Old news, but personally interesting because I spent some time working at the labs up there. The building I worked in was across the street from where the meltdown occurred. Even the building I was in had a history of nuclear accidents (at least three that required cleanup). Nobody ever used the tap water there for anything other than flushing a toilet. Boeing got the property when it acquired Rocketdyne. Boeing was stupid to not recognize the huge liability it took on.
The L.A. Times reported yesterday that Boeing seems to have dodged its cleanup problems by entering into a conservation easement on the site. That might be why this old news is cropping up on HN today.
>Grew up nearby, I just assumed everyone was used to rocket engine tests so loud that things world fall off the shelves.
This is no joke. I experienced the same in the 1980's. 1st time it happened to me, I thought an earthquake was happening. Everyone around me didn't give it a second thought.
I grew up close enough that I wouldn't be surprise if I glow at night. It's a joke - I hope.
The meltdown comes up every few years. It's a big deal yet we live our lives as if nothing happened. I don't know what to think.
> "Archaeologists estimate the paintings to be several hundred years old."
They don't say what basis was used for the estimate. Age estimates are almost always a lower bound, except where some radiocarbon date can be established, rare for rocks.
We know hominins were in the region 130,000 years ago, based on a butchered mastodon (with major bones split for marrow) found near San Diego. Nobody knows what species, or if they left descendants into the present.
When I bought my house in Los Angeles (in the southern part of the San Fernando Valley, not particularly close to the accident site), in 2005, the closing documents I had to sign had disclosures about the accident.
The sixty-year old nuclear disaster and toxic spills that still almost no one knows about due to decades of cover ups, in the vicinity of residential areas to the west of Los Angeles. Comparable to Three Mile Island, but built in a rickety warehouse with no containment.
How many folks died from cancer as a result? I personally have known quite a few, but hard to say definitively.
Just for anybody caual browsing here; we can't just blame the radiation and isotopic waste:
> During its years of operation, highly toxic chemical additives were widely used in order to power over 30,000 rocket engine tests and to clean the rocket test-stands afterwards.
> In addition, considerable nuclear research and at least four nuclear accidents occurred, which resulted in the SSFL becoming a seriously contaminated site and an offsite pollution source, requiring a sophisticated multi-agency Cleanup Project
Given that the GP quotes "nuclear research and at least four nuclear accidents occurred" that's a pretty ungenerous assumption to make.
That's not blame shifting, that's blame expansion; all of these causes are activities from the same organization, and the blame should be attributed to them.
You have to accept that HN has alot of technical/engineering folks who are trained to solve scoped problems. Some are very vocal proponents of nuclear energy, for valid reasons.
Because nuclear technology and military requirements go hand in hand, you’re always going to have the dissembling, the misinformation and the propaganda elements tightly aligned with anything nuclear.
Nobody ever knows the full story, and advocates can always latch on to some bizarre statistic, like “More people have been killed by cordless drills installing solar panels per gigawatt hour than have ever died from electric generation with nuclear power.”
Yeah I mean what are the dose rates? You need 100 mSv acute or 300 mSv over a year to get the first small increase of cancer risk from a baseline risk of 40%. Is anyone getting even remotely close to 300 mSv from this in a year? I highly doubt it. At that level every kid with a $50 Geiger counter from Amazon would see it everywhere.
You can detect even a single atom decaying. The difference between the threshold of detection and the threshold of damage is astoundingly large in radiation.
I'm pretty sure people are overblowing the radiological risks here without being quantitative. Let's talk dose rates in mSv/yr or not talk.
> I'm pretty sure people are overblowing the radiological risks here without being quantitative.
> Let's talk dose rates in mSv or not talk.
You're only seeing the direct radiation risk here .. chances of being struck by a decaying particle from a hot pile of short half life material breaking down.
There is a significant ongoing risk from toxic isotopes that aren't especially radioactive but nonetheless pose a toxic health risk (akin to straight up rare heavy metal poisoning).
There is a related risk from 'biological isotopes' that are taken up within the food chain and concentrate in plants, animals and perhaps ultimately human bodies where slow damage is caused by slow breakdown (again, not highly radioactive).
