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.