True or False: Three Mile Island: America’s Worst Nuclear Accident? — Expert Weighs In (and the Answer Might Surprise You) (Pt.7)

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) — Editor’s Note: The following news piece represents the seventh in a 15-part mini-series titled, Nuclear Power in Our World Today, featuring nuclear authority, engineer and whistleblower Arnie Gundersen. The EnviroNews USA special encompasses a wide span of topics, ranging from Manhattan-era madness to the continuously-unfolding crisis on the ground at Fukushima Daiichi in eastern Japan. The transcript is as follows:

Excerpts from History Channel Video on Three Mile Island

History Channel Narrator: Saturday, 10:00 a.m.: Reporters at Three Mile Island are now asking questions not to get a news story, but to have a sense of whether they should be running for their lives. From almost the moment the story reached them, the press has felt there was no one in authority they could trust. Met-Ed (Metropolitan Edison Co.) officials obviously are spinning the facts, and the NRC reactions are confused and contradictory.

Among the people most concerned by the confusion is the President of the United States. Jimmy Carter is a trained engineer and a veteran of the Navy’s illustrious nuclear submarine program. He now tells NRC Commissioner Joseph Hendrie that he wants a personal representative at Three Mile Island to take charge of activities and report directly to him…

At the same press conference, the Governor makes a shocking announcement – one that will do much to at last end many people’s fears.

Governor Dick Thornburgh: President Carter will be paying a visit to the area to make a personal on-site visit…

History Channel Narrator: Carter doesn’t hesitate. He starts downriver toward Three Mile Island. The President tours the plant. The tour does not uncover any new facts for the President’s consideration or the public’s consumption. Its purpose is simple: restore public confidence.

Josh Cunnings (Narrator): Thank you for joining us at the EnviroNews USA news desk for this seventh of 15 short films in our mini-series, Nuclear Power in Our World Today. I’m your host Josh Cunnings.

False advertising is a very, very serious crime. Well, ok, maybe not so much, and companies do of course get away with it every single day in America — but still, it’s just bad form, and enterprises caught doing it should at the very least be exposed for it.

But, who would want to be notoriously known as the site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history – and why?

We explore this topic as we review yet another excerpt from the bombshell interview between former nuclear industry executive and whistleblower Arnie Gundersen, and EnviroNews USA Editor-in-Chief Emerson Urry. Let’s listen in.

Urry: You’ve mentioned Three Mile Island a couple of times since we’ve been speaking, and I believe the marquee at Three Mile Island proudly boasts that it is the site of America’s worst-ever nuclear accident. Is it?

Gundersen: You know, I think there’s probably two that are worse, and when I went to school in ‘70, I never knew of the worst one. I think the worst one was Santa Susana – which is right outside of LA.

Urry: Rocketdyne?

Gundersen: Some people call it “Rocketdyne,” which was the company that ran the facility, and Santa Susana is the location. In 1959 there was a meltdown there, and the government covered it up until the 80s. So, I went to school ten years afterward – ’69, ’70, ’71, ’72 – and we knew nothing about it.

Urry: And they had two subsequent meltdowns at that site as well I believe – in the 60s.

Gundersen: Yeah. It became so highly contaminated that even now it’s difficult to clean it up, and the surrounding suburbs have some awfully strange increased incidences of cancer that I attribute to the accident that occurred in ’59. You know, what’s happening now there is that the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are looking the other way as the contractor tries to tear it down and ship that stuff…

Urry: Is that Boeing at the moment?

Gundersen: Yes. Boeing is ripping it down and shipping it to other, just regular sanitary landfills, as opposed to doing it right and shipping to radioactive landfills in Utah or Texas. They just don’t want to spend the money, and they want to be done with it. I was involved in some litigation on Santa Susana, and it was clear to me that one of the things they do is they measure the radiation on-site before they ship the stuff away, and they forget to take out the fact that the site is highly radioactive. So, they have a high background, and based on that high background they say, “Well, this material’s clean.” If they had just driven it down the road a couple miles and inspected it, [they] would have seen it’s much hotter than background, in which case it should have gone to Utah.

Urry: Hmm. It’s also been mentioned to us that although this site has been prioritized to be a Superfund, the state [of California], for whatever reasons, has fought and fought to keep this off the Superfund list. I mean, on a site that’s this severely contaminated, with a full-blown meltdown, with no containment dome no less – I mean, how are they able to keep a site like that off the Superfund list?

