by Bill Fawcett
The Santa Susana Field Laboratory’s state-of-the-art design included four distinct areas:
Areas I and II, partly owned by first the Air Force, then NASA, included rocket and missile labs, test firing areas, the Advanced Propulsion Test Facility, and an open air burn pit.
Area III included a systems test area and laboratories.
Area IV, partly leased by the Department of Energy and run by the Atomics International branch of Rocketdyne, contained the nuclear energy research, fuel development, and disposal facilities. In later years Area IV hosted Star Wars Laser research, also known as the Strategic Defense Initiative.
To protect any eventual human habitation—and the secrecy of the projects—a large buffer zone of undeveloped wilderness extended around much of the site.
The design seemed to take everything into account—except the very nature of the volatile substances involved and the fact that Rocketdyne was determined to “push the envelope,” without seeming to consider the rule that every good cook knows—cleaning up the mess is part of the job.
In 1948, Rocketdyne began testing rockets and test firing rocket engines in areas I, II, and III. Over the years it is estimated they conducted approximately 30,000 open-air rocket tests, many successfully arching into the California sky. They also had some spectacular failures. It was not unusual for a rocket to blow up on the pad if something was out of balance. In fact, the whole point of the lab was to make certain that any failures occurred on the test pad—not during an actual launch. Rocketdyne’s track record speaks for itself on that count. Their credits include the Saturn V, workhorse of the Apollo Program, the Jupiter, Redstone, and Delta as well as engines like the RS-27A, used on the Atlas ICBM, and as the Space Shuttle Main Engine.
Of course rockets and rocket engines require rocket fuel—high grade rocket fuel, as well as oxidizers, solvents, and other volatile components necessary for getting the large chunks of metal off the ground. At the very least, setting these mega-candles off created serious emissions. At worst, in the case of spills or engine misfires, significant amounts of hazardous chemicals were released into the environment. At SSFL, the goal was getting the engines to work—no one was particularly concerned about what happened to the chemicals involved. As a result, each and every test released some degree of toxins into the environment. But that was only the beginning.
After each launch and each engine test, the test stands, pads, and engines had to be cleaned with trichloroethylene (TCE)—in copious amounts. Known to cause damage to the human nervous system, liver, lungs, and heart, TCE can cause coma and death when inhaled or ingested in large quantities.
No one knows exactly how much of the rocket fuel or cleaning chemicals leached into the ground over the years, but recently the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) detected dangerous levels of perchlorate (from rocket fuel) in an artesian well at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, a Jewish education camp, approximately a mile from the lab. The well showed perchlorate concentrations of 140 to 150 parts per billion (ppb). According to DTSC the highest acceptable levels by California standards are 4 ppb. Rocketdyne denied the possibility of contamination—yet they purchased Brandeis-Bardin land, now part of the perimeter buffer around the SSFL site.
The DTSC believes that even more of the chemicals are trapped between layers of rock deep underground. Those toxins are stable—for the moment. An earthquake, common in California, could quickly change that.
Yet, despite years of fuel and chemical spills, the rocket propulsion sections of the SSFL are practically immaculate compared to the rest of the lab.
The fourth—and most secretive—section of the lab became infamous for the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history when, in 1959, the Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE) experienced a meltdown, releasing radiation into the air (see Overcooking with Atoms). But the SRE was not the only nuclear reactor on site, though it was the largest. Over the years a total of ten nuclear reactors, mostly low power, operated out of area IV. One of them, the SNAP8DR, became the first nuclear power system in space, launching from Vandenberg AFB on April 3, 1965. To this day SNAP8 remains the only nuclear reactor placed in space by the United States.
The Sodium Reactor was also not the only reactor to have a nuclear accident. At least four of the ten reactors experienced accidents. In addition to the 1959 SRE meltdown: the AE6 reactor experienced a release of fission gasses the same year; in ’64 the SNAP8ER experienced damage to 80 percent of its fuel; in ’69 the SNAP8DR (new and improved) received similar damage to one third of its fuel. Lesser radiological incidents within the reactors included a wash cell explosion and a steam cleaning pad contamination incident.
That many accidents—especially the radioactive kind—would have been bad enough. But it got worse. Because all the reactors were classed as “experimental,” none of them had containment structures. Any vented radioactive materials were free to escape directly into the environment.
And yet these reactor accidents were probably not the worst events to happen at the SSF lab.
In addition to the reactors themselves, area IV had an entire array of nuclear support facilities. Known as “critical facilities,” these included a facility for fabricating plutonium fuel rods; a uranium-carbide fuel fabrication facility; a sodium burn pit, in which non-radioactive sodium-coated objects were burned clean in an open-air pit; and a “Hot Lab.”
The Hot Lab, a facility for remotely cutting up irradiated nuclear fuel, specialized in the disassembly and on-site storage of nuclear material. The Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Energy both shipped spent nuclear fuel from their facilities around the country to the SSFL lab to be decladded and examined. Thought to be the largest Hot Lab in the country at the time, it was probably not the safest—though it was definitely “hot.” The lab suffered several fires involving radioactive materials. In 1957 a fire inside the Hot Lab got out of control and according to reports at the time “massive contamination” resulted. Passage of time did little to improve Hot Lab safety. As late as 1971 documents record a dangerous fire involving contaminated combustible reactor coolant.
