Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment

by Joseph Mangano

  Finally, on July 23, the order was given to shut down the reactor and end the ill-fated Power Run #14. Some of the fuel elements were stuck when operators tried to move them – a sign that a meltdown had taken place. Gradually, power was reduced until it was shut off completely on July 26. Power Run #14 was finally over.

  The matter at hand now was not to try and restart the reactor, but to figure out what had gone wrong and what harm had been caused. Of the reactor’s forty-three fuel assemblies, thirteen had been damaged – a meltdown that was the most severe to that point, and quite possibly the most severe in the sixty-plus years of the US atomic era. These assemblies were ruined, and had to be constantly cooled before being disassembled and stored permanently, so that its red-hot particles would not expose humans to its radioactivity.

  The fuel assemblies were ruined, but shutting down the reactor was not the end of the problems they caused. The question of how to secure the damaged fuel assemblies was a daunting one. As bad as the accident was, it was made far worse because the reactor had no containment structure – which is the concrete dome now standard in all nuclear reactors to prevent radiation from leaking into the air in case of an accident. “It was just a building with walls,” Pace says. Atomics International officials made the decision to pump the huge amount of radioactive gases into tanks, and then release the gases into the atmosphere. But the company did this without informing the public.

  The thirteen damaged fuel assemblies were removed from the reactor one by one. The highly delicate process was a risky one, and trouble naturally ensued. On August 2, one of the assemblies was placed into a protective cask, but raising the cask broke the assembly, with part of it now lodging in the cask and part remaining in the core. Radioactivity, naturally, was spurting from the assembly. Pace, who was working at the reactor at the time, recalls that the situation flustered the operator:

  It was such a shock to the operator, he panicked. He pushed the wrong button to stop it to see what had happened … and this lifted the lead shield off the floor that protected against radiation leaking out of the reactor core… The panicked worker ran and signaled with the alarm for everyone to get out of the building.

  Another worker volunteered to return to the building and lower the shield, but after he did the building was kept off limits for two weeks afterwards. The health of the two operators is still not known.

  Measuring radioactivity levels at the site was usually a routine function. For example, operators measured concentrations of radioactive gas in tanks at the reactor every day. In previous runs with problems, levels had been found to be roughly ten times more than typical levels – which apparently disturbed nobody at Atomics International. But levels in July 1959 were literally off the charts – at minimum, about 10,000 times more than normal (Atomics International chart, 1959). One estimate, made years later by David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, was that the radioactivity level above the reactor pool was one million times greater on August 1, just after Run #14 ended, compared to June 20, in the period between runs.

  Calculating how much radioactivity had escaped from the stricken reactor would be a difficult undertaking under any circumstances, as hundreds of radioactive chemicals are produced, some of which decay and disappear in hours or days. To compound the problem, in the early days of the nuclear era, equipment was relatively unsophisticated, and was unable to make any estimate of total releases. Decades later, some experts tried to reconstruct what had happened and make an estimate, but these attempts were also fraught with limitations.

  But there was another element that limited the accuracy of calculating releases – deception. Atomics International was not about to make this terrible incident seem worse than it was. The first move was to inform workers that the situation was not to be discussed with anyone – not just media, but even families. Apparently, workers (many of whom were loyal or frightened of any consequences if they were caught snitching) kept the secret. “All employees were instructed that the incident was not to be discussed,” says Pace. “I told my wife very little about it.”

  Three days after the fateful Power Run #14 ended, an ad-hoc Committee was created to study the situation by Atomics International. The panel returned a judgment of “no harm” in prompt fashion. The company issued its version of the incident to the media. The Los Angeles Daily News of August 21 published a story entitled “Parted Fuel Element Seen at Atomics International.” The paper accepted the company’s line, and stated that the sodium reactor had operated safely.

  Just one month after the meltdown, on August 29, 1959, company officials prepared a document for internal circulation and review by the AEC, stating that fuel elements were damaged, and that leaks due to tetralin failure were the likely cause. But while the document admitted damage, it was also adamant that no harm had occurred to workers or local residents: “The fuel element damage is not an indication of unsafe reactor conditions. No release of radioactive materials to the plant or its environs occurred and operating personnel were not exposed to harmful conditions.”

  The blatant lie can only be explained in one way: stating the truth would have frightened the public, possibly dooming the entire Santa Susana effort, and even the entire US nuclear power program. This short memo was followed by a longer report issued by Atomics International in March 1962. The report’s summary continued the party line that while fuel elements had been damaged in July 1959, the harm was minimal:

  Although significant fuel melting did not occur, some degree of preferential fission products volatility is involved in the relative release of the various fission products… Only Xe and Kr isotopes were found in the reactor cover gas.

  The report was referring to krypton-85 and xenon-133, both gases that decay quickly and disappear within days. There was no admission that any of the other fission products, including strontium-90, cesium-137, cobalt-60, and Tritium (which decay much more slowly and can be detected for many years) had escaped from Santa Susana. The conclusion defied scientific logic, since splitting uranium atoms results in hundreds of new chemicals, which exist and are transported all together. Again, company officials could not bring themselves to fully admit the terrible damage they had caused.

