Those inert, radioactive gases produced in the accident that had not leaked out and made it up the exhaust stack, xenon-135 and krypton-85, were kept in holding tanks for a few weeks for the radiation to decay away and then slowly released up the stack and into the environment. The iodine isotopes had apparently reacted with something in the building and were not found in the released gas. On August 29, 1959, a news release was issued to the Associated Press, United Press International, The Wall Street Journal, and seven local newspapers, informing the public of the incident. The wording tended to downplay it to the point that one would wonder what made it news, beginning with “During inspection of the fuel elements on July 26 … a parted fuel element was observed.” So? What’s a “parted fuel element”? No big deal was made.
The SRE fuel melt was a unique accident, and yet it was typical. It was unique in that so many obvious trouble clues were ignored for so long. I am not aware of another incident quite like this. It was typical of reactor accidents in that nobody was hurt, and the only way you could tell from looking at it that something had happened was to take it apart. As in many cases of reactor accidents, the fuel was damaged by a lack of coolant. There was no steam explosion. Lessons were learned, extensive modifications were made to the system to improve its reliability. For the newly funded SRE Power Expansion Program, the hot-oil pumps were junked and Hallum-type primary and secondary sodium pumps were installed, and SRE was restarted on September 7, 1960.[144] It ran well, generating 37 gigawatt-hours of electricity for the Moore Park community. It last ran on February 15, 1964, and decommissioning of the nuclear components was started in 1976. In 1999, the last remainder of the Sodium Reactor Experiment was cleaned off Simi Hills. The idea of a graphite-sodium reactor died.
Real trouble did not begin until February 2004, when locals filed a class action lawsuit against the Santa Susana Field Laboratory’s current owner, The Boeing Company, for causing harm to people with the Sodium Reactor Experiment. They had been stirred to action by a new analysis of the 1959 incident by Dr. Arjun Makhijani, an electrical engineer. In a way, the suit was like building a house in the glide path of an airport and then suing because airplanes were found to be flying low overhead. When Santa Susana was built, Simi Valley was a dry, desert-like landscape. Makhijani estimated that the accident released 260 times more iodine-131 than the Three Mile Island core melt in Pennsylvania in 1979, which speaks well of Three Mile Island. His estimate was speculative, because no iodine-131 contamination could be detected at the time. Over 99 % of the volatile isotope was captured as it bubbled up out of the naked fuel into the coolant, becoming solid sodium iodide, which collected in the cold trap in the primary cooling loop. Any pollutant that might have made its way up the stack was diluted in the air, and 80 days later there could be no detectable trace, as if there were any to begin with. There were no milk cows living in Simi Valley and no edible grass to contaminate. There was no detectable thyroid cancer epidemic. Nobody was hurt. Boeing settled with a large payout to nearby residents.
In those early decades of nuclear power, it was an unwritten rule in the AEC that the public was not to be burdened with radiation release figures or the mention of minor contamination. It was true that the general population had no training in nuclear physics and radiation effects, and if given numbers with error bars and a map of an airborne radiation plume, imaginations could take control in nonproductive ways. Nobody wanted to cause a panic or unwarranted anguish or to undermine the public’s fragile confidence in government-sponsored research. The results of such a policy are worse than what it is trying to forestall, as the government is commonly accused of purposefully withholding information, and misinformation rushes in to fill the vacuum. Conspiracy theories thrive. This fundamental problem of nuclear work has yet to be turned around.
Our next adventure in sodium takes us to Lagoona Beach, which sounds like a secluded spot somewhere in Hawaii, but it’s not. It is in Frenchtown Charter Township, Michigan, 27.8 miles from downtown Detroit, looking out onto Lake Erie.
Walker Lee Cisler was born on October 8, 1897, in Marietta, Ohio. An exceptionally bright student, Cisler sealed his fate by receiving an engineering degree at Cornell University in 1922. With that credential, he was hired at the Public Service Electric and Gas Company in New Jersey, was named chief of the Equipment Production branch of the U.S. War Production Board in 1941, and in 1943 was tapped as the chief engineer for Detroit Edison.
