Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #santasusana, aggregated by home.social.
In the Dark of the Valley
This official trailer gives a brief, focused overview of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory cover-up and the local mothers' campaign for accountability.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdFqNOEFHxk&utm
Beads of Courage
https://youtu.be/oH8BilL6H1Q
The Secret Nuclear Meltdown above Los Angeles
https://youtu.be/IKyy9_svLnw
#NuclearAccidents
#LosAngeles
#SantaSusana
#children
#video
#YouTube
#trailer
#documentary
@HistoPol @mina @si_irini @evelynefoerster
The fight has been fought.
A local resident, mother of a girl who contracted leukemia twice in her first 9 years, gathered 750,000 petitions for the government to clean up the site.
The result - you can guess...
The Beads of Courage 9min video is about her fight.
It is based on the documentary In the Dark Valley (2021).
@HistoPol @mina @si_irini @evelynefoerster
"Rapidly Growing California Wildfire Threatens Contaminated Nuclear Reactor Site"
11/
Activists are also pushing for real-time, telemetered radiological and chemical air monitoring networks around the site. By integrating open public APIs directly into neighborhood smartphone apps, the community aims to secure total transparency and prevent future data delays.
This podcast episode stands as a gripping study of grassroots resilience against a radioactive Goliath.
Based on the documentary In the Dark Valley (2021).
10/
Galvanized by their children's heavy "beads of courage" medical strings, ordinary parents transformed into fierce environmental justice advocates. Mapping cancer clusters from kitchen tables, they launched a petition that garnered over 600,000 signatures. They now demand a full source-material cleanup, fiercely resisting corporate efforts to cap and leave contamination via recreational zoning.
#SantaSusana #EnvironmentalJustice #activists #children #BeadsOfCourage
9/
For decades, local communities noticed strange odors and illnesses but trusted institutional safety guarantees. The human toll eventually became impossible to ignore. This deep dive features the story of Melissa Bumstead, a local mother who discovered a geographically impossible cluster of rare pediatric cancers, including neuroblastoma and leukemia, on her own three-mile suburban street.
#SantaSusana #activists #MelissaBumstead #children #cancer #contamination
8/
Modern climate realities have transformed this dormant contamination into a dynamic, combustible threat. Local chaparral has sequestered these toxins over decades. When wildfires like the 2,100-acre Sandy Fire strike near the property lines, the extreme heat vaporizes the biomass. This atmospheric resuspension lofts toxic ghosts like cesium-137 into smoke plumes, turning soil pollution into a breathable hazard.
https://youtu.be/IKyy9_svLnw
7/
The physical danger continues to migrate. Acting as a topographical reservoir, the elevated plateau serves as the headwaters for the Los Angeles River system and the Arroyo Simi. Rainfall routinely washes residual heavy metals and radionuclides down into the biosphere. This includes passing through the Brandeis-Barton Institute, a major Jewish youth summer camp where legacy contaminants have been identified.
6/
The truth finally emerged in 1979 when UCLA college students forensic-audited obscure archives and uncovered photographs of the melted fuel rods. Today, Boeing and its consultants' technical calculations dispute these high contamination claims, sparking a battle of models over the true fallout. Still, the baseline facts remain undisputed: a reactor melted, and the public was systematically lied to.
#SantaSusana #NuclearAccidents #meltdown #coverup #LA #SSFL #UCLA
5/
Independent scholars estimate the radioactive iodine release from the SRE meltdown could have been up to 250 times greater than the 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island. Yet, contractors and the federal government successfully executed a highly coordinated cover-up. Weaponizing Cold War patriotism, officials enforced an absolute gag order on workers, hiding the incident behind deceptive press releases for 20 years.
4/
At the center of this legacy is the July 1959 Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE) meltdown. When a coolant loop leaked an organic fluid into the liquid sodium streams, it baked into a thick carbon sludge that choked the reactor core. Lacking a secondary concrete containment dome, operators manually opened facility garage doors over several weeks to vent highly radioactive gases directly into prevailing valley winds.
3/
The site's culture of experimental speed left a permanent toxic footprint. Rocket engine flushing cascaded an estimated 500,000 gallons of carcinogenic trichloroethylene (TCE) into unlined ponds and fractured bedrock. Compounding this, workers bypassed disposal bottlenecks by shooting 55-gallon drums of mixed radioactive and chemical waste with rifles, sending toxic plumes directly over mushrooming downwind populations.
THE SECRET MELTDOWN ABOVE LOS ANGELES
Discover the hidden history of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), a Cold War facility perched just above Southern California’s valleys. Developed in the late 1940s, this 2,850-acre industrial complex became a premier sandbox for advanced nuclear reactors and high-thrust rocket testing. Yet, its selection overrode poor meteorological safety rankings simply to shorten the commute time for elite UCLA scientists.
A GIFT TO THE CHILDREN OF SANTA SUSANA, LA
#SantaSusana #NuclearAccidents #meltdown #coverup #LA #SSFL #TCE #radioactivity #fallout #contamination #children #wildfires #SandyFire #activists
The origin of the Beads of Courage
(A clip from the documentary In the Dark Valley, 2021).