I don't think that's a serious concern from a radioactive meltdown of a small core. The major hazard is, was, and will remain measurable radioactive dose.
Nuclear engineer here so I'm happy to look into whatever you're referring to. Got any publications describing this concern in more detail?
> I don't think that's a serious concern from a radioactive meltdown of a small core.
Was that the only issue over the years at this site though?
Others have cited four 'incidents' reported (I have no idea what these were), various experiments and tests, and I imagine there's the implication of a legacy of less than rigorous material handling and storage being possible.
From the wikipedia page:
> At least four of the ten nuclear reactors had accidents during their operation.
> The reactors located on the grounds of SSFL were considered experimental, and therefore had no containment structures.
Given all that I'd say the possibilities are wide open.
> Got any publications describing this concern in more detail?
Your best bet might be to drop Alex Wellerstein a line and ask if he knows of (or knows anyone who knows of) what documents the DOE | NASA have released into the public domain and whether there are whispers of further releases in the wind.
I tend to track things of this nature not in central north america.
Measurable radioactive dose is easy to measure, so of course it is what you would like us to pay attention to. But radionuclides invading tissue is what causes cancers. Those risks are harder to measure. Which radionuclides? What grain size? A nanogram of the wrong stuff in the wrong place is all it takes.
Half life is 1.25 billion years and rate is the inverse of lifetime, so I don't understand why you classify potassium-40 as a "strong" emitter?
Radon-222 has a half life of 3.8 days, so that at least is a strong emitter. Less of it in the environment, but IIRC still the biggest source of background radiation for us.
Radon may not concentrate within the body but it does concentrate within unventilated basements and within valleys in granite heavy areas.
It blows away and expresses fresh from the ground on a daily basis such that prolonged exposure is equivilant to a two|three pack a day smoking habit wrt cancer risk.
Modern standards in many G20 countries require new (and rennovating) houses in radon prone areas to provide appropriate ventilation.
Geographically in also pools in still valleys, often during the night and morning with radon 'clouds' clearing from the floor by afternoon (as can be seen when processing airborne radiometric survey data and applying radon removal filtering to normalise U-Y-Th maps).
The common (in a nuclear accident) short half live isotopes of Iodine, Stronium, Cesium, Plutonium, and other highly bioabsorptive alpha emitters would like a word?
Not to mention the chemical toxicity of many of them is non trivial.
Radioactive isotopes cause damage by imparting energy in the form of energetic emissions that can be measured quantitatively in units of mSv. You get 6 mSv/yr from natural and normal man-made sources. 100 mSv acutely causes a small increase in lifetime cancer risk from a baseline of 40%. 300 mSv over a year does the same. Above that, cancer risk increases with dose. Arount 2000 mSv acute you start getting acute radiation syndrome (which is what the ~40 first responders at Chernobyl died from). Human LD 50/30 with medical intervention is about 8000 mSv.
So unless someone is getting more than 300 mSv a year, it's highly unlikely that they are being harmed by the radiation.
That’s an overly reductive analysis based on generalized whole body doses from (external generally) ionizing radiation, and not relevant to absorbed isotopes and internal radiation.
Which is what we were discussing.
There is a reason one of the first things handed out during a nuclear accident is potassium iodide pills, and it’s not to protect against gamma radiation.
It doesn't get much play outside of LA. We moved to the area to be near my wife's family and I had no clue about it. But it's basically an open secret in the local communities.
When I found out about it and I mentioned it she said "oh yeah everyone knows about that, lots of people got cancer growing up."
The entire LA and San Francisco Bay Area regions were for half a century dumping grounds for far worse stuff than most of the radiological hazards at Santa Susana Field. The worst hazards at Santa Susana Field itself were probably the rocket-related research and associated non-radiological chemicals. This seems confirmed by the Woolsey fire, when nobody was able to detect radioactive contamination.
Detection of radionuclides is easy and reliable; detection of all the myriad other industrial chemicals less so. California hosted a disproportionate share of defense and industrial research and production facilities which are known to have released insane amounts of non-radiological hazardous waste, often adjacent to large populations. As cities expanded many communities, rich and poor, now live atop of it. Even just run-of-the-mill lead hazards are pretty bad in California because the state rapidly expanded coincident with peak usage of lead in fuel and paint.
