Meltdown California: The World’s First Nuclear Accident

[Modern School]

My students have been asking me all week about the risks of fallout from Japan’s nuclear disaster. Californians have been emptying drug stores of iodine tablets in preparation for the impending assault on their thyroids. (Hopefully they haven’t already started consuming them, as the risk of iodine overdose is far more likely). Nevertheless, the disaster in Japan is horrifying, particularly for those in the middle of it. And it is not yet over. It will be some time before we know the true extent of the damage.

While Chernobyl was the worst nuclear accident to date, it was certainly not the first. Nor was the meltdown at Three Mile Island, which miraculously had relatively minimal affects on people. The first nuclear accident occurred at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), also known as RocketDyne, in Ventura Country, California, in 1959.

According to Kim Vincent, who wrote California's Historical Nuclear Meltdown, the SSFL accident released far more radiation than Three Mile Island. The SSFL was used as a testing site for rockets and had a sodium reactor used for nuclear research during the Cold War. As such, it was fairly secretive. The details of the SSFL meltdown were essentially kept hidden from the public until UCLA researchers and few reporters tracked down the details in the afterglow of Three Mile Island’s meltdown in 1979, twenty years after the fact. Scientists and workers at the site were sworn to secrecy, one of whom never told a soul until he saw himself on a documentary about the event.

SSFL was the first U.S. commercial nuclear power plant. It was not well tested and workers were not well versed in the possible problems that could happen. On July 13th, 1959, the reactor started to act up. Workers tried to determine the nature of the problem, but failed, and turned the reactor back on and ran it for another two weeks before discovering that 13 of 43 fuel rods had partially melted. While much smaller than the Three Mile Island reactor, SSFL is believed to have released up to 240 times more radiation than the 1979 disaster. The reason for this is that it did not have a concrete containment structure.

In 1989, the Department of Energy said that the SSFL site was still contaminated. Researchers have found increased levels of bladder cancer in the area. UCLA did a follow up report that determined that cleanup workers had cancer death rates three times higher than the general population. In 2007, the EPA declared SSFL a Superfund site.

Many workers at the site were enlisted to help clean up, including many from the rocket division who did not have any expertise in radiation containment, according to the Venture Country Star. Many were told not to wear their film badges (used to measure exposure to radiation) so they could continue helping the cleanup effort even after surpassing their radiation limits and they often wore nothing more protective than coveralls. Cleaning materials were often just dumped. They also released radioactive gas over the San Fernando Valley and did not inform the public, while the company repeatedly downplayed the event and denied there was any danger to the public.

Modern School
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/

[leveymg]

1. "The company repeatedly downplayed the event and denied there was any danger to the public."

That seems to be a constant in the equation, doesn't it?

[CRH]

2. I grew up 150 miles from Ventura, ...

and was 9 years old when it happened, and never heard a thing about it, until now.

[JDPriestly]

3. K&R

[AnotherDreamWeaver]

4. I grew up in the Antelope Valley

But that year my Dad took a two month vacation and drove the family to Alaska to see my Mom's sister and her family. My good fortune I guess in more ways than I knew at the time. I was 11.

I remember they were always testing us to see if we had "Valley Fever" when I was in school. They said it was something people caught from the dust.

[hunter]

5. Wikipedia has a fairly good account.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment

The account in the O.P. isn't accurate and it's somewhat misleading. It wasn't a "commercial power plant" in the sense of being built for power production. It was a thoroughly experimental device designed for research. The power it produced was for publicity.

Furthermore it's very difficult to attribute any cancer clusters to this particular accident simply because so much crap was being dumped in this area by the aerospace and other high technology industries.

Remember it was 1959 -- gasoline had lead in it, kids bounced around in the back seats of cars without seat belts, people washed glassware with benzene, and everyone was living in a stew of pesticides and other miracles of the modern age of chemistry... chemicals that have since been banned.

Such was the carelessness and naiveté of this time concerning nuclear reactors that the accident itself wasn't immediately recognized.

The exact date of the fuel damage is unknown but believed to be within the period of July 12 to July 26, 1959.

At the time, the operators were experiencing unusual reactor behavior but were unaware of the damage. They continued operations for several days before shutting down the reactor for examination. When the operators attempted to remove the fuel elements from the reactor, most were removed normally but some were found to be stuck. Pieces of the damaged fuel elements also fell to the bottom of the reactor. In the following months, Atomics International personnel removed all of the stuck fuel elements, retrieved the pieces of dropped fuel elements, cleaned the sodium system and installed a new reactor core. The Sodium Reactor Experiment was restarted on September 7, 1960 some fourteen months after the accident. In 1961, Atomics International produced a movie explaining the accident and how the recovery operation was conducted. The Sodium Reactor Experiment operated until February 15, 1964 without a similar incident.

