History: Nuclear Reactor Meltdown in Southern California

[MineralMan]

The current nuclear crisis in Japan brought back memories of an incident from my childhood, a meltdown in a nuclear reactor in Southern California, just a few miles from my boyhood home. That incident, which occurred in 1959, is pretty much forgotten by everyone now. It was the first power generation reactor meltdown ever to occur.

The reactor, located in Santa Susana, CA, in Ventura County, just north of Los Angeles, was the first reactor in the US to generate power that was used outside of the plant. Electricity was delivered from the reactor to the small nearby town of Moorpark. It wasn't exactly a commercial reactor, but more an experimental one, built in 1957. A very small, sodium-cooled reactor, it was a test bed for what was seen to be a new way to generate electricity. It was the very first reactor to sell electricity to consumers, though.

But, in 1959, something happened. The reactor went wrong and there was a meltdown. Radiation escaped and was blown by winds into populated areas. It sort of made the news at the time, but the alarm wasn't widespread. Radioactive gases from the reactor escaped freely into the atmosphere for almost two weeks. The site, now owned by Boeing and NASA, still has not been completely cleaned up, and the projected date for the cleanup is still six years away, in 2017.

I was a high school freshman at the time, and our little town was maybe 10-12 miles by air from the reactor. Authorities claimed at the time that there was no danger from this incident, but the news slowly leaked out that radiation had been released. It's estimated that about 260 cancer cases were caused by the incident to nearby residents over a fairly short period of time.

Few people ever think about this meltdown incident today. You've probably never heard of it. It barely made the news at the time, and nobody particularly was in a panic. That could be because the news of what actually happened was suppressed.

For me, the memories are clear. I had actually visited the reactor in 1958 as part of a junior high school science club field trip. We got to see it in operation. Compared to today's reactors, it was primitive, with primitive instrumentation. We were allowed very near the actual reactor, led by one of the operators. Just a year later, this reactor made history by being the first nuclear reactor that generated commercial electricity to fail and have a catastrophic meltdown.

Just a historical story about the sorry history of nuclear power generation. Nuclear power plants are unsafe. They have always been unsafe, since the very first one went online, then failed, causing the release of an unknown amount of radiation. They will always be unsafe.

Thanks for reading. For more information, check out the links below:

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jul/13/local/me-meltdown13
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2009/07/santa-susana-meltdown-.html
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/SANTA+SUSANA+MELTDOWN+RELEASED+MASSIVE+RADIATION+STATE-FUNDED+PANEL...-a0152450340
http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=santa+susana+meltdown

[FSogol]

1. Good info, thanks for posting. n/t

[MineralMan]

3. Thanks. I hadn't thought about that incident for some time.

It demonstrates very clearly to me that the response to nuclear incidents from government and corporate officials hasn't changed much. Minimizing the seriousness of an incident is still the SOP when something occurs. That's still happening in Japan right now. Bad news is released only very slowly and often inaccurately.

I was just 14 years old when the Santa Susana incident occurred, but I remember being very interested in it at the time, especially since I had actually visited the reactor and had a strong interest in science. That interest remains, as does my skepticism about nuclear power as an alternative energy source.

[FSogol]

5. I had never heard of the problem there before. Like yourself, I also had a

class field trip to visit an experimental breeder reactor.

[shraby]

2. Weren't they still doing above ground nuke testing in Nevada

at that time? The mind-set is probably why no one was as alarmed as they should have been..only the government knew the dangers and they weren't talking. It wasn't until the early 1960s that they began underground testing only if I recall.

[MineralMan]

4. Oh, yes indeed. They were still blowing up above-ground nukes

then. My father drove us to Las Vegas once to watch one. The sky lit up, as I remember, followed shortly by a very loud sound. I had nightmares about nuclear attacks as a kid. We were doing the dive under your desk drills in school, all the way from first grade into my high school years. I had a very healthy fear of radiation, but was also fascinated by it. In my freshman year of high school, not long after this incident, I built a Geiger counter from plans in an electronics magazine, and actually found some uranium deposits in the Arizona desert with it.