  There were other subsequent incident reports and monitoring reports that covered the events of July 1959, but never did any of these admit to any release of radioactivity that might harm local residents.

  The issue of how workers’ radiation exposure was handled was particularly vexing. Employees at Santa Susana typically wore film badges that measured radiation exposure. The badges were picked up at the start of each work day, and turned in when workers had finished their shift and left the premises. Atomics International was responsible for monitoring daily and yearly exposures to ensure that they complied with federal specifications.

  Even over a half century later, it is not clear how Atomics International handled the matter of monitoring worker exposure. The film badges may not have been able to document exposures with precision, since levels were so much higher than ever before. There is also a question of how diligent the company was in ensuring badges were worn. Pace asserts that they were removed from employees; without monitoring, it was impossible to measure contamination levels: “Before July 13, we wore film badges, and after then, at some point, they took them away, since they knew that the levels would be really high.”

  Then there was the matter of the company ensuring that workers took needed precautions. Apparently, there was no special clothing or equipment to protect workers from radiation exposure. Pace says that ordinary cotton coveralls were worn even during clean up operations involving removal of radiation. Instead of looking like astronauts, like they should have, employees looked more like ordinary factory workers – only Santa Susana was no ordinary factory.

  In 1959, and for decades after, no records of worker exposure were released to the public by Atomics International, which steadily maintained that regulations had not been v
iolated. No questions were raised about any documents, statements, and conclusions. No employee of Atomics International questioned them. No member of Congress or the AEC questioned them. No local resident questioned them. No member of the media questioned them. Blind faith ruled for years after the 1959 disaster.

  The no-question response reflects not just the prevailing culture of compliance and obedience so prevalent in those times, but the belief that somehow, despite the failure of Power Run #14 and ones before it, the system was working and not posing any harm. Plant operators should have known better; scientists had established that the power of radiation exposure could be devastating, and even operators who weren’t trained scientists knew they were working behind thick walls separating them from the reactor for good reason. Everyone knew that the fuel elements contained the same uranium (and its 100-plus toxic byproducts) used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in atomic bomb test explosions in the atmosphere. Yet no one seemed to be overly concerned about the clear dangers at Santa Susana.

  Those who have studied the atomic era have considered possible reasons for these attitudes. Some have suggested a delusion existed that nuclear technology was the greatest thing to ever occur, and that somehow any problem could be fixed. Others have also considered that nuclear supporters insisted on believing that the technology somehow wasn’t that dangerous, since it was used for peaceful purposes. Still others believe that instead of a delusion, there was a deliberate obfuscation of the true risks to ensure that nothing stood in the way of the program’s progress – even if humans and other life suffered in the process.

  Despite the troubles of the summer of 1959, the show went on at Santa Susana. The Sodium Reactor Experiment was repaired, and reopened in September 1960. More experiments were conducted, and in February 1964, the reactor shut down again so more modifications could be made. But in May 1965, Atomics International officials finally gave up, and closed down the reactor permanently. The decommissioning process that followed was an intricate and slow one. Reactor parts were taken away and placed into permanent storage by 1981, and the building that housed the reactor was destroyed in 1999. Today, a grassy field marks the site of America’s worst nuclear disaster – a stark contrast to the events of years before.

  Santa Susana’s nuclear program encompassed much more than just the Sodium Reactor Experiment, and lasted far beyond 1959. Altogether, ten reactors were built and operated. Three other accidents occurred at the Santa Susana site, all within a ten-year period when optimism about nuclear power development in America was so high.

  The AE-6 reactor actually experienced an accident in March 1959, four months before the Sodium Reactor Experiment meltdown. Radioactive gases were released into the atmosphere. The SNAP8ER reactor, which was intended to power missions in the US space program, was a troubled facility, with a history of unsafe practices and conditions. The reactor operated in spite of these problems, until in 1964 operators determined that 80% of its radioactive fuel had been damaged. The SNAP8DR reactor also was part of the Santa Susana program to build the SNAP-10A reactor launched into outer space, and experienced problems similar to its counterpart SNAP8ER. In 1969, operators found that about 30% of its fuel was damaged.

  The ten Santa Susana reactors all closed by 1980, but by no means was the assault and long-term damage on the environment limited to what occurred inside these ten reactors. These additional types of operations include the following:

  Sodium Burn Pit. Atomics International operated a sodium burn pit in an open space in Area IV at Santa Susana, close to the Sodium Reactor Experiment. The purpose of the pit was to burn waste products. Actually, the pit was conceived as an improvement to the original means of disposing radioactive waste from the site. For several years, waste was put in barrels, moved by truck to the Pacific coast, placed in a tug boat, and then shipped until it was dumped into the Santa Cruz Basin, about halfway between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. The barrels were subsequently found to leak toxic radioactivity into the ocean. But even before leaks were known, Santa Susana operators wanted a more efficient way – not necessarily a safer way – to dispose of waste. Not having to move waste from the site would certainly be more efficient.

