History of Secrecy, Problems Cloud Rockwell’s Claims of Nuclear Safety

In its fight to strengthen its credibility and assure the public about the safety of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, Rockwell International might consider the case of William Lane.

The Canoga Park man was 22 in 1959 when he became a radiation safety officer at Santa Susana, the research site west of Chatsworth where Rockwell does nuclear work for the federal government. Lane was still a young man 18 years later when he learned he had leukemia.

After Lane grew deathly ill, his family filed a workers compensation claim, blaming the illness on radiation exposure. Lane died in May, 1986, at the age of 49.

Four months after Lane’s death, Marlin E. Remley, director of nuclear safety and licensing for Rockwell’s Rocketdyne division, told San Fernando Valley members of the National Council of Jewish Women the company had “never had a radioactive injury, a permanent radioactive injury.”

But Rockwell later paid the Lane family a $90,000 settlement--a large sum for a compensation case--because doctors for the company agreed that radiation exposure probably caused or contributed to Lane’s death, the case file shows. The company also has paid smaller settlements in four other cases of alleged radiation-induced cancer, according to figures supplied by Rockwell.

Scoffs at Cancer Link

Settlements are not admissions of responsibility. And Remley, who retired in January, maintained in a recent interview that radiation exposures at Rocketdyne were so low that “I seriously question whether anyone has really suffered cancer because of radiation exposure.”

Still, some Rockwell critics look back with scorn at Remley’s presentation. “It’s very obvious that they lied to us” about the safety of Santa Susana, Jeanne Londe, an officer of the Jewish women’s council who attended Remley’s talk, said recently.

To Londe and other critics, questions about Rockwell’s credibility and contamination at Santa Susana have become almost inseparable.

The big blow came in May with disclosure of a U.S. Department of Energy report on radioactive and chemical contamination at the test lab. Many residents refused to believe that conditions there did not pose an immediate health threat, despite assurances from Energy Department, Rockwell and independent state and federal agencies. Among other things, the report made clear that more nuclear work had gone on at the site than the public had been told.

“I think that’s why we’re all concerned,” said Milena Miller of Reseda, who is fighting renewal of the Santa Susana lab’s license to recycle nuclear fuel. “If we thought they’d been honest . . . we wouldn’t be pursuing this.”

Various Factors

Interviews and a review of government records and news accounts suggest various factors helped create the climate of mistrust, including:

* Statements by company officials that came back to bite them, such as Remley’s remark. The company’s cause was not helped by allegations of pollution and deception at two other Rockwell-Energy Department operations--the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington.

* Company reticence about the nuclear side of its business. While basking in favorable publicity about its work in the nation’s space program, Rockwell over the years divulged much less information about its nuclear activities. Although press clippings show the company’s nuclear mission received occasional coverage, the company rarely volunteered information and publicity was intermittent--partly reflecting secrecy concerns of Rockwell’s customer, the Atomic Energy Commission (later, the Energy Department).

* Statements by health and environmental regulators who accused Rockwell of failing to tell them about its nuclear work, even though the statements are in some instances contradicted by documents on file in their agencies. Put on the spot by newspaper reporters, some officials may have given hasty answers without knowing or remembering what Rockwell had told them in the past.

Also, Rockwell was partly immune from regulation and arguably not required to keep the agencies fully informed. Still, the situation was seen by some as evidence of a cover-up.

‘We Have Commitment’

Pat Coulter, spokesman for Rockwell’s Rocketdyne division, said the company never sought to mislead anyone. “We have a commitment to keep the public informed, and we’re going to do that,” he said.

A general distrust of things nuclear is also part of the company’s predicament. For years, government weapons production and nuclear research was shielded from publicity and largely immune to many environmental rules facing other industries. As these operations have been dragged into the spotlight, many environmental groups, citizens and congressmen have not liked what they’ve seen.

“Rockwell definitely seems to have had more than its share of problems,” said Jim Werner, a project engineer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. But “the fact that they’re working for the Department of Energy is more than a small contributor” to those problems, he said.

“Because of the Department of Energy’s secrecy in weapons production, they and their contractors have also been less than up front about environmental problems,” Werner said.

