Fukushima.

Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Unseen lethal poisons in the air. Abandoned cities. Stealth terror is attached to the place names of famous nuclear disasters. Yet the first and worst nuclear power disaster on American soil occurred over fifty years ago, just outside Los Angeles, and the meltdown remains all but unknown today.

The date was July 12, 1959. A company called Atomics International, testing the operation of a reactor utilizing the technology that destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, lost control of an experiment at its Santa Susana Field Laboratory just north of L.A.

For two weeks, the lab spewed a cocktail of radioactive debris into the Southern California air, including deadly plutonium and strontium. How much? No one seems to know. Where did it go? Ask the winds... Read More