  The highly dangerous activities at the sodium burn pit were casually noted in an internal memo at Atomics International:

  This was, and has since been, used to dispose of dangerous chemicals, fuels, oxidizers, explosives, etc. These are burned with quantities of ordinary contaminated fuels. This procedure eliminated the costly method in use at that time, of trucking them from the facility and dumping in the ocean.

  What actually happened in the pit was reminiscent of the Wild West. Contamination was placed into barrels, which were dumped into the burn pit, and waste was vented into the air periodically. During these ventings, workers loaded rifles and fired into the barrels, which ignited and exploded. The plumes of heavily contaminated air then moved with prevailing winds, even though the plumes were never tracked. There is no evidence that workers who fired on the barrels in the pit took any special precautions, such as masks. In addition, there were no measurements of amounts of highly dangerous chemicals disseminated by these plumes.

  Burn Pit for Components. Another open air burn pit was dug close to the sodium burn pit, for the purpose of disposing of Sodium Reactor Experiment components. These were placed in pools of water, which caused them to burn and boil for days at a time, as sodium reacts violently with water, causing toxic vapor to drift into the air. Periodically, the contaminated water was pumped out of the pit, and disposed into a nearby ravine that abutted a children’s camp. Burning of hazardous materials continued long after the last of the ten Santa Susana reactors closed in 1980. Again, the extent of contamination and damage to humans from the toxic vapors remains unknown.

  The Hot Lab. In 1957, Santa Susana became designated by the AEC as a site to reprocess used nuclear fuel, a recycling of fission products that had been used by reactors to prepare it for further use. This concept was one of the more risky ones of the early atomic era, as reprocessing is a dangerous process that involves creation of much greater levels of waste than the normal splitting of uranium atoms. The facility in which used fuel was accepted and prepared was aptly named the “Hot Lab” – the largest such facility in the nation.

  Soon after the process began in 1957, there was trouble. The Hot Lab cutting irradiated nuclear fuel caused a fire that “got out of control” and caused “massive contamination” according to a report issued decades later by Rockwell International. There were other fires at the Hot Lab, but this was the largest and the one that caused the greatest contamination to the site.

  Atomics International also operated a plutonium Fuel Fabrication facility at Santa Susana that created plutonium, a process considerably dirtier and more dangerous than creating uranium. The site was also home to a Uranium Carbide Fuel Fabrication facility that developed uranium fuel. Finally, radioactive waste was also transported from Santa Susana to three landfills in the Los Angeles area, none of which were specifically licensed to accept or store radioactive products.

  While the focus of this analysis is nuclear-related operations, it must be noted that Santa Susana also produced huge amounts of non-radioactive but harmful chemicals from its operations, and released them into the local environment. Many of these were produced from its rocket-related operations. Perhaps the most potent of these chemicals was trichloroethylene, a known carcinogen commonly known as TCE. This chemical was used to wash down test stands after firing rockets and missiles. Since about 20,000 such tests were conducted at the site, a huge amount of TCE was used over several decades, contaminating the site and moving off site as well. Other toxic chemicals used by Rocketdyne in its rocket program included perchlorate, PCBs, dioxins, hydrazines, heavy metals, and various volatile organic Compounds. Similar to the cocktail of radioactive chemicals, these products were not just used, but spilled, buried, mishandled, and released in large amounts, rounding out Santa Susana’s unfortunat
e ecological record.

  The strong optimism that marked the early years of the nuclear program at Santa Susana did not last. The mechanical failures, especially the meltdown of July 1959, served notice that this technology was not the clean solution that it was touted to be. And although the US nuclear program continued well after 1959, North American Aviation began to lose interest in the technology, as did other companies across the nation. As the priority assigned to atomic power development waned, Atomics International merged with the Rocketdyne division in 1978, and greater precedent was given to rocket development and testing. All nuclear reactors were abandoned at Santa Susana by 1980.

  The legacies of atomic operations at Santa Susana are multiple. The major goal of making a sodium-cooled reactor work and creating a model for a new type of reactor turned out to be a failure. Today, water is still the coolant of choice, although in time boiling water reactors gave way to pressurized water models. Of the 439 nuclear power reactors operating around the world today, only two are sodium cooled – none in the United States. The attempt at Santa Susana to develop an alternative to a water-cooled reactor was a complete failure.

  In addition to Santa Susana, three sodium-cooled reactors operated in the US. Each was small in scale, two of the three operated only briefly, and all posted poor results. The sixty-two megawatt Experimental Breeder Reactor II in Idaho operated from 1964 to 1994. The EBR II was the prototype for the Integral Fast Reactor, but Congress cut off DOE funding for this model before it was completed, and it was shut down. The seventy-five megawatt Hallam reactor in Nebraska was built by the AEC as a follow-up to Santa Susana. Corrosion and stress in the reactor caused the plant to close within several months; it never restarted because repairs would have been excessively costly. Fermi 1 was a sixty-one megawatt reactor thirty miles south of Detroit. It began operating at low power in 1963. Three years later, Fermi 1 experienced a partial meltdown, and a far greater catastrophe was narrowly averted. Several years later, the aptly titled We Almost Lost Detroit described the frightening scenario so close to a major metropolitan area. Fermi 1 was closed permanently in 1972 (see Chapter 8 for more on Fermi 1).