1959 Santa Susana meltdown

https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/santa-susana

by moviewise • 4 years ago

50 50 4 years ago

Old news, but personally interesting because I spent some time working at the labs up there. The building I worked in was across the street from where the meltdown occurred. Even the building I was in had a history of nuclear accidents (at least three that required cleanup). Nobody ever used the tap water there for anything other than flushing a toilet. Boeing got the property when it acquired Rocketdyne. Boeing was stupid to not recognize the huge liability it took on.

jeffbee• 4 years ago

The L.A. Times reported yesterday that Boeing seems to have dodged its cleanup problems by entering into a conservation easement on the site. That might be why this old news is cropping up on HN today.

bcrosby952• 4 years ago

This shit was supposed to be cleaned up 5 years ago.

dchuk2• 4 years ago

Grew up nearby, I just assumed everyone was used to rocket engine tests so loud that things world fall off the shelves.

Later in life would drive up there and park facing the San Fernando valley to drink beer, awesome view.

Only later did I learn these were irradiating activities.

labster• 4 years ago

What a glowing review. As a Ventura native, I approve.

dchuk2• 4 years ago

Most of my family ended up in Ventura. Love that city.

WheelsAtLarge• 4 years ago

Grew up nearby, I just assumed everyone was used to rocket engine tests so loud that things world fall off the shelves.

This is no joke. I experienced the same in the 1980's. 1st time it happened to me, I thought an earthquake was happening. Everyone around me didn't give it a second thought.

I grew up close enough that I wouldn't be surprise if I glow at night. It's a joke - I hope.

The meltdown comes up every few years. It's a big deal yet we live our lives as if nothing happened. I don't know what to think.

xattt• 4 years ago

Was it irradiating because the area was contaminated, because the engine firings were kicking up fallout or were these nuclear rockets?

basementcat• 4 years ago

One of the better preserved Native American cave paintings in California is within the SSFL security perimeter.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burro_Flats_site

ncmncm10• 4 years ago

"Archaeologists estimate the paintings to be several hundred years old."

They don't say what basis was used for the estimate. Age estimates are almost always a lower bound, except where some radiocarbon date can be established, rare for rocks.

We know hominins were in the region 130,000 years ago, based on a butchered mastodon (with major bones split for marrow) found near San Diego. Nobody knows what species, or if they left descendants into the present.

Asparagirl• 4 years ago

When I bought my house in Los Angeles (in the southern part of the San Fernando Valley, not particularly close to the accident site), in 2005, the closing documents I had to sign had disclosures about the accident.

carlivar• 4 years ago

You were probably occasionally downwind.

mixmastamyk2• 4 years ago

The sixty-year old nuclear disaster and toxic spills that still almost no one knows about due to decades of cover ups, in the vicinity of residential areas to the west of Los Angeles. Comparable to Three Mile Island, but built in a rickety warehouse with no containment.

How many folks died from cancer as a result? I personally have known quite a few, but hard to say definitively.

ncmncm10• 4 years ago

And so, of course, never, ever counted among the always "vanishingly small" number of victims of the nuke industry.

Its most reliable product was dishonestly, from day one.

ReadTheLicense• 4 years ago

Which company ducked it up there?

coobird• 4 years ago

I'm surprised that there are still new cases of people, especially children, who are getting cancer in the area.

High cancer rates surrounding the area has been reported for decades and I recall watching local TV news reports about it in the 2000s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory#...

defrost6• 4 years ago

Just for anybody caual browsing here; we can't just blame the radiation and isotopic waste:

During its years of operation, highly toxic chemical additives were widely used in order to power over 30,000 rocket engine tests and to clean the rocket test-stands afterwards.
In addition, considerable nuclear research and at least four nuclear accidents occurred, which resulted in the SSFL becoming a seriously contaminated site and an offsite pollution source, requiring a sophisticated multi-agency Cleanup Project

acidburnNSA5• 4 years ago

Yeah I mean what are the dose rates? You need 100 mSv acute or 300 mSv over a year to get the first small increase of cancer risk from a baseline risk of 40%. Is anyone getting even remotely close to 300 mSv from this in a year? I highly doubt it. At that level every kid with a $50 Geiger counter from Amazon would see it everywhere.

You can detect even a single atom decaying. The difference between the threshold of detection and the threshold of damage is astoundingly large in radiation.

I'm pretty sure people are overblowing the radiological risks here without being quantitative. Let's talk dose rates in mSv/yr or not talk.

CodeWriter23• 4 years ago

I’m not surprised at all. It was never cleaned up, and now that it has been handed over to UNESCO as a “Heritage” site, it never will be.

bcrosby952• 4 years ago

It doesn't get much play outside of LA. We moved to the area to be near my wife's family and I had no clue about it. But it's basically an open secret in the local communities.

When I found out about it and I mentioned it she said "oh yeah everyone knows about that, lots of people got cancer growing up."

wahern• 4 years ago

The entire LA and San Francisco Bay Area regions were for half a century dumping grounds for far worse stuff than most of the radiological hazards at Santa Susana Field. The worst hazards at Santa Susana Field itself were probably the rocket-related research and associated non-radiological chemicals. This seems confirmed by the Woolsey fire, when nobody was able to detect radioactive contamination.

Detection of radionuclides is easy and reliable; detection of all the myriad other industrial chemicals less so. California hosted a disproportionate share of defense and industrial research and production facilities which are known to have released insane amounts of non-radiological hazardous waste, often adjacent to large populations. As cities expanded many communities, rich and poor, now live atop of it. Even just run-of-the-mill lead hazards are pretty bad in California because the state rapidly expanded coincident with peak usage of lead in fuel and paint.

Unless you live on a property far outside coastal LA and Bay Area cities, it's not entirely unreasonable to reflexively pave over backyards, etc, especially if you have kids. Alternatively, pay a sizable amount of money for soil testing.

Testing soil samples for lead is cheap/free, though, through some government programs; just be prepared to resort to plan A. When we bought our house in the Outer Richmond of San Francisco, I meticulously took samples of our backyard and shipped them off for spectroscopic measurements through one of those programs. Unsurprisingly they all came back near or above the threshold for "absolutely don't garden here". A couple came back near the threshold for "you're required by law to inform the EPA", which was pretty insane because the thresholds for mandatory declaration of soil lead contamination are (at least in non-commercial contexts) way, way, way above recommended safe limits; this is to minimize the economic burden of remediation.

A family member of mine develops small and medium size apartment complexes in Southern California and she deliberately avoids soil tests. She assumes any parcel of land in a populated area is contaminated and designs projects accordingly--e.g. cover any common areas where kids might play with known clean soil from elsewhere. She also reminds contractors to follow basic safety measures, like not washing their work clothes in the same wash load as other family members. If she voluntarily tested as a matter of course she'd subject herself to expensive, mandatory remediations, and construction of anything except luxury housing wouldn't be economically viable.

acidburnNSA5• 4 years ago

I hope we're measuring and disseminating dose rate and dose rate hazard information these days. I hate that I ctrl-f these kinds of articles for mSv (measure of radioactive dose) and never find it.

The reactor type they were testing there is actually super interesting. It was a liquid metal cooled reactor (LMR) with slow neutrons. We have made lots of fast-neutron LMRs, but only a tiny handful of slow-neutron LMRs. They're interesting because they get the neutronics efficiencies of slow neutrons (e.g. they can start up and operate with very low enriched uranium) while also getting the benefits of cooling with liquid metal (low-pressure passive safety, high temperature heat, low corrosion, single phase flow).

It's my favorite reactor type actually. The SRE in LA was the prototype for the Hallam reactor in Nebraska.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallam_Nuclear_Power_Facility

ncmncm10• 4 years ago

I.e., we already have seen entirely enough of them.

doyouevensunbro• 4 years ago

I live near here. They have built housing on top of the waste drainage area. We tried to protest but it did no good. They say they trucked out the rest of the waste but no one really believes it.

ncmncm10• 4 years ago

This event, and everything around SS, was just par for the nuke industry.

Forbidding staff from warning their families about contamination was typical evil.

There is never any expectation that any nuke project will do better, absent strict regulation and rigorous enforcement. It is why the public is very sensibly sour on nukes.

But the only thing stopping more of it, today, is that they cost way more than alternatives. Always did, but it is harder now to paper over.

pdonis• 4 years ago

the nuke industry

This wasn't "the nuke industry". It was a government testing lab. No member of the public has been harmed by actual commercial nuclear power plants. All of the dicey stuff (and there was a lot more of it than just this) was done by the government.

There is never any expectation that any nuke project will do better, absent strict regulation and rigorous enforcement

So you want the government that set this testing lab up to do the regulation and enforcement?

morsch2• 4 years ago

Debatable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident_h...

ncmncm10• 4 years ago

It was a government-funded private lab.

Animats• 4 years ago

Well-known event.[1] Some release of Kr-85 (half life 11 years) and Xe-133 (half life 5 days.) It's been 62 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment

1959 Santa Susana meltdown

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