![]() ![]() Hirsch runs the anti-nuclear group Committee to Bridge the Gap, and he’s been trying to get Santa Susana cleaned up for more than 40 years. They weren’t supposed to be doing it,” he said. Radioactive waste was also routinely burned in open-air pits, Hirsch said. For years, workers used rifles to shoot barrels of toxic chemicals to make them ignite or explode. There were shockingly unsafe waste disposal practices too. The scope of the contamination far exceeds a single meltdown more than 60 years ago.ĭaniel Hirsch - a retired UCLA and UC Santa Cruz lecturer whose students originally uncovered the meltdown, which was hidden from public view for two decades - says there were several accidents at the field lab, worsened by a lack of containment domes for the nuclear reactors. A decade later, University of Michigan researchers found that people living within two miles of the site had been diagnosed with thyroid, bladder and other cancers at a 60% higher rate than people living more than five miles away. In 1997, UCLA scientists reported that field lab workers exposed to higher doses of radiation from 1950 through 1993 were more likely to die of cancer. Still, there’s been research suggesting that Santa Susana may pose a serious health risk to people nearby. And cancer is so common in the modern world that even seemingly obvious clusters can sometimes be a cruel trick of statistical fate. I should caution that it’s challenging to conclusively link individual cancer cases to specific causes. But it’s the kids who have to suffer, and it’s the parents who have to bury them.” “The thing that’s heartbreaking is that it’s just going to continue. So we’ll just have to find out who has more endurance, me or them,” she says in the film’s closing moments. Gavin Newsom to compel Boeing and the federal agencies to live up to their long-unfulfilled promises. Bumstead started a petition that has garnered more than 700,000 signatures, calling on politicians including Gov. The film focuses on Melissa Bumstead, whose daughter Grace Ellen was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of leukemia at age 4. It’s a gut-wrenching story about children living near the field lab who have been diagnosed with cancer, and whose mothers have banded together to demand a full cleanup, in hopes that other families won’t suffer like theirs have. Santa Susana is also the subject of a new documentary, “In the Dark of the Valley,” which is making the rounds on the film festival circuit. Yet much of it has not even started,” columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote last year. “That work was supposed to be completed by 2017. And the parties responsible for the long legacy of radioactive waste and other contaminants - namely Boeing, NASA and the federal Department of Energy - have done hardly anything to clean it up. Santa Susana is an incredibly toxic site.
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