Unless you live on a property far outside coastal LA and Bay Area cities, it's not entirely unreasonable to reflexively pave over backyards, etc, especially if you have kids. Alternatively, pay a sizable amount of money for soil testing.
Testing soil samples for lead is cheap/free, though, through some government programs; just be prepared to resort to plan A. When we bought our house in the Outer Richmond of San Francisco, I meticulously took samples of our backyard and shipped them off for spectroscopic measurements through one of those programs. Unsurprisingly they all came back near or above the threshold for "absolutely don't garden here". A couple came back near the threshold for "you're required by law to inform the EPA", which was pretty insane because the thresholds for mandatory declaration of soil lead contamination are (at least in non-commercial contexts) way, way, way above recommended safe limits; this is to minimize the economic burden of remediation.
A family member of mine develops small and medium size apartment complexes in Southern California and she deliberately avoids soil tests. She assumes any parcel of land in a populated area is contaminated and designs projects accordingly--e.g. cover any common areas where kids might play with known clean soil from elsewhere. She also reminds contractors to follow basic safety measures, like not washing their work clothes in the same wash load as other family members. If she voluntarily tested as a matter of course she'd subject herself to expensive, mandatory remediations, and construction of anything except luxury housing wouldn't be economically viable.
I hope we're measuring and disseminating dose rate and dose rate hazard information these days. I hate that I ctrl-f these kinds of articles for mSv (measure of radioactive dose) and never find it.
The reactor type they were testing there is actually super interesting. It was a liquid metal cooled reactor (LMR) with slow neutrons. We have made lots of fast-neutron LMRs, but only a tiny handful of slow-neutron LMRs. They're interesting because they get the neutronics efficiencies of slow neutrons (e.g. they can start up and operate with very low enriched uranium) while also getting the benefits of cooling with liquid metal (low-pressure passive safety, high temperature heat, low corrosion, single phase flow).
It's my favorite reactor type actually. The SRE in LA was the prototype for the Hallam reactor in Nebraska.
I live near here. They have built housing on top of the waste drainage area. We tried to protest but it did no good. They say they trucked out the rest of the waste but no one really believes it.
This event, and everything around SS, was just par for the nuke industry.
Forbidding staff from warning their families about contamination was typical evil.
There is never any expectation that any nuke project will do better, absent strict regulation and rigorous enforcement. It is why the public is very sensibly sour on nukes.
But the only thing stopping more of it, today, is that they cost way more than alternatives. Always did, but it is harder now to paper over.
This wasn't "the nuke industry". It was a government testing lab. No member of the public has been harmed by actual commercial nuclear power plants. All of the dicey stuff (and there was a lot more of it than just this) was done by the government.
> There is never any expectation that any nuke project will do better, absent strict regulation and rigorous enforcement
So you want the government that set this testing lab up to do the regulation and enforcement?
Have you read the article you post? Virtually no-one was able to find a statistically relevant affect on health in then neighbouring population.
> The American Nuclear Society concluded that average local radiation exposure was equivalent to a chest X-ray and maximum local exposure equivalent to less than a year's background radiation.
> the study found no link between fallout and cancer risk
> "no consistent evidence" of causation by TMI
> found rates as expected in the county in which the reactor is located
Anyway the American Nuclear Society was not "able".
No one seemed interested in the experience of people living near the river, gassed by the volume of radioactive krypton gas "vented" that (being much denser than air) poured down and spread out over the river banks.
Government contractors do what the government wants and ignore what they don’t.
The people who designed nuclear strategy believed that nuclear warfare and devastation was inevitable. It was a convenient way to brush off these types of concern.
55 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 96.5 ms ] threadThis shit was supposed to be cleaned up 5 years ago.
Later in life would drive up there and park facing the San Fernando valley to drink beer, awesome view.
Only later did I learn these were irradiating activities.
This is no joke. I experienced the same in the 1980's. 1st time it happened to me, I thought an earthquake was happening. Everyone around me didn't give it a second thought.
I grew up close enough that I wouldn't be surprise if I glow at night. It's a joke - I hope.