In 1944 he joined the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in Europe, assigned the task of rebuilding the electrical power systems on the continent as the German army retreated. By 1945, he had the power system in France generating more electricity than it had before the war. Impressed, the early embodiment of the AEC named him secretary of the AEC Industrial Advisory group in 1947. Resuming work at Detroit Edison, he became president in 1951 and CEO in 1954.
As a visionary, pushing for a greater and everlasting energy supply in his native land, Cisler became an early advocate of the breeder reactor concept, and by October 1952 he established the Nuclear Power Development Department at Detroit Edison. His dream of a civilian-owned, commercial breeder played right into the AEC plans, and it was the second breeder concept in their set of demonstration power reactors to be built. The first, the thermal U-233 breeder, would be built at Santa Susanna. The second, the fast plutonium breeder, would be Cisler’s baby. A kick-off meeting was held with the AEC at Detroit Edison on November 10, 1954. Present at the meeting was Walter Zinn, the scientist who headed the slightly melted EBR-I project at National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho. The plant would be named Fermi 1, in honor of the man whose name, along with Leó Szilard’s, was on the patent for the original nuclear reactor. Ground was broken at Lagoona Beach in 1956, after Cisler had secured $5 million in equipment and design work from the AEC and a $50 million commitment from Detroit Edison.
It would be a long crawl to implementation of Cisler’s plan, fraught with ballooning costs, many engineering novelties, and strong opposition to the project by Walter Reuther. Reuther was an interesting fellow. A card-carrying Socialist Party member, anti-Stalinist, and a fine tool & die machinist, he became a United Auto Workers organizer/hell-raiser and was attacked by a phalanx of Ford Motor Company security personnel in the “Battle of the Overpass” in 1937. This, at the very least, made him a well-known figure in Detroit.[145] Reuther, the UAW, and eventually the AFL–CIO filed suit after suit opposed to the building permit for the plant and later the operating license, based on multiple safety concerns and the fact that it was not an automobile. The suits ate up a vast amount of time and money, and court decisions finding against Fermi 1 were taken all the way to the Supreme Court. In the summer of 1961, the court decided seven to two in favor of Cisler, the AEC, and Detroit Edison. Construction could proceed, and the projected cost had risen to $70 million.
144
The Hallum Nuclear Generating Station is a little-known, second graphite-sodium reactor built near Lincoln, Nebraska, starting in 1958. This experiment was also funded by the AEC. Unlike the SRE, the vertical-shaft centrifugal sodium pumps for this reactor were designed from scratch and were considered far superior to the ill-fated SRE pumps. Unfortunately, the modified Hallum-type pumps used in the rebuilt SRE had undersized overflow loops which produced a serious gas-entrapment problem. The Hallum reactor operated only briefly, from 1962 to 1964. The graphite moderator cans were clad in stainless steel, and stress cracking and corrosion caused irreducible problems. By 1969, evidence of the Hallum reactor was erased from the prairie, but the Hallum-type pump remains as a credible means of moving liquid sodium.
145
Walter worked as a “wage slave” at the Ford Motor Company starting in 1927. Henry Ford sent him to Nizhny, Novgorod, Soviet Union to help build a tractor factory, but he became overly interested in the proletarian industrial democracy, and Ford fired him in 1932. After working for a few years at an auto plant in Gorky, Reuther returned to the U.S. and became a very active member of the UAW. On May 26, 1937, at 2:00 P.M., he and Richard Frankensteen were in the middle of a leaflet campaign (“Unionism, Not Fordism”) and they were asked by a news photographer to pose on the pedestrian overpass in front of the Ford sign. Ford’s modest army of about 40 security specialists walked into the frame from the left and proceeded to discipline the uninvited visitors. The Dearborn police stood out of range and shouted advice while the union men were beaten, kicked, dragged by the feet, slammed down on the concrete, and thrown down two flights of steps. Reuther, always a champion of the underpaid and the underappreciated worker with too little money, died on May 9, 1970, when his privately chartered LearJet smacked the runway at the Pellston, Michigan, airstrip in rain and heavy fog. He was on his way to the UAW recreational facility at Black Lake.