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America’s Worst Nuclear Disaster Was in California. Who Knew? 10

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RoopinderTara

RoopinderTara

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I was quite surprised to find out that the Santa Susana Field Lab, 35 miles from the center of Los Angeles, was the scene of partial core meltown in 1959. More radition was released there than Three Mile Island, over 900X according to one worst case analysis. A friend of mine, an engineer, told me about it. He is not one to believe in conspiracy theories so I checked it out. I read many accounts, looked at internal memos, listed to local broadcasts from investigative news teams, talked to people who lived nearby, too. Amazed how so few people have heard about it. Boeing owns the site now and denies that it is dangerous. Real estate agents sell houses less than 2 miles from the failed nuclear reactor. It is mind boggling. I wrote an article about it on engineering.com. I am very interested in what engineers in this forum have to say about it. If you have first hand knowledge about it or lived in the area I would very much appreciate hearing your story.


Roopinder Tara
Director of Content
ENGINEERING.com
 
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“Worse” being subjective, consider the SL-1 experimental reactor in Idaho, 1961. Full withdrawal of the control rod during maintenance caused a 3 MW reactor to go prompt critical generating 20 GW IN 4 milliseconds, vaporizing the core and all of the water inside, and causing the 26,000 pound reactor to lift more than 9’ off of the floor. They found one of the three operators who was killed impaled to the ceiling of the containment building as a result.


The resultant cleanup created 99,000 cubic feet of highly contaminated waste.
 
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And let's not forget Fermi I outside of Detroit in 1966, where they also had a partial core meltdown, and this was a sodium-cooled, fast-breeder reactor.


Personal note: When I was about 15 years old, four years before the accident, while the plant was still under construction, me and my family got a close-up and personal tour of the Fermi I nuclear plant. My cousin was an electrical engineer working for the general contractor building the plant and he arranged for us to visit areas not open to the general public, which included not only the control room, but also down on the main floor where the turbines were located and finally, inside the containment building itself. At one time we lived only a few miles from where the plant was to be constructed, although by the time the plant was finished and put into operation, we had moved up to Northern Michigan, however we still had family living in the area, some no more than five or six miles from the power plant.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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Don’t forget about when the Air Force jettisoned two nuclear bombs in Goldsboro, NC in 1961.

Uh Oh!



Good Luck,
Latexman
 
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All news to me.

I couldn't help wondering about the particulars of how/why the control rod on SL-1 came to be removed. The wiki summary of the accident investigation has the following (excerpt):

One of the required maintenance procedures called for the central control rod to be manually withdrawn approximately 4 inches (10 cm) in order to attach it to the automated control mechanism from which it had been disconnected. Post-accident calculations estimate that the main control rod was actually withdrawn approximately 26 inches (66 cm), causing the reactor to go prompt critical, which resulted in the steam explosion. The fuel, portions of the fuel plates, and water surrounding the fuel plates vaporized in the extreme heat. The expansion caused by this heating process caused water hammer as water was accelerated upwards toward the reactor vessel head, producing peak pressures of 10,000 pounds per square inch (69,000 kPa) on the head of the reactor vessel when air and then water struck the head at 160 feet per second (50 m/s).[27]

The most common theories proposed for the withdrawal of the rod are (1) sabotage or suicide by one of the operators, (2) a suicide-murder involving an affair with the wife of one of the other operators, (3) inadvertent withdrawal of the main control rod, or (4) an intentional attempt to "exercise" the rod (to make it travel more smoothly within its sheath).[30][31] The maintenance logs do not address what the technicians were attempting to do, and thus the actual cause of the accident will never be known. The investigation took almost two years to complete.

Investigators analyzed the flux wires installed during the maintenance to determine the power output level. They also examined scratches on the central control rod. Using this data, they concluded that the central rod had been withdrawn 26.25 inches (66.7 cm).[20] The reactor would have been critical at 23 inches (58.4 cm), and it took approximately 100 ms for the rod to travel the final 3.25 inches (8.3 cm). Once this was calculated, experiments were conducted with an identically weighted mock control rod to determine whether it was possible or feasible for one or two men to have performed this. Experiments included a simulation of the possibility that the 48-pound (22 kg)[32] rod was stuck and one man freed it himself, reproducing the scenario that investigators considered the best explanation: Byrnes broke the control rod loose and withdrew it accidentally, killing all three men.[11]
Click to expand...
 
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John,

Thanks for the link. I'm Alvin's younger brother, and agree that we did not almost lose Detroit. I worked to decommission the plant during the summer of '75. Sodium is neat stuff.

When considering the safety of nuclear generated power, please consider the alternatives. How many have died from coal?
 
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SL-1...what happens when you let Army play with nuclear reactors. (My opinion is not neutral - former Navy Nuc here!)
 
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I worked at the Santa Susana site for 2 year from 7/1/1963 to7/1/1965. This was before the development of the Semi Valley.

I was employed by Rocketdyne (another division of north American Aviation) that used the vast majority of the area because of the area required for testing of liquid propellant rocket engines. I think we had 12 or 17 test stands. With the development of much more powerful rocket engines, much of the testing was moved to a site near Edwards Air Force base. The up-grading of the capacity of the stands was ongoing as long as possible.

I believe another division of North American occupied another division (Atomics International???) was just down the road in Santa Susana.

