In the wake of Japan’s nuclear tsunami, it has become vogue once more to fret about the ominous implications of nuclear energy. Indeed, had the tumbler that shifted the earth just off Honshu, Japan on March 11th been merely a mere rather than chart-topping 9.0 earthquake that washed away entire towns and changed the country’s coastline forever, the 32nd anniversary of The Three Mile Island disaster near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania would have gone as unnoticed as the 31st.  Instead, March 28th was a special  day for the press this year. From NPR to Fox, the media was positively frothy about the near-meltdown that occurred at the power plant in 1979. Though no one was killed in the accident, and the second unit of the plant still operates to this day, the mishap transpired a mere week after the opening of the blockbuster film The China Syndrome, and was thus immediately conflated with the fictional version in which Jane Fonda uncovers a massive cover-up and Jack Lemmon saves the world. To make matters worse, President Jimmy Carter decided to pay a personal visit the site, hoping to expose himself to enough radiation to enable him to beat the atomic mutant who was conspiring to seize the presidency from his grasp. His effort proved to be too little too late, and Ronald Reagan–abetted by clandestine aid from Megator, Mothra, and Baby Godzilla–ran away with the election that changed America forever, ensconced the Lunatic Right Wing Fringe, and eventually gave birth to Sean Hannity. Thus, it came as no surprise when Monday, March 28th dawned to a seemingly endless parade of scientific experts and socio-political pundits who crawled out of the woodwork on TV, radio, and the interweb, to offer their collective two cents on what they all called “The worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history.”

Unfortunately, they were all wrong.

As any savvy reader of L.A. Bizarro will tell you, the boasting rights to America’s worst nuclear disaster belong to the Top Secret enclave tucked into the rocky creases that separate the northwest corner of L.A. county from southernmost Ventura county. That’s where the Santa Susana Field Laboratory hummed and glowed from its perch overlooking the entire San Fernando Valley, spewing tons of radioactive toxins into the air, water, and earth  for more than five decades.

“What?!” you cry. “Surely the government and the fourth estate would have made us all aware of such a catastrophe!” Indeed. If that’s what ran through your mind, please email us immediately. We have some prime Florida swampland we’d like to sell you.

The reason you probably never heard about the government’s secret testing ground has to do with the fact that it was, uh, secret. The almost three-thousand-acre facility was built in the mid-forties to research nuclear reactors and rocket engines; the remote location was chosen because the work being done there was so dangerous. Unfortunately, bureaucrats at the Department of Energy forgot to plan for the expansion of that little burg just two dozen miles to the south called Los Angeles. Troops returning from World War II took advantage of the low-priced housing provided by the GI Bill, and L.A. overflowed into “America’s Suburb,” the San Fernando Valley (much of which came to be owned by Bob Hope).  Thousands of acres of citrus groves were razed to make way for the explosion of affordable tract homes. Though the site technically resides in the Simi Hills along the Ventura County border, it overlooks one of the most densely populated suburbs in the U.S., the closest being West Hills, Chatsworth, Canoga Park, Northridge and Woodland Hills to the east and south, and the cities of Simi Valley, Moorpark, and Thousand Oaks to the west and north. All have been tainted in one way or another by Santa Susana’s voluminous history of toxic waste disposal and nuclear mishaps.

L.A. is surely the World Capital of The Stars, but astro-geeks will be thrilled to know that the SSFL actually helped to take the U.S. to the stars. Wernher Von Braun’s early V-2 rockets were tested here, as were the rocket engines that took the Apollo program to the moon. Laser testing for Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense was carried out on the grounds, along with a myriad of highly classified, unclassified, and plain ol’ “never-happened-here” Black Ops that will forever remain unknown. What we do know is that the nation’s first commercial nuclear facility (the Sodium Reactor Experiment, or SRE) came online here in 1957, and for a short time, the small, uncontained reactor provided power to more than 1100 homes in nearby Moorpark. So much for the argument offered by some that Three Mile Island was a commercial facility and Santa Susana a government proving ground–as if the distinction truly matters. What matters is that  on July 13, 1959, the Santa Susana reactor suffered a partial meltdown—the first nuclear meltdown in history, another medal on its chest—releasing what one study estimates to be well over four hundred times the radiation released by the Three Mile Island mishap, which was also a partial core meltdown. Another independent advisory panel estimates that the meltdown led to somewhere around 260 cases of cancer within a sixty-square-mile radius of the reactor. Imagine getting an X-ray that lasted thirty years. Hello, San Fernando Valley and Simi Valley!

