were, of course, very upset about it at what happened because on that particular shift, all of our families lived in the San Fernando Valley and all that radiation went over their homes in the west valley over there. That was on the 13th there.
The next step was they started up the reactor again after that point around two weeks trying to determine what caused the reactor to go down. They had little indications before the 13th that there was something a little edgy about the reactor that they weren’t quite sure about. There were indications on gauges that something wasn’t quite up to par, the way a reactor really should be. It wasn’t enough for anyone to say there was a definite problem you see. After the meltdown, they started the reactor to see what the customer thought was wrong and took little short runs with a low amount of electricity, in other words at low levels, where they had control on things and each time they ran it, they’d watch the gauges. With a reactor, you can’t hear anything, see anything; you have to go by the gauges. They ran it there for a few hours at low level and then they’d shut it down and bleed the gases out from the reactor. Then they’d talk about it ‘what do you think?’ and ‘I’m not sure, I think it could be this or that.’
They started getting the idea that the pump was giving them some problems with the tetralin but they weren’t sure. So they would fire it up again at a low level, check out the gauges, shut it down, and then bleed the reactor again. This went on over a number of days doing the same scenario until we figured out that the sump was the cause of it. It was about 20-something that they decided not to run the reactor anymore. That’s when they shut it down for the final test. Then they started planning on what they were going to do from that point. In the meantime, during all that time when they were doing those tests, they kept building up all this radiation in the high bay area. It was getting more contaminated all the time. It was pretty well contaminated in the building. They couldn’t go out in the high bay area because it was too contaminated and they had it all sealed off there.