The rocket testing used liquid and gaseous propellants - liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen(LOX) and a very few other minor exotic propellant additives that completed the fuel blend. All were liquid/vaporous and dispersed or burned.

The rocket test stands were steel structures up to 200' high including the fuel tanks. The steel structure sat on a massive cantilevered concrete foundation on the side of the rock. The exhaust from the engine was down on to a steel flame deflector mounted of the steep rocky terrain. The deflector was cooled by water that was film of cooling to preserve and stabilize the deflector. One day a 3' long heavy (75#?) wrench was left on the deflector before a firing. The wrench hit the window of the observation building about 1000' away and went into about 5 separate 1-1/2" layers of "bullet-proof glass".

The many deer and mountain lions were never injured. We fed them by tossing lunch leftovers down from our offices/trailers. There was also a old building near us the was referred to as the "old log cabin" that previously was a "roadhouse bar" for Hollywood stars to use decades ago.

It was a great experience. I also got to attend paid engineering graduate courses at USC 3 or 4 nights every week. Also, 60 miles mileage and dinner every day.

I would have paid to get the experience.

Dick



Engineer and international traveler interested in construction techniques, problems and proper design.
 
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I think you got to count this as a pretty close call as well even though the bulk of the radioactive material was contained. They were 4 actual BOMBS that went loose that day. Lsat time I looked (15 years ago) it was still vacant land with a small fence around it, no warning signs, with encroaching development in the area. I may be wrong, but it seems that it was never entirely cleaned up. USAF didn't learn all that much during the 5yrs since those other two bombs got lost in 1961.
 
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Been plenty of accidents in North America. Semi Hills SRE reactor, SL-1, Fermi, Chalk River (Canada). That only gets you up to 1966. A good book to read on these is Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey. Then, if you want to get into the military incidents, read Command and Control by Eric Schlosser.

One of the things I found interesting is when Canada had their first accident at Chalk River in 1952 (they had another in 1956), Admiral Rickover decided to help, sending a team led by a young Lt. James Carter. 27 years later, as President Jimmy Carter, he visited Three Mile Island only 4 days after that accident.
 
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I'm sure there's an 'accident' buried in here somewhere--

AEL_idy612.jpg



Brad Waybright

It's all okay as long as it's okay.
 
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phamENG, that's an amazing story. Thanks.

While we had already moved from Michigan to SoCal, during the time that these events were taking place, I was a frequent visitor to the Detroit and during this period I was working for EDS, which was part of GM. In fact, our office was in Farmington Hills Township, which bordered Commerce Township. And I have to say is that this is the first that I've ever heard of this. Amazing what a smart kid can do if they're creative enough. That being said, I would hope that if someone tried this today, that the 'alarm bells' would go off quicker than that did back in 1995 ;-)

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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That Boy Scout thing is really scarey. I got as far as black powder, but never thought about taking it to the nuc level.
 
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This quote at the end of Harper's "the Radioactive Boyscout" phamEngr cited is telling.
“It’s simply presumed that the average person wouldn’t have the technology or materials required to experiment in these areas."
Consider the number of people that have built Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor devices just for fun I think the regulators underestimate the power of human curiosity. (<disclaimer>While the fusor is far less unsafe than the boyscout's breeder reactor, it defiantly is not a safe toy.</disclaimer>
Fred
 
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phamENG: Great article... bright kid. It was grade 6 or 7 that I first made nitro... and I thought I was doing good.

Dik
 
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As a former boy scout and rad worker myself, I was always intrigued by that one.

In looking it up to post the link yesterday I discovered something unfortunately, though. I didn't dig into it, but something went terribly wrong and that bright young mind was ultimately wasted. Not sure if it was the fallout (sorry) from the legal issues or what, but he died a few years ago in his late 30s - drugs and alcohol. Hard to imagine what somebody with that level of intelligence, curiosity, and motivation could have done with the right mentor to guide him.
 
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A major problem was that he'd already received a life-time exposure to radiation and therefore was blocked from working in the field. He may have had other problems, but alcoholism finished him off.
 
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stevenal said:
I'm Alvin's younger brother
Click to expand...
username (last 2 letters) checks out. Small world!
Amazing what a smart kid can do if they're creative enough.
Click to expand...
I think the writing style built up the "radioactive boyscout" to imply more than he really did. They make the kid out as a genius, focusing on his INTENT to build a breeder reactor in his shed. I see he accomplished two surprising things, he got hold of radioactive materials and he apparently did succeed in concentrating Thorium to some extent. Yes, that’s something impressive, but other than that there’s not much evidence reading through those 6 pages that he succeeded in anything other than spread the radioactive materials that he bought around, making a mess.

There are real genius kids out there doing amazing nuclear things at young ages. Taylor Wilson did achieve fusion at the age 14. Then Jackson Oswalt did so at age 13.

As far as op article
[ul]
[li]Mushroom clouds are associated with nuclear bombs, not nuclear power. [/li]
[li]You spent a little too much time on the China syndrome for me.[/li]
[li]In my decades in the nuclear industry, I have never heard of a reactor being “turned on”. Reactors are “started up”. The “turn on” terminology conjures up imagines of a comically simplified reactor with an on/off button. (Starting up a reactor involves a lot more than manipulating one switch/button.)[/li]
[/ul]


=====================================
(2B)+(2B)' ?
 
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