You’d think that you would have heard something the worst nuclear meltdown in our nation’s history (and by most estimations, the third worst in the entire world) and that it would have led to the closure of the site, but SSFL soldiered on, thanks in part to the cloak of secrecy surrounding the site and the meltdown. Over the years, approximately ten nuclear reactors were built on the Rocketdyne-operated site (parent company Rockwell International also had secret nuclear reactors at its facilities on Canoga Avenue and DeSoto Avenue, smack dab in the middle of commercial and residential areas) and at least half of those reactors failed and/or leaked radioactive contaminants into the atmosphere. The site also contained plutonium and uranium carbide fuel fabrication facilities, the nation’s largest “Hot Lab” for decladding and examining irradiated nuclear fuel that was shipped to SSFL from Department of Energy facilities across the nation, and, most disturbingly, open burn pits used to incinerate radioactively and chemically-contaminated whatnot. An open burn pit is exactly what it sounds like: an enormous, uncovered hole in the ground into which radioactive material was set ablaze. Okay kids, what happens when you set something on fire? That’s right, it makes smoke! And what happens when the wind blows the smoke up grandpa’s nose? And you thought he had smoked just one Tiparillo too many.

The Hot Lab also lived up to its name, suffering a number of fires involving radioactive materials, often resulting in massive contamination. The quaintly-named sodium burn pit was another open air pit for cleaning sodium-contaminated products, but it also turned out to be a cheap and easy way to dispose of highly toxic materials as well.

Angelenos are well familiar with the blustery Santa Ana winds that sweep down wide across the deserts and across the Los Angeles Basin in fall and winter, pushing dust and smoke far out into the Pacific Ocean. These yearly meteorological occurrences may very well explain the gigantic, oddly glowing halibut that devour scores of surfers, swimmers, and fishermen each year. Equally cruel winds are notorious along the craggy mountains and passes surrounding the labs. Drivers familiar with the stretch of the 118 freeway that connects L.A. and Simi Valley can attest to the strength of these buffeting zephyrs that can arise from nowhere, and the startling experience of having one’s car casually slapped into the next lane as if propelled by the  invisible hand of God(zilla). In fact, Simi Valley’s name is said to originate from the Chumash Indian word Shimiyi, which refers to the stringy clouds–borne from fierce air currents–that typify the region. (Like all American Indians, the Chumash no longer roam their native land thanks to friendly relocation efforts aided by the U.S. Calvary, ornery land barons, and cowpokes hopped-up on sarsaparilla. Today, what remains of the Chumash tribe enjoys the sweet taste of revenge by milking elderly retirees of their Social Security checks at one of their many fine gambling establishments.)

Three Mile Island was an isolated incident that released a significant amount of radiation into the atmosphere, yet a vast majority of researchers agree that it was not enough to pose a serious health risk to anyone. The only thing Three Mile Island killed (other than some expendable wildlife and shrubbery) was the building of any more nuclear power plants in the U.S.  That’s what happens when the pesky press goes poking their noses into things. SSFL did not suffer from such media exposure, nor did Fox News exist to give it a positive spin. Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and even Wilford Brimley were oblivious to its existence. So, for somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty years, Santa Susana was free to, as Dennis Hopper might say, “Do its own thing, maaaaan.” The wind, depending on which way it blew, would invariably carry countless radioactive and chemically-contaminated particles, invisible to the naked eye, through the half-opened windows of many a tract home and into the lungs of dozing Baby Boomers and The Great Generation that spawned them.  The neighboring American Jewish University Brandeis-Bardin Campus in Simi still gets the worst of it (wouldn’t you know it?), as runoff from the 1959 meltdown still flows directly into their property whenever it rains. When visiting the campus it is helpful to know phrases like “Ikh hob zeks toes” (“I have six toes”) and “Dayn yarmulke iz shayn” (Your yarmulke is glowing”).

