![]() And in March, the Department of Energy provided $38.3 million in funds to complete the radiologic survey of “Area IV” as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. “We don’t know how much or if any was released.”Īccording to an analysis of a five-year study by a panel of independent scientists convened years after the incident, the SRE accident spit out up to 459 times the amount of radiation released during the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island.įifty years later, the contaminated site has yet to be cleaned up, although this month two federal agencies promised to plow ahead without the site’s current owner, Boeing. “We know there was a fuel meltdown,” said William Taylor, the current spokesman for the U.S. What exactly vented remains in contention. Pure sodium - not to be confused with table salt, or sodium chloride - was a risky metal to use since it catches fire when exposed to air and explodes when mixed with water.ĭue to the experimental nature of the SRE, it was built without a containment structure - the distinctive large dome associated with nuclear power plants - so any radiation vented hot out over the San Fernando Valley, which the city of Los Angeles was busily annexing. Unlike most conventional reactors that circulate water to be heated by the fuel rods in the core in order to turn steam turbines, the SRE used sodium because it could operate under lower pressure. In fact, from July 12 through July 26, 1959, an unknown amount of radioactive gases were intentionally vented to prevent the Sodium Reactor Experiment from overheating and exploding. This press release - issued five weeks after the end of the United States’ worst nuclear reactor meltdown - was the public’s first notification that something unusual had happened up on “The Hill.” For the next 20 years, it remained the only public notification about the accident at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory on a mountaintop in California’s eastern Ventura County, on the border with the San Fernando Valley. This fuel loading, nearing the end of its useful life, was scheduled to be removed in the near future.” In each case, all seven tubes of the fuel element remained in the core. No release of radioactive materials to the plant or its environs occurred and operating personnel were not exposed to harmful conditions… The fuel element damage is not an indication of unsafe reactor conditions. “During an inspection of fuel elements on July 26 at the Sodium Reactor Experiment, operated for the Atomic Energy Commission at Santa Susana, California by Atomics International, a division of North American Aviation, Inc., a parted fuel element was observed. At least it also retailed for $20 less than the others (the VG&CE review states the Amiga version was $44.95 but the Maxis newsletter I posted earlier has it at $49.95).Human error helped worsen a nuclear meltdown just outside Los Angeles, and now human inertia has stymied the radioactive cleanup for half a century.īy Joan Trossman Bien and Michael Collinsįor Release Saturday A.M., August 29, 1959 With SimCity there is a lot missing in the C64 release, though it does include a terrain editor which is a separate purchase on other platforms. It's normal for games available on multiple computers to be of the lowest quality on the C64 but typically that is in regards to graphics. None of these things are in the C64 version. In the Amiga review from Commodore Magazine, the writer also mentions flooding, air, and nuclear meltdown disasters, multiple game speeds, a traffic helicopter, ships, railways, and how the zones change, such as houses transforming into apartment buildings. That review mentions adjusting taxes, building police and fire stations, constructing a sports stadium, starting funds that vary by difficulty level, and multiple windows with graphs onscreen while playing. While the review from Video Games & Computer Entertainment (VG&CE) doesn't actually state the platform being reviewed, it clearly is not for the C64 version. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any reviews of the C64 version. I decided to do a blog post to go with the video since it is a significant game and this way I can also include magazine reviews. Above is a "Let's Play" video for SimCity on the Commodore 64 (C64) that includes an intro with an unboxing.
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