LA Times, AP, etc: 1959 Rocketdyne reactor accident may have caused hundreds of cancers

A nuclear reactor mishap at Rocketdyne test site in 1959 near Simi Valley on the border of heavily populated Los Angeles County went almost unreported at the time. Its very existence did not begin to emerge with any detail for 20 years. It’s been a simmering issue ever since. On Thursday an expert advisory panel appointed by local public officials in response to community worries said the release of radioactive Iodine-131 may have been among the largest of any such incident in US history. A whiff of Cold War military-industrial political muscle and coverup is in the air.

AP’s Robert Jablon calls the incident a “nuclear reactor meltdown” without equivocation, and passes on a claim that the released radioisotope could have caused 260 cancers in a 60-square-mile area around the site of the plant. The Boeing Co., which now owns the site, retorts that there is no sign that actual cancer incidence rose among plant workers, who presumably would have been most heavily exposed. LA Times’s Amanda Covarrubias refers to the incident simply as a nuclear accident in her lede, but as a meltdown deeper. She writes that up to 1,800 cancers may have ensued. Yesterday, the Times’s Gregory W. Griggs had a story anticipating the report’s release.

The story merits further, deeper digging into exactly what happened to the reactor — a small, sodium-cooled, high temperature, 20 megawatt machine — and why so little information came out at the time. Did the entire fuel bundle melt? Just a bit of it? What containment, if any, was on this graphite-moderated machine? A web search finds references to a “partial meltdown” but that’s ambiguous. Who is on the advisory panel and how credible is it? Its co-chairman, a little checking reveals, is president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, an anti-nuclear activist organization. The panel members’ objectivity might be examined. Hmmmm.

Other stories: Ventura County Star Anna Bakalis;

Other nuclear history news: AP’s Deborah Baker reports efforts to preserve the historic structures at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.