Without a doubt, burning toxic waste is cheap, easy, and most of all, fun–but it can also be deadly for those who stoke the poisonous pits. Perhaps that explains why, for a short time, the lab adopted the disposal method of packing steel barrels to capacity with highly toxic waste and then firing at them with a rifle. The barrels would then explode, dispersing their contents into the air. For some unexplained reason, this safe and sane  practice of waste removal was abruptly halted shortly after its implementation, and the open pits were set ablaze once again. To provide some idea of the risk involved in standing around a crater of smoldering nuke trash, twenty two of the twenty seven men who worked on one sodium pit crew alone died of various cancers (a 23rd worker, ironically, survived working on the sodium pit only to be swallowed whole by a giant radioactive halibut while scuba diving off the Channel Islands in 1981). In 1994, two SSFL scientists were killed when the illegal trash they were incinerating blew up. Their deaths led to a grand jury investigation and an FBI raid on SSFL, which is how most of this info came to see the light of day. But it’s only the tip of the proverbial glowing, toxic iceberg.

There’s no telling just how much poison has leached into the soil and groundwater of the cities that surround SSFL, but the state has estimated that almost two million gallons of toxic trichloroethylene were dumped on the grounds and that half a million gallons also of trichloroethylene have saturated the bedrock, soil, and ultimately the water table beneath the lab. We tend to gloss over big numbers, so slowly say this out loud to yourself: Two and a half million gallons. And that’s just the count for only two chemicals that we know about.   Buy a home remotely close to the site, and your escrow and purchase agreement will contain an waiver stating that you may very well be living on poisoned property. Having resided very close to the facility ourselves, we think that’s a small price to pay to be privy to the earth-shaking, awe-inspiring  experience of feeling a Saturn rocket prototype being tested just a few miles from your front door. One would swear the damn thing was on your driveway it was so loud, a fact made even more impressive by the fact that, while tests were conducted in open air, most of the enormous rockets were fired and run (sometimes for hours) in one of the many concrete bunkers burrowed deep beneath the surface of the labs.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, that vanguard of justice, reviewed the site in 2003 and gave it two big thumbs up, saying that there was no risk of exposure to contaminants in the area, and though three other studies failed to find any evidence of increased cancer rates in the area, Boeing (which purchased the site from Rockwell/Teledyne/Dr. Evil, still agreed to pay $30 million to settle a single lawsuit alleging that pollutants from the site caused cancer in many nearby residents. In an age when tobacco companies fight to the bitter end, lawsuits about the obvious ill effects of smoking to the bitter end, a behemoth like Boeing rolled over like an old hound, despite reports in their favor. Is there something they know that we don’t?, we ask rhetorically.

The DOE has been anxious to turn the prime-view property over to residential developers who are just, uh, dying to build there. We can only imagine some of the creative names that marketing gurus will devise for the tony gated communities that will inevitably populate the radioactive hilltop: Keloid Crossroads . . . Glowing Oaks . . . Plutonium Acres . . . Nuclear Renaissance…Uranium Villas. . . Tumors:Lifestyle Living for the Soon-to-Be Terminally Ill . . . Mutant Manors…Metastasize: Making Your Early Retirement Even Earlier and of course, Estates of the Living Dead (Sorry, Phases One and Two Already Sold Out!)

And just think of the creative marketing campaigns that will line the signs leading up to the communities:

A nuclear neighborhood for your nuclear family!

Waterfalls and Fallout. What a Beautiful Combination.

Where the glow of sunset is surpassed only by the glow of your front yard.

At last, a community that radiates the status you deserve.

Is it ironic that Santa Susana was built to develop weapons to stop the Soviet Union from bombarding Americans with radiation, and yet it was the facility itself that poisoned and killed nearby residents, never once warning them that they were in mortal danger, that their water and air were deadly, and that their children would grow up to become into flesh-eating mutant teens with loose morals and even looser pants? 