Nuclear power was born in secrecy during World War II in the race to build the first atomic bomb.

As late as 1952, when Rockwell’s predecessor firm, North American Aviation Co., started up California’s first atomic reactor in Downey, the small test plant initially was classified.

Satellite Program

A few years later at Santa Susana, the company developed the first of several SNAP (Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power) reactors, which were intended to provide power for spy satellites, a company official said.

In the early years, “all nuclear reactors were born classified,” said Bob Tuttle, Rocketdyne radiation and nuclear safety manager, who joined the company in 1957.

“All of us had top-level clearances from the AEC,” Tuttle said, refering to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. “We were taught, instructed, not to talk about our work. . . . The philosophy of not divulging information I’m sure was thoroughly ingrained in our top people, and the public relations people,” Tuttle said.

He said the attitude carried over to later years. “Information has always been available,” said Tuttle, but the company “didn’t push it on people.”

A tradition of secrecy was reinforced by growing public distrust of atomic power, even before Three Mile Island or Chernobyl.

Court cases and news reports disclosed that American soldiers had been marched into the desert after nuclear blasts to see how they’d react. And clusters of cancer and leukemia appeared in downwind communities, where residents weren’t warned to take precautions following atomic tests. Meanwhile, government and the nuclear industry struggled unsuccessfully to find a safe means to dispose of high-level radioactive waste.

‘Negative’ Stories

Rocketdyne spokesman Paul Sewell, who managed the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque for a time in the 1970s, recalled that whenever a reporter came to do a story on the museum, there was always a good chance “it was going to be a negative story.”

Industry officials, put on the defensive, usually took a low profile, reasoning that little good could come of saying more than was necessary. In this atmosphere, a serious nuclear accident at Santa Susana in 1959 was not widely publicized for 20 years.

The accident involved the so-called “sodium reactor experiment,” the first nuclear reactor in the country to produce electricity for a commercial power grid. Dedication ceremonies in November, 1957, “attracted many high-ranking government and industrial leaders,” according to an account in The Times.

But the accident, in which 13 of 43 nuclear fuel rods ruptured or partially melted, did not make a blip on the public radar until 1979, when an anti-nuclear group released records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Atomic Energy Commission and North American Aviation issued a press release following the accident in the summer of 1959. But the two-page statement was so technical that it was widely ignored. Words such as “accident” and “meltdown” were not used. The release gave no hint that the commission had criticized the company for continuing to run the reactor despite weeks of abnormal operation, as records later showed.

Not Mentioned in Report

The accident also was blacked out of a 1983 report by Rockwell to the Energy Department on decommissioning and cleanup of the sodium reactor. A section on historical highlights of the project made no mention of the accident. During the 1950s, at least a dozen newspaper articles discussed Santa Susana’s emergence as a nuclear reactor site. Much later, in 1981, a news story said a safety analysis commissioned by Ventura County officials found that Santa Susana workers and the public were adequately protected from radiation hazards. It would be ludicrous to suggest that the nuclear side of Rocketdyne’s work stayed hidden, company spokesman Paul Sewell said.

In recent years, however, publicity about that work has been minuscule compared to that focused on Rockwell’s involvement in the space program. Almost everyone knew Rockwell built and tested engines for the space shuttle. But many people didn’t know the firm had run more than a dozen nuclear reactors and produced and recycled nuclear fuel at the same sites.

Even when Rockwell made news because of pollution, it was linked to non-nuclear work. News articles in recent years told how the company, under orders from state health agencies, was attempting to clean up ground water pollution from chemical solvents that were used to rinse rocket engines. But the issue of radioactive pollution was rarely raised.

Cover-Up Charged

Controversy engulfed Santa Susana in May after the Los Angeles Daily News wrote the first of many front page articles about the Energy Department report on contamination at Santa Susana. Subsequent stories suggested a cover-up, stating that health and environmental agencies were unaware of the extent of nuclear work at the site.

In fact, their ignorance may not have been as surprising or as complete as the stories suggested.

For one thing, nuclear safety at the lab was beyond the jurisdiction of most environmental agencies, so Rockwell wasn’t always obliged to keep them fully informed.

