The Largest Nuclear Meltdown in United States History

On the disaster of my current book project.

In the summer of 2017, I started writing a book about the largest nuclear meltdown in United States history. The book was going to be great.

No one had yet written a book about the 1959 nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. There was no film or documentary, no devastating five-part miniseries as HBO produced for Chernobyl. No big podcast or headlines splashed across the New York Times. No full clean up was ever funded, attempted, nor yet planned for the radioactive waste still blowing around behind the suburban bungalows.

I’d give it the old Erin Brockovich try, I told myself.

Interview a few hundred people. Hike around the hills with the Geiger counter I got on Amazon.com. And by the time the book went to press, complete with blurbs from Oprah, the lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, and a harrowing half-page write up in People magazine, the bidding war between Netflix and Hulu would have boiled over, Tom Hiddleston would be texting me to try and learn more about his character, and whatever brutal prison bail I’d had to pay would be but pesos by the time Biden summoned me to Washington to present me with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and those families I interviewed with children dying of leukemia, they too would pardon me like the president, because my vast millions had made just as many people aware of their story, and perhaps now that everyone had heard of the 1959 nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, no one would have to suffer the same fate they had: no hard-working white family would ever again move into a brand new McMansion at the end of the San Fernando Valley only to find their suburban dream shattered by an increasingly inexplicable number of obscure physical maladies—particularly not my family because I’d be taking the cats and Christina to Joshua Tree, her perennial dream, and I wouldn’t be buying her that crappy bungalow complete with a rescue burro she’d always dreamed of but something big hidden in the boulders with room for horses, which isn't to say that there was particularly anything wrong with buying a whitewashed faux-Tuscan-style villa in the rustic outlands of the San Fernando Valley, not since all the radioactive waste was finally cleaned up to background levels thanks to the resounding success of my second book, a book that never got bogged down in the long sentences or stymied by any masturbatory artistic posturing but instead proceeded like a steam roller right up Woolsey Canyon Road to the gates of the lab with its big Boeing logos and No Trespassing signs and barbed wire fences, the latter of which I would climb with my Geiger counter before proceeding straight to AREA IV, as it’s officially known, a plot of leveled land upon which the Atomic Energy Commission’s Sodium Reactor Experiment, the first nuclear reactor in America to supply power to the public grid, melted down in 1959.

Yes. I would do it all.

As one one-time resident of the San Fernando Valley, a Valley Girl named Christina, once told me: “Your book could be… like… really big.”

It was the ultimate suburban nightmare. A story so improbable, so wicked in its particulars it would read contrived as fiction, cliché, lazy if it had been invented. But as nonfiction it was uncanny, creepy, crazy. Of course, what made it even more surreal back in summer 2017 was that no one beyond those immediately affected seemed to have ever heard of the disaster.

It was this ignorance, if you are to believe the claims of several government contractors I interviewed, that allowed the design for a ‘pioneering’ nuclear reactor that melted down in SoCal in 1959 to be smuggled out of the United States and used to build nothing other than Chernobyl.

Such a claim, outlandish on the surface, remains perhaps conceivable when you consider that for 20 years the federal government intentionally covered up the Sodium Reactor Experiment’s 1959 meltdown. By the time evidence of the disaster was finally unearthed in 1979 by a graduate student digging through random boxes abandoned in the basement of a UCLA engineering library, Chernobyl had already been online for two years. Of course, then, in Southern California, the real disaster was just getting started. Previous Santa Susana workers exposed to radiation yet sworn to secrecy had begun to develop cancer, and Los Angeles, itself like some unstoppable cancer, continued its own monstrous growth, with the city’s suburban sprawl eventually swelling all the way to the far edge of the county where it stopped only a few hundred feet from the laboratory where the meltdown had remained hidden for the past two decades.

“This thing sounds like it could be really big,” my agent said, back when I still had one in the summer of 2018, echoing the proclamations of that one-time Valley Girl when I eventually got around to distilling it all for him over the phone. “I could see this going to Oprah’s Book Club or something,” he said as I paced the living room, watching the back windows, eager as ever to catch the next dumpster fire on film for my 103 Instagram followers. “How soon until you can send me a few chapter outlines?”

A few weeks I told him.

Of course there was just one problem—the first of many that has ultimately helped turn my would-be second book itself into a disaster fit for the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.

The problem?

Death threats.