I think most of the secrecy encountered by some anti-nuclear researchers (my dumpster diving self included) was the result of ordinary Cold War paranoia. Imagine Chekov in Star Trek IV asking for directions to the nuclear wessels...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdSJFrhb-HM

Edited to add:

Watch the Atomic Energy Commission movie about the accident

http://www.etec.energy.gov/Reading-Room/Video/Video_index.html

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. EBR-1 — November 29, 1955

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I

…

The design purpose of EBR-I was not to produce electricity but instead to validate nuclear physics theory which suggested that a breeder reactor should be possible. In 1953, experiments revealed the reactor was producing additional fuel during fission, thus confirming the hypothesis. However, on November 29, 1955, the reactor at EBR-I suffered a partial meltdown during a coolant flow test. The flow test was trying to determine the cause of unexpected reactor responses to changes in coolant flow. It was subsequently repaired for further experiments, which determined that thermal expansion of the fuel rods and the thick plates supporting the fuel rods was the cause of the unexpected reactor response.

…

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. While it's unclear from that if radiation was released, it definitely was at Windscale in 1957

Graphite overheated and fire broke out
Air from fan fuelled fire
Nuclear contaminants travelled up chimney
Filter blocked some but not all contaminated material
Radioactive cloud spread over UK and Europe

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7030281.stm

So calling the SSFL accident in 1959 "the world's first nuclear accident" is clearly wrong.

[GliderGuider]

11. It was probably the first accident at an electrical power reactor.

Not quite the same claim to fame, but still a significant event.

[OKIsItJustMe]

13. FWIW

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/mragheb/www/NPRE%20457%20CSE%20462%20Safety%20Analysis%20of%20Nuclear%20Reactor%20Systems/Experimental%20Breeder%20Reactor%20Number%201%20%20EBRI%20Criticality%20Accident.pdf

The Experimental Breeder Reactor, EBR-I was the first reactor built at the Idaho National Laboratory, INL. It began operation in 1951 and produced the first usable electricity from nuclear heat on December 20, 1951. It achieved full-power operation the next day.

…

[OKIsItJustMe]

12. Experimental Breeder Reactor Number I, EBR-I Criticality Accident

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/mragheb/www/NPRE%20457%20CSE%20462%20Safety%20Analysis%20of%20Nuclear%20Reactor%20Systems/Experimental%20Breeder%20Reactor%20Number%201%20%20EBRI%20Criticality%20Accident.pdf

…

Fifteen minutes later, radioactivity within the control room set off the alarms and everyone evacuated the building. Half of the football-sized core had melted.

…

[GliderGuider]

7. My GF knew about this when I told her this morning.

She almost bought a house in the neighborhood around 2004. The house was wonderful, but something struck her as strange about the area - it wasn't as popular as it should have been, given how beautiful the place was. She somehow schmoozed the real estate agent into telling her why. She didn't buy the place.

I didn't know about it until I read this article, and I was amazed that my artist GF would know about an obscure(d) 50 year old sodium reactor in Ventura County. But then it's not the first time she has amazed me with her knowledge.

[hunter]

14. Hmmm. The area is strange. It's not because of the nuclear accident.

As much as I hate to reveal too much personal information here on DU and embarrass my kids or invoke a call from my mom, I used to be able to go up on the hill and watch the rocket engine tests throwing their thundering plumes into the sky. Later, when I was a more mobile and adventurous, and let's face it, reckless, I could get quite a bit closer...

I've got family living an easy early morning walk or jog from the accident site. I stay there often. I learned a long time ago that nobody bothers a sweaty jogger... well, most of the time. A few times in my youth I pushed the limit and got ejected from places.

"Grandma Prisby" who built a shiny folk art village from stuff she found at the dump is representative of the community of the time.

http://www.agilitynut.com/h/prisbrey.html

Other Simi Valley residents were psychedelic rocket scientists, technicians, and engineers, innumerable odd evangelical Christian churches with congregations numbering a few dozen that were always splitting and merging like some kind of amoebic life form, vile white supremacists, pot smoking pacifists, violent drug gangs and ... I could go on. The Simi valley was a place the Sheriff didn't like to go, maybe because writing a police report often became an exercise of futile surrealism.

Eventually real estate developers made the place profitable for themselves by creating a safe white bedroom community for LA police officers (who would get instant mortgage approval and significant property upgrades as incentives to buy) and various others fleeing the rising tides of urban brown people in Los Angeles.

[MineralMan]

9. Here's a personal account I wrote. I lived just a few air miles

from that reactor when it melted down. From my journal, posted March 15:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/MineralMan/133

[GliderGuider]

10. +1 - A fascinating personal glimpse of history. n/t