The meltdown comes up every few years. It's a big deal yet we live our lives as if nothing happened. I don't know what to think.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burro_Flats_site
They don't say what basis was used for the estimate. Age estimates are almost always a lower bound, except where some radiocarbon date can be established, rare for rocks.
We know hominins were in the region 130,000 years ago, based on a butchered mastodon (with major bones split for marrow) found near San Diego. Nobody knows what species, or if they left descendants into the present.
How many folks died from cancer as a result? I personally have known quite a few, but hard to say definitively.
Its most reliable product was dishonestly, from day one.
High cancer rates surrounding the area has been reported for decades and I recall watching local TV news reports about it in the 2000s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory#...
> During its years of operation, highly toxic chemical additives were widely used in order to power over 30,000 rocket engine tests and to clean the rocket test-stands afterwards.
> In addition, considerable nuclear research and at least four nuclear accidents occurred, which resulted in the SSFL becoming a seriously contaminated site and an offsite pollution source, requiring a sophisticated multi-agency Cleanup Project
Think of my comment as emphasing the range of the "Choose your toxic pollutant" offered up by lab activities over the decades.
That's not blame shifting, that's blame expansion; all of these causes are activities from the same organization, and the blame should be attributed to them.
Because nuclear technology and military requirements go hand in hand, you’re always going to have the dissembling, the misinformation and the propaganda elements tightly aligned with anything nuclear.
Nobody ever knows the full story, and advocates can always latch on to some bizarre statistic, like “More people have been killed by cordless drills installing solar panels per gigawatt hour than have ever died from electric generation with nuclear power.”
You can detect even a single atom decaying. The difference between the threshold of detection and the threshold of damage is astoundingly large in radiation.
I'm pretty sure people are overblowing the radiological risks here without being quantitative. Let's talk dose rates in mSv/yr or not talk.
You're only seeing the direct radiation risk here .. chances of being struck by a decaying particle from a hot pile of short half life material breaking down.
There is a significant ongoing risk from toxic isotopes that aren't especially radioactive but nonetheless pose a toxic health risk (akin to straight up rare heavy metal poisoning).
There is a related risk from 'biological isotopes' that are taken up within the food chain and concentrate in plants, animals and perhaps ultimately human bodies where slow damage is caused by slow breakdown (again, not highly radioactive).
Nuclear engineer here so I'm happy to look into whatever you're referring to. Got any publications describing this concern in more detail?
Was that the only issue over the years at this site though?
Others have cited four 'incidents' reported (I have no idea what these were), various experiments and tests, and I imagine there's the implication of a legacy of less than rigorous material handling and storage being possible.
From the wikipedia page: > At least four of the ten nuclear reactors had accidents during their operation.
> The reactors located on the grounds of SSFL were considered experimental, and therefore had no containment structures.
Given all that I'd say the possibilities are wide open.
> Got any publications describing this concern in more detail?
Your best bet might be to drop Alex Wellerstein a line and ask if he knows of (or knows anyone who knows of) what documents the DOE | NASA have released into the public domain and whether there are whispers of further releases in the wind.
I tend to track things of this nature not in central north america.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory
[2] https://alexwellerstein.com/writing/books/restricted-data/
These were rugged days when onions were worn on belts and rocketship reactors were fashion in garages from materials scavanged froom smoke detectors.
Measurable radioactive dose is easy to measure, so of course it is what you would like us to pay attention to. But radionuclides invading tissue is what causes cancers. Those risks are harder to measure. Which radionuclides? What grain size? A nanogram of the wrong stuff in the wrong place is all it takes.
For potassium 40 it's about 10,000,000 nanograms. It is a strong beta and gamma emitter. It has been in all creatures that have ever lived.
It's difficult to postulate that levels 7 orders of magnitude less than that are major threats.
Radon-222 has a half life of 3.8 days, so that at least is a strong emitter. Less of it in the environment, but IIRC still the biggest source of background radiation for us.
People get cancer when a microscopic grain of Pu lodges in an alveola and just blasts and blasts that one spot for years.
It blows away and expresses fresh from the ground on a daily basis such that prolonged exposure is equivilant to a two|three pack a day smoking habit wrt cancer risk.
Modern standards in many G20 countries require new (and rennovating) houses in radon prone areas to provide appropriate ventilation.