Many environmental researchers believe that accidents at the Hot Lab and the Plutonium Fuel facility may have been more serious than even the SRE meltdown, but very few details about their accident histories have been made available to the public.
Yet while activities at both the propulsion labs and the nuclear facilities created potentially lethal environmental hazards to both workers and nearby civilians, it was the scientists on “trash detail” who faced the greatest immediate danger.
Between the propulsion lab chemicals and the nuclear components, the SSFL generated large amounts of hazardous material waste, much of it quite volatile or toxic. In addition, toxic and radioactive materials were regularly shipped in from other facilities. Yet, for some reason, despite all the other state-of-the-art facilities, the SSFL design omitted any equally high-tech way to dispose of all the hazardous waste. Most of it ended up in barrels, and the storage space was limited. Rather than attempt to continue storing the rapidly accumulating barrels of poison until the facility was buried in it, the order came down to dispose of it. So the lab workers did.
Utilizing a unique—and possibly insane—method of disposal, the crew responsible for disposal duties placed barrels marked for disposal in an open area, then, from behind the protection of a small barrier some distance away, they took a rifle, took aim—and shot each barrel. The resulting explosion, caused by the bullet impacting the volatile contents, usually did succeed in destroying the offending barrel. As for the contents? It appeared to have been vaporized, but in fact much of it simply became airborne—a true case of out of sight, out of mind.
It is unclear exactly when this practice began, but according to DOE official Mike Lopez, as reported by the Ventura County Reporter in 2002, it was used as a typical cleanup procedure for a number of years, only ending sometime prior to the 1990s. The California legislature even found it n
ecessary to create a bill (SB990) concerning this manner of waste removal.
Target shooting, while unique, was not the most dangerous method of waste removal. Because of the large number of nuclear operations that utilized liquid sodium, the SSFL had an open-air pit, known as the sodium burn pit, for cleaning sodium-contaminated components. On paper, this pit was only for burning off the sodium buildup to allow the components to be reused. In practice, however, it was used as a trash-burning pit for everything—including chemical and radioactive waste. One worker, James Palmer, interviewed by the Ventura County Star, spoke of going home at night to kiss his wife, only to burn her lips from the chemicals that accumulated on his own lips while at work. The article went on to report that out of the twenty-seven men on his crew, twenty-two died from cancer.
On July 26, 1994, the dangerous practice turned deadly. Otto Heiny and Larry Pugh, both scientists at the facility, were under orders to burn the contents of unmarked containers in the burn pit. Believing they were burning the leftover chemicals as allowed by law, Heiny poured an unmarked container of explosive material into the fire. Both men were killed in the resulting explosion, and a third man injured in the blast. When the case went to court in 2004, three Rocketdyne officials pled guilty to illegally storing explosive materials. The more serious charges, related to illegally burning hazardous waste, resulted in a deadlocked jury. Rocketdyne only recently admitted that toxins, including napalm, dioxins, and unmarked waste products from the nuclear facilities were regularly burned at the burn pit.
Even when used successfully, the burn pits released toxins into the environment in the smoke from the burning and in toxic runoff every time it rained. Rocketdyne claims to have sealed the pits with impermeable clay to prevent runoff—but it turns out the clay was actually very porous, only slowing the runoff.
In 1989, a DOE investigation found widespread chemical and radioactive contamination throughout the property. The resulting public outcry at this revelation led Rocketdyne to terminate all nuclear activity at the site. A number of lawsuits and the beginning of cleanup operations followed.
In 1995, the EPA and the DOE entered into a joint agreement to clean the site to EPA Superfund standards. Boeing purchased Rocketdyne 1996, inheriting the entire mess. However in 2003 the DOE and Boeing, probably realizing the true scope of the cleanup, performed an about-face and announced the SSFL property would no longer be brought up to Superfund standards, but instead put forward a plan that only involved cleanup of 1 percent of the contaminated soil and included a plan to release the land for unrestricted use in approximately ten years. The resulting battle between the EPA, the local residents, and Boeing/DOE is still raging.
It is doubtful the advances in aerospace technology that led to the current space program would have been possible without the vital contributions from the Santa Susana Lab. Nuclear science, too, owes a great debt to the work done at the lab. But because Rocketdyne focused so completely on attaining these advances without giving serious thought to the consequences, the employees of the lab as well as the people of southern California may pay the price for decades to come.
In August of 2005, the Pratt & Whitney Corporation purchased Rocketdyne from Boeing. There was one condition, however—the Santa Susana Field Laboratory could not be included in the sale. As of this writing Boeing still owns the SSFL.
“Believe it or not, I’m walking on air. / I never thought I could feel so free.”
—Mike Post and Stephen Geyer, theme song from Greatest American Hero
Under Pressure
The First Space Walk
Teresa Patterson
Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was the first man to view the awesome vistas of space unencumbered by the confines of a capsule. Now an artist, he has spent much of his life trying to capture the wonders of those moments on canvas. But Leonov came very close to becoming a permanent part of that vista.
