While it was out of control, radiation levels went off the scale and doors had to be opened for worker protection. The Field Lab’s experimental reactor had no containment structure like the big domes at Three Mile Island. But when I asked about radioactive emissions, an executive for the Rocketdyne subsidiary Atomics International told me, on camera: “The potential hazard of major release into the environment was just not there.”
I was allowed onto the site and given a tour of the reactor building, which was being torn down. New equipment, including special cameras had to be developed to remove the melted fuel, and the video has been used to train nuclear plant operators for the future.īut, despite our revelations, the secrecy and denial continued. It was an accident that wasn’t supposed to happen, and it continued for 10 days until engineers finally shut the reactor down. Splitting uranium atoms had melted both the fuel and the metal cladding, and highly radioactive gases were being released. Documents reported that the heat measured 1465 degrees Fahrenheit and was thought to be even higher. In 1979, we showed pictures of broken fuel rods on the bottom of the reactor core. This story’s hardest lesson is that when dangerous secrets get buried you often have to keep excavating them, over and over. Sixty-three years since the accident, Santa Susana should remind us of the perils not only of nuclear materials but also of our short memories. Gavin Newsom appears to be backing away from enforcing a cleanup of nuclear contamination that remains on the site. Today, that accident is still news, as Gov. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and a nuclear contractor kept it secret for 20 years, but there was no denying the evidence we revealed on local TV, discovered in AEC archives by the watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap.
The Field Lab opened in 1947, at the onset of the Cold War, and the reactor accident happened in 1959. It occurred at the Santa Susana Field Lab, a reactor and rocket-testing facility in the mountains between the San Fernando and Simi Valleys.īack then, the story was both news and history. In 1979, the year of Three Mile Island, I exposed another nuclear accident-another partial meltdown-in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
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