Nuclear Coverup	Email me
Norm's Soapbox- My corner of Hyde Park

Since the 1950s, DOE, NASA and the Defense Department held nuclear experiments at Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Laboratory, in Simi Valley, California, which included a plutonium fuel fabrication facility, a facility for cutting up irradiated nuclear fuel, and approximately 10 nuclear reactors. One of the reactors experienced a partial meltdown. The Sodium Reactor Experiment-SRE was an experimental nuclear reactor which operated from 1957 to 1964 and was the first commercial power plant in the world to experience a core meltdown.

There was a decades-long cover-up by the US Department of Energy. Thousands of pounds of sodium coolant from the time of the meltdown are not yet accounted for. The reactor and support systems were removed in 1981 and the building torn down in 1999. Operators of the site routinely burned contaminated reactor components in an open pit overlooking Simi Valley approx. 30 miles from Los Angeles.

There are now dangerous levels of radioactive tritium, the solvent trichloroethylene, perchlorate (a chemical used in rocket fuel), and other toxic chemicals and radioactive material that pose a threat to public health that still have not been removed from the environment in 2011. It took environmental groups suing the government recently for them to finally agree to clean up the site but they have until 2020 to complete the contamination removal.