Hello again, I'm Warming Olney. This edition of To the Point is all about radioactive fallout,

childhood cancers, and broken promises by the state of California. First year's some history.

Kelly, we've obtained films and documents which show what happened when a nuclear reactor suffered an accident 20 years ago.

The reactor was located about five miles from what's now the Topanga Plaza Shopping Center,

20 miles from Van Nuys, and 35 miles from downtown Los Angeles.

That's me, working for Channel 4 News in 1979,

reporting a nuclear meltdown in the Santa Susanna Mountains between the San Fernando and Simi Valleys.

It was the same year as the meltdown at Three Mile Island, you know, that big power reactor in Pennsylvania.

Here's a bit more from my TV story.

Unit 4 has obtained these retouched photographs and drawings of the damaged reactor

core, pictures of the first fuel melting accident in a commercially producing nuclear power plant.

But as you heard, the Santa Susanna meltdown didn't happen in 1979. It was 1959,

20 years earlier, and the accident had been kept secret by the federal government and the private

companies testing nuclear power. They lied about it to me at the time, but it turned out that

extensive releases of nuclear radiation had gone on for weeks. Once again, from our TV story,

here's a nuclear engineer engineer formerly worked for General Electric

describing what he saw in the records of how the meltdown was handled.

A slipshot operation, I guess, is the way I would describe it,

and just sort of a dam the torpedo's full speed ahead attitude, which is...

All right, so why bring this up now?

That's because dangerous contamination in Santa Susanna has never been cleaned up.

And it's not from just one reactor accident, but four.

...