“In the Dark of the Valley,” a documentary about the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, is scheduled to air nationwide on the MSNBC cable network on Nov. 14 at 10 p.m. Eastern Time, the Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles and other groups announced recently.
The documentary film explores a 1959 nuclear accident involving a commercially-owned sodium experimental reactor at the 2,800-acre property owned by Boeing and now being cleaned up by the company along with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Energy.
“The affected community has demanded a full cleanup of the area for decades, but the site’s corporate and government landowners and their persuasive lobbyists have successfully stalled any hope of a cleanup — until recently,” according to a notice on the MSNBC website.
One of the documentary’s key figures is Melissa Bumstead, whose daughter was twice diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia.
The DOE recently removed the last of its final 18 buildings from the site about 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles although the state of California has said soil and groundwater cleanup could last into the 2030s. The agency and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, did nuclear research, initially supporting the government’s breeder reactor program, within its Energy Technology Engineering Center from the 1950s into the 1980s.