I'm a nuclear baby, born right between the dates of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. It's been part of my life for my entire life.

[shraby]

13. I was born in 1942 and can remember in the late 1950s a

brown substance in the air in Michigan about 35 miles south of Traverse City. It was in the news that it was from a western dust storm. That told me that the testing they were doing could easily drift that far also. Scary stuff.

[hunter]

17. My father-in-law saw an above ground nuclear test up close.

He was one of the soldiers they used as guinea pigs. They went marching around the blast site just as soon as it cooled down enough, and then they took showers to wash off the radioactive dust.

That's the way it was then. Compared to what the military was purposely inflicting upon our own soldiers and general population the accident at Santa Susana wasn't really considered that big a deal.

The site at Santa Susanna is contaminated with lots of toxic non-radioactive stuff too, as in "half-life of forever." They used to put chemical wastes in pits, mix it with rocket fuel, and light it on fire.

[MineralMan]

26. A co-worker of mine, many years ago, was on one of the Naval ships

that observed the first Thermonuclear tests. His description of being exposed to that was amazing. He contracted polycythemia vera from the exposure to radiation. The VA never acknowledged that Naval personnel were injured during the tests, which deliberately exposed enlisted personnel to the blasts. Once a month, he had to have blood drawn to get rid of the excess red blood cells produced by the illness. He died at the age of 59, still with the causation unacknowledged.

[CreekDog]

21. did you know that even the underground testing had significant "venting"?

[Lucinda]

6. Wow. I grew up in So Cal and I don't remember ever hearing about it

Thanks for the post and the links

[MineralMan]

7. Yes. Unless you were around when it actually happened, it's

unlikely that you ever heard of it. The news was very limited and only local, really. No 24/7 cable news at the time.

[Lucinda]

8. I'm not sure what year my parents moved to California

They may have been there by then. I'll have to ask my older sister about it. Our family has had a LOT of weird health problems, I wonder if there is a connection...?

[PVnRT]

9. You're right, safety standards remain unchanged since 1959

Yep. :eyes:

[MineralMan]

16. Of course they have changed. This reactor didn't even have a

containment structure as we know it today, and schoolkids were allowed into the reactor room. Obviously safety is improved. What has not is the information that is released when an incident occurs. People still try to minimize the incident as long as possible in many cases.

[jannyk]

10. But...but...but...I just posted this! Didn't you read it?

US Energy Secretary "Don't Worry - We Got This!"
#
1425: Several countries who, like Japan, depend on nuclear power for much of their energy have insisted their facilities are safe. US Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said the US will learn from the disaster, but that plants in the country have "rigorous" safety rules.
#
1445: More from US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu. He told lawmakers that Americans "should have full confidence that the United States has rigorous safety" rules and that nuclear plant builders "clearly consider things like tsunamis ... and earthquakes". He added: "Whenever there's an incident such as what's happening in Japan, we have to pay very close attention to that, think very hard."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12307698

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x650620

Silly! Can't happen here. We think very hard! :eyes:

[kestrel91316]

11. MOORPARK had a meltdown??????

M-O-O-R-P-A-R-K????

:wtf: :wow:

It's a bedroom community now. Lovely to think of all the folks sleeping there with that radiation hazard still unmitigated other than by time.

[MineralMan]

15. Not Moorpark. Santa Susana. Moorpark was getting electricity

from this reactor. Of course Moorpark is pretty close to Santa Susana, though. Just over the hill from Fillmore, where I grew up.

[kestrel91316]

34. Santa Susana isn't a town. It's the range of hills just south of Simi Valley

and Moorpark. I used to live just south of them in Agoura.