Yes, and The Gipper probably knew it (at least until he entered the “Drool Cup Days” that would follow him to his grave). But like so many canny conservative politicians of his era as well as today, Ronald Reagan built his political career by exploiting the Red Scare, seeing commies hiding in every coat closet, under every bed, and worst of all, hiding on soundstages and movie lots. Reagan was what Michael Moore refers to as “our first spokes-president.” He was ultimately an entertainer with political convictions that could shaped and shifted just as easily as the lines in any script. Dollars to donuts, when the former Death Valley Days host made his dramatic demand,  “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” he knew the partition’s demise was already a done deal; he was just reading his lines in an agitprop farce that had run its course. Just as Nancy Reagan urged Americans to “Just Say No” to drugs while Ollie North and the Iran-Contra gang were creating a bull market for cocaine in the U.S. (especially its ghettos) to fund a secret and illegal war, Mr. Reagan and those before him apparently found nothing wrong in fomenting fear over an exaggerated Soviet nuke threat (the USSR, as it turned out, was a nearly toothless bear) while knowingly exposing U.S. citizens to radiation through scores of open air bomb tests and secret facilities like Santa Susana which operated with little oversight and even less accountability. With a government like that looking after us, who really needed the commies?

America. Land of the free, home of the facade.

As we celebrate this special week that marks the 32nd anniversary of what even the most educated commentators still wrongly refer to as “the worst nuclear disaster on U.S. soil,” please feel free to pass the word that in 1959, twenty years before Three Mile Island was ushered as more myth than fact into the American lexicon , it was the humble yet mighty uncontained reactor at Santa Susana that blessed the United States its first and deadliest nuclear mishap. Though the reactor that went awry at Three Mile Island was shut down, its twin is still humming away as you read this. At Santa Susana, the gates are now chained and padlocked, the buildings  mostly abandoned or razed, and the cracked concrete yields to weeds.  The property is still owned by Boeing, as one can plainly see from the logo on a water tower just outside the main gate, and though the site seems abandoned, there are sometimes signs of human life behind the gates.

On October 15, 2007,  Boeing and California officials announced that almost 2,400 acres of land that is currently Boeing’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory will become state parkland, and permanently restrict the land for nonresidential, noncommercial use. A little more than three years later, on December 7th, 2010, state and federal agencies signed a plan to decontaminate a portion of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, handing the bulk of the task to Boeing. The state had previously mandated that the aircraft and aerospace manufacturer — which purchased the facility in 1996 — make the 2,850-acre test site squeaky clean by 2017 with support from from NASA and the Department of Energy. Not surprisingly, Boeing appealed. and so the site still languishes behind the chains and padlocks and barbed wire fences.

Just a few miles to the west of the Santa Susana site, along a more verdant stretch of the same Simi Hills, the presidential library and burial place of Ronald Reagan looks more like an upscale Mission-style monastery than a shrine to “The Great Communicator.” Given the history of the man whose belongings–including Air Force One–are housed there, its proximity to the site of our nation’s worst nuclear disaster is more than just poignantly ironic. It is also a testament to the naivete of a nation so in love with its own righteous mythology that it, like all empires that have come before, believes that the sun will never set on its self-perceived  of world domination, a notion fueled in part by the just cause of our greatest export, a nebulous catch-all concept called freedom. In 1979, Americans already hard-bitten by a recession, an energy crisis, the ghosts of Watergate, and the Iranian hostage crisis, were burdened with a new bogeyman of nuclear power gone mad. Yest, instead of chasing the public from the theaters, what happened in Harrisburg prompted moviegoers to stand in line for hours to see The China Syndrome, a film as cynical as its audience, which believed then as it does now that the movie is a thinly-veiled replay of Three Mile Island — even though it hit the theaters a week beforehand. That this falsehood has been so casually repeated by the media, reinforced by lazy bloggers, and swallowed whole by a public that would rather question Mr. Obama’s birth credentials proves the old adage that if you say something often enough and loudly enough, it becomes fact.

In 1959, twenty years before The China Syndrome, as the Santa Susana Field Laboratory silently sprinkled its toxic fairy dust over the San Fernando suburbs, Americans flocked to another film that stands as a symbol of it day. Appropriately enough, the 5th highest-grossing motion picture in 1959 wasn’t even a live-action eff0rt. It was a feature length cartoon presciently entitled Sleeping Beauty.

The facilities of the Boeing (née Rocketdyne) Santa Susana Field Laboratory/United States Department of Energy can be gazed upon longingly through the chain link fence  at the top of Woolsey Canyon, just off Valley Circle Boulevard in Chatsworth. Don’t forget to wear your hazmat suit!