Gundersen: I think there’s a lot of political pressure not to. One for money, and two, they just don’t want the population which… You’ve got to remember, 50 years ago, LA was not anywhere near as big, and the suburbs weren’t there either. But now, the suburbs have encroached around this, and they really don’t want a frightened population that might litigate, and run the cost of the cleanup up.

Excerpt from CNN News Report

Don Lemon — Anchor, CNN: Developing story about the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant – the site of the significant commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history…

Cunnings: While CNN and others have reported that Three Mile Island is the site of the worst-ever nuclear accident in the U.S., nothing could be further from the truth – and unfortunately, [due to] TMI’s false advertising and erroneous reporting by the media, most Americans go on thinking Three Mile Island is as bad as it gets on U.S. soil.

In 2013, Emerson Urry was in a sit-down interview with legendary environmental activist and consumer advocate Erin Brockovich when the topic of Rocketdyne spontaneously came up in the conversation. Let’s just say that Three Mile Island’s catchy marquee and slogan didn’t in the least fool team Brockovich regarding the true identity of America’s worst radioactive incident.

Urry to Brockovich: What local California environmental issues do you find most pressing, and which ones are you participating with most actively?

Brockovich: California is covered in red dots and locations that we’re dealing with.

Urry: Yes.

Brockovich: You know, there’s a whole lot of issues going up on the Bay, and we’ve got things in the San Joaquin Valley; PG&E polluted out there just like they did in Hinckley. You’ve got similar problems in Bakersfield; two issues down in Carson. We’re doing Beverly Hills High and oil problems and nuclear meltdowns. There’s a lot. It’s sad.

Urry: Yeah.

Brockovich: You know, I get drawn back in in the situation with Rocketdyne, which is just right over our shoulder here, and communities reporting too many people with cancer. There’s definitely a lot of issues in the state of California.

Urry: It’s interesting because people think of California [and they think of such] a green progressive state, and we were just discussing how, pretty much right down the road over here, we had, I think the third of fourth largest oil spill in the history of the world over at Taft. [Editor’s Note: Correction: EnviroNews has now concluded: the Taft Lakeview Gusher #1 oil spill of 1910 was the world’s largest.]

Brockovich: Oh absolutely. I thought you were going to say Rocketdyne and the nuclear meltdown.

Cunnings: In December of 2013 EnviroNews California expanded on the Brockovich-Urry dialog with an article of its own, wherein two studies on the site were discussed. One study indicates that Rocketdyne released up to 459 times more radiation into the open environment than did Three Mile Island. Just a small difference of magnitude there. Ever so slight.

With Gundersen, Urry also mentioned two subsequent meltdowns at Rocketdyne, which is also correct. Two more meltdowns did indeed happen there — one in 1964 and another in 1965. But the 1959 accident was indeed the granddaddy of them all.

Rocketdyne had been conducting research on an experimental sodium reactor when things went horribly wrong. EnviroNews’ own Shad Engkilterra reported on the incident this way:

For 14 days, radioactive material was vented into the open air. There is no record as to exactly how much or what kind, though there are sources that say it was immeasurable because the measuring equipment that was available at the time did not have the ability to read emissions that high. What is known, is that deadly plutonium and strontium were indeed released during the episode.
This experiment took place before the widespread adoption of containment domes for nuclear power plants, and thus the radioactive material fell out unrestrained, to wherever the winds and air currents carried it.

Excerpts from the Testimony of John Pace, Eyewitness to the 1959 Nuclear Meltdown at Santa Susana

John Pace (speaking to audience): On the ’59 reactor meltdown, I was there. I was 19 years old at the time. I worked for Atomics International from January 5 to November 9 of 1959. That’s the period of time that I worked there. But that was the critical time. That’s when everything happened…

What I want to show you on this particular picture real quick is, the reactor building, you see there’s no containment building, and that’s the way they was built back in 1959 – as [an] experimental reactor, and it wasn’t required to have a containment building…

