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
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
This shit was supposed to be cleaned up 5 years ago.