In 1965, both the U.S. and Soviet manned space programs were fighting to become the first to land a man on the moon. At that point, the Soviet Union led the race, having launched Sputnik 1, the first successful man-made satellite to orbit the earth, followed by the first manned orbit, with cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, and the first woman in space, Valentina Terechkova. Russia had even scored the first three-man space mission, though they had to send the men up without spacesuits in order to fit them all in the tiny Voskhod capsule. But the Russians felt the United States closing fast on their heels after the success of the Mercury program and preparations to launch the first Gemini mission.
To hold onto their lead, the Soviets planned to prove a man could function successfully outside his space capsule and “walk in space.” It seemed a simple enough objective. They had already proven they could get men into space and back down again. All they had to do was get a man out of the pressurized capsule—without having his blood boil in the vacuum of space—and get him back in again a few moments later.
Of course, as one poet observed in a song popularized at sci-fi conventions, if you open a pressurized spaceship hatch to the vacuum of space, “the air is sure to leave it. And air is very hard to catch, you never will retrieve it.”
In order to prevent the depressurization of the entire capsule, the Soviet designers created an “airlock,” a small isolated area with an inner and outer hatch that would allow controlled depressurization without endangering the pressure of the entire cabin. To keep the airlock from taking up valuable space in the tiny cabin, they made it inflatable.
To protect the cosmonaut from the deadly vacuum, they created a strong, flexible space suit, a human-shaped pressure balloon, which would hold a high-pressure artificial atmosphere around his body.
On March 18, 1965, Alexei Leonov and Pavel Belyayev rode their Voskhod 2 spacecraft into orbit. Approximately an hour later while Belyayev piloted the craft, Leonov inflated the airlock, entered it, and stepped through the hatch into space. The young cosmonaut spent twelve minutes making history as he floated outside his ship, anchored only by a five-foot tether.
During those twelve minutes, however, Leonov’s flexible suit responded to the lack of external pressure by expanding—much the way a balloon does as it rises in the atmosphere. It also became rigid. Upon his return to the ship he discovered he could no longer fit back through the tiny hatch. He found himself trapped outside his ship. In order to get through the hatch he opened a valve and began bleeding air from his suit, a little at a time. After almost ten minutes he still wasn’t small enough to get all the way into the airlock. Finally, in desperation, he bled off almost all of the air from his suit and still barely managed to struggle, feet first, into the airlock, and, with effort, sealed the outer door. He made it just in time for the ship’s passage over the ground stations in the Soviet Far East.
Unfortunately Leonov’s problems didn’t end there. Notorious for technical glitches, the automatic guidance control malfunctioned, omitting a crucial command to initiate the reentry sequence. Pavel Belyayev had to land the ship manually with instructions from ground control. For some reason, during sixteen revolutions of the orbit, ground control kept sending the order to initiate retrofire after the ship had already passed the retrofire point. Belyayev managed to bring the capsule down safely—but landed over one thousand kilometers off course in a snow bank deep in the Ural Mountain wilderness. The two cosmonauts were forced to spend the night where they landed while rescue crews struggled through the thick forest to reach them. Even then, the area was too heavily wooded to allow a helicopter to land, so they had to ski to a safer landing zone before being airlifted back to civilization. The two cosmonauts finally returned to the Baikonur Cosmodrome approximately forty-eight hours after their initial landing, having spent more time in the wilderness than they had in their entire historic mission.
“Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We’re dreamers, you see, but we’re also realists, of a sort.”
&nbs
p; —William Gibson
The Biospherians in the Bubble
Joshua Spivak
Science has never been able to fully answer the question of why the earth is well suited for life. James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis, argued that the living organisms on earth evolved in symbiosis with their surroundings. But how could this theory be tested?
Lovelock and other scientitsts hatched an idea.
What about a working model of our world?
They built a miniature, completely self-contained version of earth—in Arizona—filled it with a diverse array of species, and locked in eight scientists as well, serving as the “keystone predator” in this quasi-laboratory, for a stint of two years.
If they were correct, the air, water, and life forms would work symbiotically.
If it didn’t, they would at least have a wealth of scientific data.
Rather than blow everything on an “all or nothing” venture, the plan prescribed a series of small qualitative and quantitative steps. The first was extrapolated from a series of experiments performed by Russian scientist Evgenii Shepelev, in which he constructed and inhabited a completely sealed steel chamber filled with only green algae in a water solution for a trial period of twenty-four hours (showing that the algae’s production of oxygen combined with his production of carbon dioxide balanced each other out). A group of American scientists next locked themselves in an enclosed environment (one that grew food and had water condensed from the humid air) for three weeks.
With each test verifying the scientists’ theories, by the late 1980s they were ready to re-create the project on a large scale. Funded by Edward Bass, the scientists built an eight-story complex, costing one hundred and fifty million dollars, in the Arizona desert, and named it Biosphere 2 (Earth being the original Biosphere). Once the complex was constructed, Biosphere 2 was stocked with living organisms, including four thousand different species, and a number of different environments.