Now, here’s a picture of me. I finally got in there. This is when I was 20 years old. [This] was about a month before the accident happened. I came to work on my shift, I didn’t think anything was wrong, just like a regular shift, and I came through that door, and then there I looked as I came through that door and I said, “Uh oh. Something’s not right here. There’s something going on that I don’t know about. Am I supposed to be here?” All these questions were running through my mind. [I closed] the door real quietly so I wouldn’t disturb. But, around that console, they call it where I’m sitting at, there was men all lined up around that console, and they [were] discussing what happened on the nuclear accident. As I stood there and listened, it scared me to death to hear what they [were] talking about…

Anyway, I was talking to them and I heard about how they barely shut the reactor down. The reactor had run away on them… The reactor has an automatic shutdown on [it]; that didn’t work. And then they finally had to put the control rods down in the reactor all the way trying to stop it, [and] it still wouldn’t stop it. So, what they had to do, they had to release the nuclear radiation straight out of the reactor out into the atmosphere. This has not been talked about, but I was there and I know it happened. It went out over the San Fernando Valley; it went over the eastern end of Simi Valley. The winds were blowing in that direction. This might be a surprise to many out there, but that’s what actually happened…

And then the men asked him, “Can we tell our families about it? It went right over our own homes. We live in Chatsworth, Canoga Park, all those areas. Can we let our wives know what had happened?” And the three men got together and talked about it and they [came] back to them and [said], “No, you can not. No, [we] don’t want anyone saying a word about it. We’ll report what happened to the public in our own due time.” And then he turned around and came over to me where I’m standing taping up the door and all that, and he got right up next to like a sergeant in the military right in my face and said, “You will not say a word about what happened here today!” And he really got stern about it and scared me half to death in the fashion he had done that. So, here I am talking to you right now; I was not supposed to say a word. This is something I have to say to all of you. [It’s] something that’s very important to me to be able to let you know what actually happened. It’s been with me 55 years. I’ve know this, but this is my first opportunity…

Now, here’s a picture of me working on the sodium pump. This sodium pump was what turned out to be the cause [of] the nuclear accident. This is me working on it, finishing it up, putting clear on the pump over the asbestos. And that’s not a very safe thing do, messing with asbestos. But, that’s the pump there that caused the accident…

Marvin J. Fox said, “I want you guys to take and restart the reactor up. We want to find out what caused the reactor to go down.” So, he gave us an assignment that we had to restart the reactor. And it was a very scary thing. I was on that crew. I was right there…

So, what they [did], they took for two weeks, like it’s been advertised, it’s been said… you’ve heard it a hundred times maybe… Why did we start it and do all this? It was a very foolish thing. We [were] told to do it by the boss man…

What they’d do, every 24 hours roughly, they would take and shut down the reactor and then restart it again until they figured out for sure that it was that pump that was the cause of it. And every time they shut the reactor down, more radiation was released from the reactor out into the atmosphere. It could have been towards Simi Valley. [It] could have been towards Topanga Canyon…

Now, where this tall piece of equipment is right there, is where the reactor sat. As we were working on the reactor we had to have the door open to let the radiation out. The radiation was high enough that we had to get it out of the building as much as we could to be able to work in there. So, that’s what went on for those two weeks…

Now, [here’s] another picture of me here on top of the reactor with my supervisor next to me. We’re lining up some equipment. It was that equipment you seen in the last picture there. On top of that reactor — see all those holes there – that’s where the fuel elements would go down in the reactor. On those holes, they had O-rings around those holes and they were leaking. And I had radiation coming up on me and my supervisor while we [were] lining that equipment up. So, we [were] always continually getting radiation bombarded…

This is a seal around the core of the reactor. It keeps the radiation from leaking out. We had to cut that because they wanted to get the small pieces out of the reactor…

[This is a] large plug right there. We had to have it in the right spot to get the broken pieces of fuel elements out, as well as the fuel slugs. There [were] 81 fuel slugs that [were] dropped in the bottom of the reactor from all the broken fuel rods, or fuel elements there that we had to get out. So, we had to do that six or seven times before we got all those out, and all us men that’s in that picture got exposed to the radiation coming out from around the edge of it, as well as in the center there.

Cunnings: Just last year, LA’s NBC4 dropped a media bomb on Boeing when they revealed downright scandalous lobbies and political payoffs in an attempt to thwart cleanup efforts at that site.