Geographically in also pools in still valleys, often during the night and morning with radon 'clouds' clearing from the floor by afternoon (as can be seen when processing airborne radiometric survey data and applying radon removal filtering to normalise U-Y-Th maps).
Not to mention the chemical toxicity of many of them is non trivial.
So unless someone is getting more than 300 mSv a year, it's highly unlikely that they are being harmed by the radiation.
Which is what we were discussing.
There is a reason one of the first things handed out during a nuclear accident is potassium iodide pills, and it’s not to protect against gamma radiation.
What is your point exactly?
When I found out about it and I mentioned it she said "oh yeah everyone knows about that, lots of people got cancer growing up."
Detection of radionuclides is easy and reliable; detection of all the myriad other industrial chemicals less so. California hosted a disproportionate share of defense and industrial research and production facilities which are known to have released insane amounts of non-radiological hazardous waste, often adjacent to large populations. As cities expanded many communities, rich and poor, now live atop of it. Even just run-of-the-mill lead hazards are pretty bad in California because the state rapidly expanded coincident with peak usage of lead in fuel and paint.
Unless you live on a property far outside coastal LA and Bay Area cities, it's not entirely unreasonable to reflexively pave over backyards, etc, especially if you have kids. Alternatively, pay a sizable amount of money for soil testing.
Testing soil samples for lead is cheap/free, though, through some government programs; just be prepared to resort to plan A. When we bought our house in the Outer Richmond of San Francisco, I meticulously took samples of our backyard and shipped them off for spectroscopic measurements through one of those programs. Unsurprisingly they all came back near or above the threshold for "absolutely don't garden here". A couple came back near the threshold for "you're required by law to inform the EPA", which was pretty insane because the thresholds for mandatory declaration of soil lead contamination are (at least in non-commercial contexts) way, way, way above recommended safe limits; this is to minimize the economic burden of remediation.
A family member of mine develops small and medium size apartment complexes in Southern California and she deliberately avoids soil tests. She assumes any parcel of land in a populated area is contaminated and designs projects accordingly--e.g. cover any common areas where kids might play with known clean soil from elsewhere. She also reminds contractors to follow basic safety measures, like not washing their work clothes in the same wash load as other family members. If she voluntarily tested as a matter of course she'd subject herself to expensive, mandatory remediations, and construction of anything except luxury housing wouldn't be economically viable.
The reactor type they were testing there is actually super interesting. It was a liquid metal cooled reactor (LMR) with slow neutrons. We have made lots of fast-neutron LMRs, but only a tiny handful of slow-neutron LMRs. They're interesting because they get the neutronics efficiencies of slow neutrons (e.g. they can start up and operate with very low enriched uranium) while also getting the benefits of cooling with liquid metal (low-pressure passive safety, high temperature heat, low corrosion, single phase flow).
It's my favorite reactor type actually. The SRE in LA was the prototype for the Hallam reactor in Nebraska.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallam_Nuclear_Power_Facility
Forbidding staff from warning their families about contamination was typical evil.
There is never any expectation that any nuke project will do better, absent strict regulation and rigorous enforcement. It is why the public is very sensibly sour on nukes.
But the only thing stopping more of it, today, is that they cost way more than alternatives. Always did, but it is harder now to paper over.
This wasn't "the nuke industry". It was a government testing lab. No member of the public has been harmed by actual commercial nuclear power plants. All of the dicey stuff (and there was a lot more of it than just this) was done by the government.
> There is never any expectation that any nuke project will do better, absent strict regulation and rigorous enforcement
So you want the government that set this testing lab up to do the regulation and enforcement?
> The American Nuclear Society concluded that average local radiation exposure was equivalent to a chest X-ray and maximum local exposure equivalent to less than a year's background radiation.
> the study found no link between fallout and cancer risk
> "no consistent evidence" of causation by TMI
> found rates as expected in the county in which the reactor is located
No one seemed interested in the experience of people living near the river, gassed by the volume of radioactive krypton gas "vented" that (being much denser than air) poured down and spread out over the river banks.
The people who designed nuclear strategy believed that nuclear warfare and devastation was inevitable. It was a convenient way to brush off these types of concern.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment