Spent Fuel
The Risky Resurgence of Nuclear Power
By Andrew Cockburn
Harper's Magazine
January 2022
Exceprts:
Moorpark, a small town northwest of Los
Angeles, became the first American community
to draw its electricity from a nuclear
reactor. Moorpark’s power came from the
Sodium Reactor Experiment, operated by the
Atomic Energy Commission at the Santa Susana
Field Laboratory twenty miles away. The AEC—a
precursor to today’s Department of
Energy—invited Edward R. Murrow to
commemorate the event on his television
show. “Enrico Fermi once looked at a reactor
and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it
could cure the common cold?’” intoned Murrow. “Here at Moorpark, a chain reaction
that started with him washed the dishes and
lit a book for a small boy to read.” No such
lyrical announcement marked the day in July
1959 when the plant’s coolant system failed
and its uranium oxide fuel rods began
melting down. With the reactor running out
of control and set to explode, desperate
operators deliberately released huge amounts
of radioactive material into the air for
nearly two weeks, making it almost certainly
the most dangerous nuclear accident in
U.S. history. The amount of iodine-131 alone
spewed into the southern California
atmosphere was two hundred and sixty times
that released at Three Mile Island, which is
generally regarded as the worst ever
U.S. nuclear disaster. None of this was
revealed to the public, who were told merely
that a “technical” fault had occurred, one
that was “not an indication of unsafe
reactor conditions.” As greater Los Angeles
boomed in the following years, the area
around the reactor site—originally chosen
for its distance from population centers—was
flooded with new residents. No one informed
them of the astronomical levels of
radioactive contaminants seeded deep in
the soil.
Prosperous and 70 percent white, West Hills,
California, is one of the communities that
have sprouted near the Santa Susana Field
Laboratory in the decades since the 1959
meltdown. Unlike the poor, sick, and
embittered residents of Shell Bluff, people
living in West Hills had until recently only
the barest inkling that nuclear power in the
neighborhood might have had unwelcome
consequences. “Almost no one knew about the
Santa Susanna Field Lab, or they thought it
was an urban legend,” Melissa Bumstead, who
grew up in nearby Thousand Oaks, told me
recently. In 2014, Bumstead’s four-year-old
daughter, Grace, was diagnosed with an
aggressive form of leukemia. “This has no
environmental link,” her pediatric
oncologist told her firmly. Childhood
cancers were rare, and this was just cruel
luck. Then, while taking Grace to Children’s
Hospital Los Angeles, Bumstead ran into a
woman who recognized her from the local park
where their young daughters played. The
woman’s child had neuroblastoma, another
rare cancer, as did another from nearby Simi
Valley, whom they encountered while the
children were getting chemo. Back at home,
someone on her street noticed the childhood
cancer awareness sticker on
Bumstead’s car and mentioned that another
neighbor had died of cancer as a teenager.
Bumstead began to draw a map detailing the
cluster of cancer deaths in small children
just in the previous six years, but stopped
working on it in 2017. “I had such severe
PTSD when I added children onto it, my
therapist told me to stop.” But it is still
happening, she said, mentioning the unusual
number of bald children she had noticed in
local elementary schools in recent years, as
well as the far-above-average rate of breast
cancer cases recorded in the area. A cleanup
of the field lab was due to be completed in
2017, but it has yet to begin.
I called Bumstead because I had been struck
by the fact that TerraPower’s Natrium
reactor resembles in its basic features the
long-ago Sodium Reactor Experiment at Santa
Susana. (Natrium is
Latin for sodium.) “That’s exactly what we
had!” Bumstead exclaimed when I mentioned
that liquid sodium is integral to
TerraPower’s project. “The meltdown was in
the sodium reactor.” As her comment made
clear, such liquid sodium technology is by
no means innovative. Nor, in an extensive
history of experiments, has it ever proved
popular—not least because liquid sodium
explodes when it comes into contact with
water, and burns when exposed to air. In
addition, it is highly corrosive to metal,
which is one reason the technology was
rapidly abandoned by the U.S. Navy after a
tryout in the Seawolf submarine
in 1957. That system “was leaking before it
even left the dock on its first voyage,”
recalls Foster Blair, a longtime senior
engineer with the Navy’s reactor program.
The Navy eventually encased the reactor in
steel and dropped it into the sea 130 miles
off the coast of Maryland, with the
assurance that the container would not
corrode while the contents were still
radioactive. The main novelty of the Natrium
reactor is a tank that stores molten salt,
which can drive steam generators to produce
extra power when demand surges. “Interesting
idea,” Blair commented. “But from an
engineering standpoint one that has some
real potential problems, namely the
corrosion of the high-temperature salt in
just about any metal container over any
period of time.”
TerraPower’s Jeff Navin assured me in
response that Natrium “is designed to be a
safe, cost-effective commercial reactor.” He
added that Natrium’s use of uranium-based
metal fuel would increase the reactor’s
safety and performance. Blair told me that
such a system had been tried and abandoned
in the Fifties because the solid fuel
swelled and grew after fissioning.
In a March 2021 report for the Union of
Concerned Scientists, the physicist Edwin
Lyman likewise concluded that there was
little evidence that reactor designs like
Natrium’s would be safer than water-cooled
models. “When I read about many of the
current proposals,” Blair said, “it is
almost as if they are unaware of all the
work that has gone before.” Citing the
Navy’s abandonment of sodium reactors, he
suggested that companies such as TerraPower
“are unaware, or intentionally choose to
ignore history.” He recalled that Admiral
Hyman Rickover, who ran the Navy’s nuclear
program for three decades, would personally
command the sea trials of every new nuclear
submarine. In that spirit, he suggested,
“they should only license a small modular
reactor on condition that the head of the
corporation that built it takes up permanent
residence within a quarter mile of
the plant.”
As the sodium saga indicates, the true
history of nuclear energy is largely unknown
to all but specialists, which is ironic
given that it keeps repeating itself. The
story of Santa Susana follows the same path
as more famous disasters, most strikingly in
the studious indifference of those in charge
to signs of impending catastrophe.The
operators at Santa Susana shrugged off
evidence of problems with the cooling system
for weeks prior to the meltdown, and even
restarted the reactor after initial trouble.
Soviet nuclear authorities covered up at
least one accident at Chernobyl before the
disaster and ignored warnings that the
reactor was dangerously unsafe. The
Fukushima plant’s designers didn’t account
for the known risk of massive tsunamis, a
vulnerability augmented by inadequate safety
precautions that were overlooked by
regulators. Automatic safety features at
Santa Susana did not work. This was also the
case at Fukushima, where vital backup
generators were destroyed by the tidal wave.
No one knows exactly how much radiation was
released by Santa Susana—it exceeded the
scale of the monitors. Nor was there any
precise accounting of the radioactivity
released at Chernobyl. Fukushima emitted far
less, yet the prime minister of Japan
prepared plans to evacuate fifty million
people, which would have meant, as he later
recounted, the end of Japan as a functioning
state. Another common thread is the attempt
by overseers, both corporate and
governmental, to conceal information from
the public for as long as possible. Santa
Susana holds the prize in this regard: its
coverup was sustained for twenty years,
until students at UCLA found the truth in
Atomic Energy Commission documents.