Excerpt #1 From NBC4 Documentary “LA’s Nuclear Secret”

Joel Grover – Investigative Reporter, NBC4: In Woodland Hills, Canoga Park, Simi Valley and other neighborhoods, people are afraid. They think that chemicals and radiation from the Santa Susana Field Lab have made them and their families sick. Now, the NBC4 I-Team has uncovered evidence that big business interests working behind the scenes with government bureaucrats have managed to stonewall a full cleanup of the site.

Excerpts #2 and #3 From NBC4 Documentary “LA’s Nuclear Secret”

Grover: This woman almost got it cleaned up…

Grover to Linda Adams: You’re wiping away tears talking about Santa Susana…

Grover: She’s Linda Adams, the former head of California’s Environmental Protection Agency, who served both Democratic and Republican governors.

Adams: They depended on me to get it done.

Grover: Years ago Adams heard stories…

Unknown Resident #1: Every single house on my street had cancers…

Grover: …of people like these who lived near the former test site, including children who’d lost their eyes to a cancer often linked to radiation exposure.

Grover to Adams: Did you feel there needed to be a full cleanup of the contamination?

Adams: Absolutely. Those chemicals don’t stay on the mountain. [The] population is below the site.

Excerpt #4 From NBC4 Documentary “LA’s Nuclear Secret”

Grover: This toxic site was once run by Rocketdyne, but is now owned by Boeing – one of the state’s largest employers, and a big contributor to California politicians – including Governor Brown. Even though Boeing didn’t own it when most of the nuclear and rocket testing took place, as the current owner, they’d have to pay the millions of dollars it would take to fully clean it up – with some help from NASA and the Department of Energy, which also used parts of the site.

Grover to Adams: Did you sense Boeing was spending a lot of money to kill a full cleanup?

Adams: Absolutely. They had formed a large army of lobbyists to do everything they cold to stop cleanup to that level.

Grover: It’s been like a game of musical chairs: a former environmental aide to Governor Brown, a former head of the state EPA, and the former chief lawyer of the DTSC (California Department of Toxic Substances Control), have all switched sides and worked on behalf of Boeing to kill a full cleanup of Santa Susana.

Liza Tucker – Consumer Advocate, Consumer Watchdog: It’s a very smart and very evil strategy.

Excerpts #5, #6 and #7 From NBC4 Documentary “LA’s Nuclear Secret”

Sheila Kuehl — Former California State Senator: The Boeing Company has employed cadres of people…

Grover: In 2007, State Senator Sheila Kuehl went after Boeing.

Kuehl: There are cancer clusters of various kinds of exotic cancers, all around this site…

Grover: Senator Kuehl managed to get a bill passed ordering the DTSC to force Boeing to fully clean up Santa Susana, restoring it to the way it was before the nuclear and rocket testing. But Boeing went to court and got the law thrown out, saying the site was being unfairly singled out by being held to such a high cleanup standard.

Adams: It was an uphill battle.

Grover: So, EPA Secretary Adams stepped in in 2009 and got NASA and the Department of Energy to sign agreements guaranteeing they would fully clean up their parts of Santa Susana. But Boeing wouldn’t sign a similar agreement.

Adams: We were outnumbered.

Grover: According to internal emails we obtained, Boeing lobbyists were privately meeting with DTSC staffers to influence the cleanup requirements.

Grover to DTSC Barbara Lee – Director, DTSC: There are those that think that your agency is too cozy with Boeing.

Lee: I haven’t seen it and I’ve looked for it.

Grover: Today, five years later, Boeing is proposing to turn Santa Susana into parkland for recreational purposes.

Dan Hirsch — Nuclear Policy Instructor, University of California: Boeing is proposing that it only have to clean up something of the order of a few percent of the contamination.

Grover to Lee: Are you concerned contamination from that site is still spilling into neighborhood communities?

Lee: I don’t believe that there is a current exposure to communities.

Adams: I don’t know how anyone could be saying that. All the evidence I’ve seen shows there is a threat.

Excerpt #8 From NBC4 Documentary “LA’s Nuclear Secret”

Unknown Resident #2: The Government doesn’t want to admit that it killed its own people.

Chuck Henry – Co-Anchor, NBC4: Tonight the NBC4 I-Team reveals that dangerous secrets [were] kept behind this fence in a place called Area IV.

Unknown Resident #3: I just want the truth out there.

Henry: A terrible nuclear accident, radioactive gasses leaked over Los Angeles, and a Government cover-up. The big question tonight: Did the toxic fallout cause people, including children, to get sick and die?

