To this day, the site has yet to be cleaned up of the various contaminants, and the State of California has resisted allowing the Environmental Protection Agency to designate it as a Superfund site. Department of Energy and Boeing, the current owner of the land, both play down the incident, with DOE claiming not to know how much, if any, radiation was released, while Boeing claims a lack of elevated incidents of cancer in the employees that work in the area.Ī study released by the UCLA School of Public Health in 2006 refutes those claims, and demonstrates those who were exposed to radiation had more occurrences of key cancers than did those workers who experienced less exposure to the radiation.īoeing has done its best to hamper the study by not providing its data about the prevailing wind currents at the time of the radioactive venting. Some experts claim, based on a five-year study, that the amount of radiation released over the San Fernando Valley was 459 times that which was released at Three Mile Island. This experiment took place before the widespread adoption of containment domes for nuclear power plants, and thus the radioactive material fell out unrestrained, to wherever the winds and air currents carried it. What is known, is that deadly plutonium and strontium were indeed released during the episode. There is no record as to exactly how much or what kind, though there are sources that say it was immeasurable because the measuring equipment available at the time did not have the ability to read emissions that high. On Jthat experiment went horribly wrong, and there was no one around to report on it.įor 14 days, radioactive material was vented into the open air. Sodium, which explodes on contact with water, was used to cool the reactor. The Sodium Reactor Experiment was designed to prove that nuclear power could be used to generate commercial power. The site was used by Rocketdyne for jet fuel testing and by the Atomic Energy Commission for nuclear power experiments. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory is located a scant couple of miles from the city of Simi Valley and only about 30 miles from greater Los Angeles. ![]() ![]() The under-reported meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in the late 1950s was far worse, and in fact, it is the worst nuclear disaster in United States history. While journalists and editors at CNN have reported it was the worst nuclear meltdown ever in the United States, they are wrong. (EnviroNews California) – The infamous accident at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island power facility is typically the first meltdown that comes to mind when people think about nuclear disasters in America.
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