Lab Pollution No Immediate Threat, Federal Officials Say

Chemical and radioactive pollution at Rockwell International’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory west of Chatsworth appears to be confined to the site and poses no immediate threat to nearby residents, according to a preliminary report by the U.S. Department of Energy.

However, the report, furnished Tuesday by DOE officials to Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), called for more environmental tests since inadequacies in the plant’s “groundwater monitoring system make it difficult to characterize the nature and extent of contamination.”

Officials of DOE, which has contracted for nuclear work at the isolated research complex, predicted that additional testing and some cleanup work will be needed.

Qualified Bill of Health

Still, DOE officials gave the site a qualified bill of health.

“The public has no reason to fear any hazard to human health as a result of the contamination” found to date, said Richard H. Nolan, chief spokesman for the DOE’s operations office in Oakland.

However, a DOE critic who worked on the report as a private consultant said there has been too little ground water testing at the lab for the public to feel reassured.

And Gallegly said he will “push for additional monitoring wells to be dug as quickly as possible so we will know for sure if there is any reason to be concerned. . . .” He was briefed Tuesday by DOE officials after demanding a copy of the report in response to news stories.

“They told me there’s no radioactive contamination in any of the water they tested,” Gallegly said in a telephone interview from his Washington office. “I hope there’s not fear out there to the point where people are thinking of picking up and moving to Northern California--there’s no cause for that.”

The lab, operated by Rockwell’s Rocketdyne division in a rugged area of the Simi Hills about three miles from Chatsworth and two miles from Simi Valley, for several years has been on the state Superfund cleanup list because of high levels of trichloroethylene, or TCE, a chemical solvent, in ground water under the complex. Rocketdyne has been pumping and treating ground water in one part of the property where TCE has been found at levels of up to 11,000 parts per billion, 2,200 times the amount that would be allowed in drinking water.

Some Contamination

The DOE report acknowledges, apparently for the first time, that some radioactive contamination also exists in soil and structures from nuclear operations and spills.

But agency officials Tuesday characterized this contamination as moderate, saying radiation levels a short distance from the “hottest” spots do not exceed natural background levels.

Rocketdyne officials said they have repeatedly tested 16 wells and springs, off the site but nearby, over the last four years without detecting chemical or radioactive pollution.

And DOE officials, contradicting published news reports, said radioactive pollution has never been found in ground water, either under or off the site.

But James Werner, the former consultant who worked on the report and now is an environmental scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said it “isn’t surprising” that no radioactive elements have been found in ground water “since they haven’t looked for them to any extent.”

Werner said, for example, that ground water has seeped in and out of a contaminated building--but that the nearest test well is uphill from the building, or in the opposite direction of the ground water flow.

Werner also said that when he surveyed the lab in May, 1988, Rockwell “had not even gone through the process of identifying” all areas of potential contamination in portions of the site devoted to work for DOE.

Congressional Pressure

Under pressure from Congress, DOE more than three years ago began surveying 35 labs and production sites where weapons or energy development was done for DOE or its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission.

In a report to Congress due in December, DOE officials will rank the sites by priority, establishing which will be first to get funds for more tests and cleanup. The Santa Susana lab will probably appear near “the bottom of the list,” said Wolfgang Rosenberg, a DOE spokesman.

DOE officials said that in one area of the plant, known as the sodium burn pit, soil tests revealed levels of radioactive cesium as high as 700 picocuries per gram of soil--about 10 to 30 times higher than normal background radiation for the area.

In a sewage leach field where radioactive water was spilled in the 1970s, the highest radiation level found was 4,900 picocuries per gram of soil, officials said.

First Reactor

Opened in 1947, the Santa Susana lab had the first nuclear reactor in the United States to produce power for supply to a commercial power grid. The small, experimental sodium-cooled reactor went on line in 1957, producing power for Southern California Edison Co.

The plant was crippled by a serious accident in July, 1959, when 13 of its 43 uranium fuel rods ruptured or suffered partial meltdown. The plant was repaired and operated until 1967. But the accident remained virtually unknown to the public until 1979, when it was finally described in news reports.

A 1983 report by Rockwell to DOE described the removal and cleanup of the sodium reactor without discussing the 1959 accident.

According to the report, the cleanup work, which took from 1974 until 1983, involved removal of 136,411 cubic feet of radioactively contaminated buildings, soil and rock, which were hauled to nuclear waste dumps at Beatty, Nev., and Hanford, Wash. The cost of the cleanup was $16.6 million, according to the report.

Studies by Rockwell and Argonne National Laboratories showed that the plant area was “decontaminated to levels that allow unrestricted use,” the report said, suggesting that the remaining radioactivity was caused by other nuclear work done at the lab.