Colleen Williams – Co-Anchor, NBC4: That nuclear accident happened a long time ago – 1959 – one of the worst in U.S. history – just 35 miles from downtown LA. Tonight Joel Grover and his team have uncovered proof – 56 years later – that the fallout from this accident is even worse than the Government has ever admitted. Joel is here right now with the I-Team’s yearlong investigation. Joel?

Grover: Well Colleen, you might be wondering why we should care about a nuclear accident that happened more than half-a-century ago? Because, as you’re about to see, thousands of people in the San Fernando and Simi Valleys have been secretly exposed to dangerous radioactive fallout, and there’s evidence if you live close to the hot zone you could still be exposed or even get sick.

Excerpts #9 and #10 From NBC4 Documentary “LA’s Nuclear Secret”

Grover: A government press release said simply, there had been a minor “fuel element failure” at the reactor, and there had been “no release of radioactive materials” to the environment.

Grover to John Pace: Did the government lie to the public?

Pace: Yes they did. And that’s one of the reasons I’m here. What they’ve written in that report is not even close to what actually happened. The radiation in that building got so high it went clear off the scale.

Excerpt #11 From NBC4 Documentary “LA’s Nuclear Secret”

Grover to Group of Sick Residents: How many think your cancers or cancers in your family are related to Santa Susana?

Entire Group of Sick Residents (in Unison): I do!

Excerpts #12, #13 and #14 From NBC4 Documentary “LA’s Nuclear Secret”

Grover: For our investigation, the I-Team collected and combed through more than 15,000 pages of documents, which reveal what the Government has yet to publicly admit: that there were secret releases of radiation from Area IV that might have caused many cases of cancer.

Grover to Pace: Were the workers allowed to tell their wives, their families, what was going on?

Pace: No they were not. They were sworn in secrecy.

Grover: But buried in the archives of NASA, which used part of the Field Lab, we found this document, which confirms the 1959 meltdown led to a release of radioactive contaminants. And in the files of the U.S. EPA, we found interviews with former Santa Susana workers who we tracked down, like Dan Parks.

Grover to Parks: Did you witness releases of radioactive gas?

Parks: Certainly.

Grover: Parks’ job was to monitor radiation in Area IV in the 1960s, and he says he frequently saw workers release dangerous radiation into the air from three different reactors.

Parks: It was supposed to be a secret…

Grover: And he says workers would often dispose of barrels of radioactive waste from reactors by taking them out to what were called the “Burn Pits.”

Parks: …and they would shoot it with this high-powered rifle. It was a volatile explosion beyond belief. Fire, smoke; if the wind was blowing to the valley, it would blow it in the valley.

Grover: And he says that radioactive smoke blew right onto workers like Ralph Powell, an Area IV security officer.

Powell: I saw the clouds of smoke engulfing my friends that are dying now.

Grover to Powell: You fear that you brought radiation home?

Powell: Yes. I was told that maybe I tracked in some radiation. I suspect it caused the death of my son. I’ve never got that out of my mind.

Excerpt #15 From NBC4 Documentary “LA’s Nuclear Secret”

Grover: We had a lot of questions for the federal agency in charge of the nuclear reactors at Area IV: the U.S. Department of Energy. Like, why the Government still hasn’t publicly admitted that radiation was released into the air over LA for years? The Energy Department said no one would be available to talk to us for this story…

Grover to John Jones – Department of Energy, Federal Project Manager: Mr. Jones, I’m Joel Grover with Channel 4.

Jones: Nice to meet you.

Grover: So, we showed up at a public meeting to try and talk to the Energy Department’s project manager over the Santa Susana Lab, John Jones.

Grover to Jones: Will anyone from your agency talk to us at all?

Jones: My public people have talked to you. I’ve said all I’m going to say.

Grover: You’ve said nothing.

Jones: Thank you for your time.

Excerpt #16 From NBC4 Documentary “LA’s Nuclear Secret”

Williams: An NBC4 I-Team investigation exposing “LA’s Nuclear Secret” triggers a major call for action tonight — a big development in the wake of our reports.

Henry: We’ve revealed how a contaminated nuclear and rocket test site could threaten the health of thousands in Southern California. The I-Team’s Joel Grover is here now with the story. Joel?

