At approximately 6:30 PM on the night of July 13, 1959, engineers working at an experimental reactor in the Santa Susana hills confronted their worst nightmare: an out of control reactor. It's called "an excursion," in Orwellian nukespeak but in fact it was the start of a partial meltdown that would take over a month to control and has taken over 50 years to clean up at a cost of over $250-million and will take another 50,000 years to clear the released radiation from the groundwater.

It was fifty years ago today, that the city of Los Angeles experienced the meltdown at the Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE) that, except for blind luck, didn't become LA's Chernobyl. Unlike Chernobyl or Three Mile Island this research reactor didn't have a protective containment structure and a breach could have, "released more radiation than was released at Three Mile Island," said Dan Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap.

Still, according to Hirsch, the meltdown released enough radioactive isotopes to cause over a thousand cancers. While the SRE melting may have fallen short of other large scale catastrophes the nuclear industry didn't want the public to know about what happened in LA's backyard.

This story is part of the reason why I mistrust the nuclear power industry. When fed lies like this for fifty years regarding the "safety" or "cleanliness" of this industry, I balk at any promise made by pro-nuclear advocates.