Each bead represents something different.
For example, red represents when she had a blood transfusion.
Black when she got poked with a needle.
Yellow for inpatient stays.
White for chemotherapy.
14/
This intense grassroots mobilization has fueled an incredible petition with over 600,000 signatures, demanding that the government and current site owners take real accountability and fully clean up the Santa Susana Field Laboratory once and for all.
How much longer will these communities be forced to pay the price for secrets kept 60 years ago?
#TheEarthGazer #SantaSusana #NuclearAccidents #LA #SSFL #SRE #hibakusha #children
13/
These families have shared deeply moving symbols like Beads of Courage, where every single glass bead a child receives physically represents a painful medical milestone—such as enduring chemotherapy or a blood transfusion.
#SantaSusana #NuclearAccidents #LA #SSFL #SRE #hibakusha #children
12/
The Human Cost: Beads of Courage
The response from the local communities to this invisible, multi-generational threat has been profound. Local parents, such as Melissa Bumstead, whose own daughter battled a rare leukemia, began using everyday tools like Facebook and Google Maps to map out clusters of sick children right in their own neighborhoods.
#SantaSusana #NuclearAccidents #LA #SSFL #SRE #hibakusha #children
11/
This process lofts 60-year-old legacy radioactive particles straight into the smoke plumes, weaponizing the pollutants and carrying them far into the air columns. Even when emergency crews heroically achieve 100% containment on a blaze, the smoke passing over the area causes extreme, justified anxiety, requiring the active deployment of hazardous materials and radiation monitoring teams to track the air quality.
10/
Today, this legacy remains an active threat through what researchers call the "incinerator chimney effect". When a massive wildfire—such as the recent Sandy Fire—tears through the area, the intense heat vaporizes the contaminated soil and plant life.
#SantaSusana #NuclearAccidents #LA #SSFL #SRE #hibakusha #contamination
#radioactive #wildfires #SandyFire
9/
running down intermittent streams past a children's camp (the Brandeis-Barden Institute) and directly into the headwaters of the Los Angeles River. This pulls a toxic path directly into the watersheds and residential backyards of half a million people living within just 10 miles of the site.
#SantaSusana #NuclearAccidents #LA #SSFL #SRE #hibakusha #contamination
#radioactive #children #rivers
8/
Gravity’s Revenge & The Incinerator Chimney Effect
Because the lab sits on a mountain plateau with no physical barrier holding back the pollution, inescapable physics dictate the flow of contamination. When it rains, rainwater washes heavy metals and mixed fission products out of the saturated soil...
#SantaSusana #NuclearAccidents #LA #SSFL #SRE #hibakusha #contamination #radioactive
7/
• Open Burn Pits: Hazardous materials were disposed of by dragging 55-gallon drums of toxic chemicals to open pits and literally shooting them with rifles to ignite them, creating huge plumes of toxic smoke.
https://youtu.be/oH8BilL6H1Q
6/
A Toxic Cocktail
Beyond the nuclear fallout, decades of environmental negligence created a massive chemical hazard:
• Rocket Engine Testing: The site hosted over 30,000 high-powered rocket engine tests.
• Groundwater Contamination: Workers routinely flushed these engines with a highly toxic solvent called TCE, trapping half a million gallons of it in the groundwater.
https://youtu.be/oH8BilL6H1Q
5/
Instead of alerting the public, leadership ordered workers to quietly vent radioactive noble gases into the atmosphere through large garage-type doors over a period of weeks. The cover-up was absolute, with workers commanded to stay completely silent; the full truth only began to surface 20 years later when UCLA students uncovered buried documents in 1979.
3/
The 1959 Secret Meltdown
In July 1959, an absolute disaster struck the site’s Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE). A cooling agent called Tetralin leaked, clogging vital coolant channels and causing 13 of the reactor's 43 nuclear fuel elements to severely overheat and melt.
2/
The Hidden Fortress & Terrible Logistics
Built in the 1950s and 60s, the #SSFL plateau sat nestled behind massive rocky hills that acted as a giant natural wall, completely masking top-secret nuclear and rocket testing operations from the public eye. Despite an official study ranking #SantaSusana fifth or sixth for safety due to terrible meteorological conditions that could easily carry radioactive materials into populated areas, the site was selected anyway.
BEADS OF COURAGE
What happens when a modern, raging wildfire collides with America’s most secretive Cold War nuclear site? Based on In the Dark Valley (2021) documentary, this explainer unpacks the hidden history and active environmental threats of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), located just 30 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.
#SantaSusana #NuclearAccidents #LA #SSFL #SRE #hibakusha #children
@0tracas @bojacobs
7/
Want to understand the corporate cover-up culture that allowed the 1959 Santa Susana nuclear meltdown to stay hidden for decades? Watch the documentary "In the Dark of the Valley." It follows a group of local mothers who uncover astronomical childhood cancer rates in their neighborhoods, tracking the toxic, radioactive legacy Boeing and NASA left behind. Pure Chernobyl-style investigative energy, but right in LA's backyard.