Grover: Well, some of the area’s most influential leaders have signed these letters, calling on the state to make sure the Santa Susana Field Lab is fully cleaned up without delay. The Field Lab is a place that some people believe is literally killing them.

Excerpt #17 From NBC4 Documentary “LA’s Nuclear Secret”

Mitch Englander: We need a full cleanup. And nothing short of a full cleanup is reasonable or acceptable.

Grover: LA City Councilman Mitch Englander also signed the letter after watching the I-Team’s Nuclear Secret reports.

Englander: I can’t thank you enough for exposing what I think has been a major Government cover-up over decades.

Grover: In their letter elected officials are calling on the DTSC to reject Boeing’s latest requests, that it not be required to clean up the vast majority of the contaminated soil at the former test site.

Englander: My mom died at 50 years old of a brain tumor.

Grover: Councilman Englander grew up in Canoga Park and says his whole family developed unexplained illnesses. They lived just three miles downwind from Santa Susana.

Englander: I do suspect that their illnesses were related, as so many other families…

Grover: According to that letter, Boeing’s own estimate is that 96 out of 100 people exposed would get cancer from the contamination if they were living on a certain portion of Santa Susana and eating food grown in their gardens.

Cunnings: If one thing’s for sure, it’s that the mess left behind at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory is still festering and it needs to be addressed – and hopefully, for the surrounding communities, as soon as possible.
As bad as the massive 1959 Rocketdyne meltdown was, according to Gundersen, it isn’t the only covered-up large-scale nuclear cataclysm that has occurred in the United States.

Gundersen: There’s one other accident that has to be right up there with Santa Susana…

Urry: Let me guess. Is it INL (Idaho National Laboratory)?

Cunnings: Just to break in with a quick note here. Urry is referring to several little-known reactor meltdowns – of which some were created intentionally by the good ol’ U.S. Government – at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), also in the 1950s.

Gundersen: No. It’s not.

Urry: Darn it. (Laughs. Snaps fingers.)

Gundersen: It was actually on a Native American reservation, and it was called Church Rock, and it was a mill-tailing site which is, after the ore is taken out of the ground, it’s stripped with acids so that the uranium comes off – and this huge acid pond of highly radioactive stuff burst. A dam burst, there was a 20-foot gash in the dam, and hundreds of millions of gallons of radiation ran down into this river at Church Rock. Now, it occurred three months after TMI (Three Mile Island), and it occurred on a Native American reservation.

Urry: What reservation was that?

Gundersen: It’s the Navajo reservation on the Utah-Nevada border there. And I’m sorry I can’t remember the river. But had it occurred in a more populated area where the news trucks could have gotten to, and frankly, had it occurred, not to Native Americans, but to, you know, voters…

Urry: It would have been Love Canal, but instead we didn’t even hear about it?

Gundersen: Right. Right. The most liquid radiation was from Church Rock, the most gaseous radiation was from Santa Susana.

Cunnings: Maybe AmerGen LLC, in charge of the Three Mile Island site today, should consider coming clean (pun intended), and taking down words of false advertising that appear on the marquee. Perhaps a token effort of respect should be offered up to the victims of the far worse disasters at both Santa Susana and Church Rock.

We say this not to take anything away from the poor victims of Three Mile Island. All we’re saying is that TMI should at least be honest about the size, scope and scale of these various catastrophes.

Tune in tomorrow as we shift gears big time halfway through our 15-part mini-series, and we commence discussions on the simply massive and ongoing crisis at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan.

For EnviroNews USA, this is Josh Cunnings. Thank you for watching and good night.

Excerpt from the Testimony of John Pace, Eyewitness to the 1959 Nuclear Meltdown at Santa Susana

Pace: Some people have heard about the trash pile we had out in the back of the reactor. This is a picture of it right here. Nobody knows that it was there. Being there, I was able to catch this picture at the right moment. We had out there; it was about 15 feet high, had all that plastic I showed you was out there. It was all covered with radiation. We had furniture from the office was out there, where Bonnie used to work in. The whole building at one time got contaminated from breaking a fuel rod element off in the reactor, and [that] contaminated the whole building. We couldn’t even get around the building for about, almost two miles around the building. And all that furniture from the offices went right out in the back in that pile there. And records too. Records are hard to find. That’s where they are. They went right there and they got thrown away.

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