Biggest Nuclear Spill in U.S. History Was Upwind of Malibu Creek

Photo credit, Hans Laetz

PATH—Smoke and ash from the September 2005 fire that burned across the former Rocketdyne Santa Susana Field Lab blew south toward Malibu. Efforts are now underway to determine whether similar wind patterns were in effect during the nuclear reactor accident that occurred at the site in 1959.

Radioactivity Drifted from Accident Site Located 20 Miles North of Coast

BY HANS LAETZ

The possibility that the largest nuclear accident in United States history dumped radioactive material in Malibu Creek’s watershed was raised last week, when scientists released a series of reports about a secret 1959 nuclear accident 20 miles north of Malibu.

State Sen. Sheila James Kuehl on Friday demanded that the current owners of the Rocketdyne site release additional records that were withheld from state investigators about the spread of radiation, as well as tons of poisonous and cancer-causing chemicals, from the facility.

Kuehl said she is specifically angry that Boeing will not release its detailed weather data from the summer of 1959, crucial to finding out which direction the radioactive cloud was blown. A Santa Ana wind or other offshore wind event could have blown the cloud over the Malibu Creek watershed and out to sea over the few thousand residents of 1959 Malibu.

Officials at Boeing, which bought the Rocketdyne Santa Susana Field Laboratory a decade ago, vehemently dispute the study’s conclusions.

“Two major environmental studies, which Boeing was not a part of, examined the site thoroughly and have found there is no health risk,” said the company’s environmental communications manager, Blythe Jameson. “And an examination of the cancer reporting maps shows that there is no concentration of cancers among the plant’s neighbors.”

Kuehl disagrees. “We have never seen a federal study that they (Boeing and Rocketdyne) did not have their fingers in,” she said. “Their scientists always show up to testify that they are not responsible.”

An EPA study in 2003 discounted risks from the site, where an Energy Department cleanup of spilled and partly-burned rocket fuels and solvents is underway. Several housing projects are planned for the immediate area, which federal officials say is safe for habitation.

Kuehl said her job as a state senator “is to make sure development never happens up there.”In the report issued Friday, state scientists estimate that at least 260—and possibly as many as 1800—cases of human cancer could be expected from the airborne nuclear contamination. The report was written over five years by a committee of independent scientists hired by the state at the request of legislators who represent the area.

The new state report was hailed as vindication by Simi Valley residents who have been campaigning for full disclosure for 17 years. They said they were shocked to learn in 1989 that rocket fuel oxidizers called perchlorates, cancerous chemicals and poisons were routinely dumped into unlined disposal pits, leached into groundwater and flowed off the research center site in washes and creeks.

“It was the end of our innocence,” wrote Dawn Kowalski, one of four neighbors galvanized into action 17 years ago, Writing together in a report released Friday, the neighbors said they were blindsided by the disclosures. “The fact that the state agencies we thought were there to protect us knew nothing about the radioactive work at the site was also a rude awakening.”

The Rocketdyne Santa Susana facility sits north of Agoura Hills, with portions of it draining east into the Los Angeles River, west into Calleguas Creek, and south into Malibu Creek. It was used beginning in 1946 for rocket engine tests that sprayed deadly chemicals onto the ground, which may have leached into surface water runoff, and the secret nuclear project beginning in 1949 saw 10 small reactors located there.

No one was told in 1959 when a small nuclear reactor, 20 miles north of Malibu, suffered severe damage and released 450 times more radiation into the air than was released in the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster. The amount of airborne radiation released 47 years ago was quantified for the first time in last week’s report.

In the 1960s, rocket engines that powered the Apollo astronauts to the moon were test-fired at the site. Chemical residue, including 1.7 million gallons of toxic solvents, were dumped in dirt pits, and toxic rocket smoke and unburned fuel coated the hillsides, prompting a multiyear federal cleanup effort.

Tons of trichloroethylene, a cancer causing solvent, and perchlorate were dumped by Rocketdyne and may be leaching into groundwater and three creeks that drain towards Malibu, Los Angeles and Point Mugu.

Last year, firefighters who battled a brushfire in the Malibu Creek watershed at the Rocketdyne plant said the thick brush burned with strange, green flames. Firefighters at Ventura County station 56, in northern Malibu, were ordered to give blood samples after the fire to establish medical records in case they were contaminated by chemicals that had been drawn into vegetation, and then released into the atmosphere during that recent blaze.

The nearest residents are worried that the Rocketdyne site might be used for residential development, which would require the heavy grading of contaminated soils.

“How could a facility operate with materials of such great potential for harm, in an area surrounded by hundreds of thousands of residents, become so contaminated, with essentially no effective oversight?” the residents said in a statement issued Friday.