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By Michael Collins The world's first nuclear meltdown occurred in Simi Valley, California, not more than 20 minutes from Los Angeles, on July 26, 1959. Thanks to a lack of media coverage on the meltdown, the amount of radiation that escaped and where it went is completely unknown. Despite the magnitude of the event and its suspected impact on the environment, even the residents of Simi Valley and the adjacent San Fernando Valley are largely unaware of what happened there and what has continued to take place in the years following. The 40-year saga of gross negligence and subsequent whitewashing began when power company Rocketdyne's primitive nuclear reactor, the Sodium Reactor Experiment, experienced a meltdown. Nearly a third of the reactor's core melted, and radioactivity spewed into the environment from the unshielded building. But instead of workers in hazardous-materials suits converging on the scene and evacuating the surrounding area, the disaster was not even acknowledged until six weeks later in a small and misleading press release. The communiqué announced that only "a parted fuel element was observed" and that "the fuel element damage is not an indication of unsafe reactor conditions. No release of radioactive materials to the environment plant or its environs occurred, and operating personnel were not exposed to harmful conditions." It was a lie that Rocketdyne has perpetuated and exacerbated in the decades since. "Rocketdyne is our Chernobyl," says Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of the Los Angeles public-health organization Physicians for Social Responsibility and longtime Rocketdyne critic. "People have died; others are chronically ill. But because it's so damned hard to link a hypothetical incident of exposure to the onset of a specific disease, I bet Rocketdyne will never be accountable for their acts." Locals call it "The Hill," a 2,668-acre military-industrial complex, covered with boulders and blanketed by chaparrals, smack-dab in the middle of the mountains separating the valleys. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) is a giant expanse of rocket-test stands, concrete bunkers and decaying former nuclear reactors. The laboratory was integral to developing America's arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles, including the nuke-tipped Navaho, Atlas, Jupiter and Minuteman rockets. Rocketdyne has inadvertently and deliberately leaked a plethora of radioactive and chemical poisons into the environment since it first opened SSFL in 1946. Residents are currently fighting back, lodging more than 300 individual lawsuits against the Boeing-owned company. They contend that the pollutants emanating from the site, now undergoing a $258-million cleanup, are killing them with oftentimes rare cancers. The same year as the nuclear meltdown, a fuel rod exploded at the lab while being washed, flooding a reactor with radioactivity that was vented outside. In 1960, a reactor pipe that was being moved outdoors for decontamination exploded and flew across a ravine. The facility would also experience another meltdown in 1964, with 80% of the fuel from an experimental space reactor melting, causing radiation to escape into the environment. Rocketdyne claims to have changed its ways. "Back during the Cold War years, when KGB agents were working the San Fernando Valley, we were required to maintain a degree of secrecy," says Dan Beck, Rocketdyne's public-relations chief. "But we put that era behind us years ago. Since the '80s, we've been very open, very responsive to the community. The idea of Rocketdyne being supersecretive and hiding things just isn't true." Dan Hirsch, the president of the Los Angeles-based environmental watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap, would beg to differ. Along with Parfrey, he serves on the EPA-sponsored Santa Susana Field Laboratory Workgroup that oversees the cleanup of SSFL. Hirsch has been the bane of Rocketdyne since 1979, when he was a lecturer at UCLA and one of his students showed him an instructional film that depicted workers at the Simi Valley facility cleaning up after the 1959 reactor meltdown, despite the company's rosy press release. Hirsch has no doubt that Rocketdyne continues to stonewall about the meltdown's serious aftermath: "The question we cannot answer is how much [radioactivity] was released and how much it affected people." Accidents and coverups haven't been the only problems plaguing Rocketdyne, which has also deliberately released goo into the hills and water near the SSFL facility. In 1961, Rocketdyne began burning radioactive waste in an open-air, sodium burn pit, euphemistically called the "Thermal Treatment Facility." That dangerous practice was banned by the California Environmental Protection Agency in 1989. The company pleaded guilty to the open-air burnings, and received a $280,000 fine to limit and settle all future claims. Despite the punishment, Rocketdyne continued to burn the waste outside, for which it was fined an additional $650,000 in 1990. Six years later, two scientists were killed when a "bucket test," or illegal burning of chemicals, exploded, a tragedy for which the company paid $202,500 in fines in 1999. Rocketdyne earned another dubious honor when it was fined $6.5 million for three counts of violating federal environmental laws-the largest such payout in U.S. history. By the 1990s, residents had had enough, and class-action lawsuits representing 50,000 San Fernando Valley inhabitants were filed against Rocketdyne. But they were dismissed after a judge determined that the residents should have known about pollution problems earlier from stories in the local papers, and that the statute of limitations had run out-this, despite the company's protestations over the years that they ran a clean operation. But folks possibly affected by Rocketdyne's SSFL still haven't given up the fight, soldiering on in their battle against the Hill. -Michael Collins * * * Michael Collins is a journalist in Los Angeles who has written for Los Angeles Magazine, LA Weekly and many other publications. He currently is a board member of the Los Angeles Press Club. |
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