[MineralMan]

35. It used to be. It's been subsumed by Chatsworth and Simi Valley now.

50 years ago, there actually was a town there, of sorts. Not much of one, but it had a name and people said they lived there. Much has changed in the Simi Valley. It's still on the map, though, at the corner of Tapo St. and E. Los Angeles Ave. It is a real placename.

[KittyWampus]

12. Have you ever heard of the "Gamma Ray Forest"? Here on LI, Brookhaven opened drums of radioactive

material in the middle of the pine barrens (which are over an aquifer) just to see what would happen.

The entire forest surrounding the drums die. Still hasn't regrown.

The only reason I learned about this was listening to the radio and a high school kid was telling about a report he did about it. Report won an award.

[Scurrilous]

14. K & R

:thumbsup:

[divvy]

18. wrong thread

wrong thread sorry

[pintobean]

19. Living in California is unsafe. It has always been unsafe,

since humans first stepped foot on that land, and eventually died. It will always be unsafe.
Life is unsafe....

[suffragette]

20. One of the most striking things about the press conference

shown on NHK yesterday was the more tone shift with very aggressive questions from the reporters.
They are clearly tired of being put off and strongly pressed for more specific answers, basically saying stop apologizing to us and start answering our direct questions.

And yeah, that part is "same as it ever was."

I think this might be the 1st time I'm recommending one of your posts - a K&R to you.

[Bluenorthwest]

22. Best MM post ever.

Recommended highly.

[MineralMan]

24. Thanks for that!

It's one of the issues that has been a big part of my life, probably because of that early exposure to the dangers of nuclear power.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

23. The problem with nuclear plants is that they can't be made perfectly safe.

Of course, nothing can be made perfectly safe. But when most other systems fail, the failure does not result in widespread disaster. When nuke plants go bad, however, they go really, really bad, and cause terrible problems. The Japanese probably have the best nuclear engineers in the world, and their plants are among the best and safest. The risk-management people and the engineers would have planned for what they probably thought was the worst-case scenario -- unfortunately, what actually happened was much worse than the scenario they imagined. And your worst-case scenario turning out not to be bad enough is always going to be a possibility.

So as a society we have to decide whether we are willing to accept the risk, even if it's a small one, of another horrendous disaster in exchange for cheap, efficient energy. Eventually, as long as nuclear plants are in use, there will be another very bad accident, because no system is ever perfectly safe.

[Uncle Joe]

25. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, MineralMan.

[MineralMan]

27. Thanks. My pleasure.

[MineralMan]

28. More information about the seriousness of this meltdown.

"And a state-funded study released in 2006 determined that the 1959 meltdown had released 300 times more radiation than the infamous accident at Three Mile Island, Pa., which until that time had been considered the nation's worst."

http://www.dailynews.com/ci_12827839

"...released 300 times more radiation than...Three Mile Island." Uff da!

[hardluck]

30. Not to dismiss the meltdown(s)

but they were only part of the problem. Much of the current contamination is from sodium burn pits in which they burned radioactive and other hazardous materials, as well as all of the chemicals used by Rocketdyne in the testing of rocket engines (this is where the engines were tested for Saturn, Delta, and Atlas rockets). Rocketdyne was very lax in its treatment of waste materials to the communities detriment - and my own as I live about three miles away from it.

[Politicalboi]

29. I lived in Simi Valley while growing up

Always remember Rocketdyne rumbling throughout the town. We moved there in 1966, I was a small kid. My dad worked on the hill and my brother did years later. I never heard about the melt down till the 80's or 90's. The thing that scared us the most was Charlie Manson and the gang. My oldest brother went to school with Steve Grogan AKA Clem.

http://crime.about.com/od/murder/ig/The-Manson-Family/grogan.htm

[struggle4progress]

31. A couple of years later, SL-1 blew up in Idaho. Most folk don't know about that either

[MineralMan]

32. We have very short memories, and these things happened 50

years ago and more. Soon, there will be nobody to remember them at all.

[MineralMan]

33. Evening Bump...

Bump!