Moreover, correspondence suggests that the agencies knew at least enough to have asked pointed questions.

Officials with the toxic substances control division of the state Department of Health Services were among those who said they knew nothing of Rocketdyne’s nuclear work. But their off-the-cuff remarks were at odds with their own files.

“Some of us were a little bit surprised at first, . . . but quite a few of us are new to the division,” said Scott Simpson, enforcement chief for the division’s regional office in Burbank.

Inspectors Knew

From a review of inspection reports “it becomes pretty clear” that agency inspectors knew part of Santa Susana “was a DOE nuclear power-type research facility” that they assumed they “didn’t have authority over,” Simpson said.

The California Regional Water Quality Control Board was another agency that complained it had been kept in the dark. The board was working with Rockwell on the cleanup of non-nuclear areas of the Santa Susana site, where chemical solvents had leaked into ground water. At the direction of the regional board, Rockwell periodically tested off-site wells and springs for solvents and reported the data to the agency.

Although it was unknown to the regional board, Rockwell also was testing the well water for radioactivity, finding no evidence that any had migrated from the site. But the regional board had not asked for radioactivity measurements and apparently did not know the company was taking them. Instead, Rockwell shared the data with the Department of Health Services’ radiological health branch.

Regional board officials expressed indignation when they learned of the radioactivity testing in May. Rockwell and the Energy Department should have volunteered the data, if only as a professional courtesy, Hank Yacoub, a senior engineer with the regional board, said later. “You know we don’t have the resources” to police everyone, Yacoub said. “Without the cooperation of industry,” he said, the agency “is going to be totally ineffective.”

Records Show Otherwise

But records show the board should not have been completely in the dark.

For example, in a letter to the regional board in October, 1981, a lawyer for residents of Bell Canyon near Santa Susana expressed concern about possible radioactive discharges into Bell Creek.

Regional board files show that Raymond Hertel, then executive officer for the agency, replied that the discharges were being monitored by Rockwell and contained no radioactive pollution.

Rockwell “conducts some very low-level radioactive operations” at Santa Susana, according to Hertel’s letter in December, 1981.

Then in May, 1986, Rockwell told the board in a letter why it couldn’t test ground water for chemical pollution in a particular area of Santa Susana. As the letter disclosed, “a small space power reactor” formerly was housed in a building in that area, and water seeping into the basement had become contaminated by radioactive cobalt 60.

If the company pumped ground water for chemical tests, this might cause the “cobalt 60 contaminated water to exit the basement,” the letter explained.

Didn’t See Letter

The letter was addressed to Yacoub, but he said he never saw it and that it was dated at a time he was on vacation. In any case, he said, the letter was a “very vague” and “perhaps even a sneaky way of addressing the issue of radioactivity.”

Rockwell denies there was anything sneaky about the letter. Besides, “the radioactivity was out of that agency’s jurisdiction,” Tuttle said. “I think the appropriate agencies were always fully informed of what we were doing.”

The regional water board and health services department may have the last word, however. Both agencies are investigating whether Rockwell violated state laws by failing to obtain permits for some waste treatment and disposal operations at Santa Susana.

Also fueling the credibility issue were sensational allegations about two other Rockwell-Energy Department sites: Hanford and Rocky Flats.

Until 1987, Rockwell operated the plutonium processing plants at the giant Hanford atomic weapons complex in eastern Washington. A recent report by the House subcommittee on oversight and investigations told how Rockwell prepared for a visit to Hanford by Washington’s governor in March, 1985.

Warnings Removed

As the governor’s party approached a contaminated area, “signs which warned of the radiation hazard were removed . . . on direct orders from Rockwell Hanford Operations management . . .” said the June, 1989, report.

“A part of the governor’s entourage passed right through the contaminated area, oblivious of the hazard around them,” the report said. “Rockwell covered up this incident for almost one year until the matter came to the attention of the media and the subcommittee.”

And at Rocky Flats northwest of Denver, operated by Rockwell for the Energy Department, a special federal grand jury is weighing evidence of possible criminal violations of environmental laws.

Rocky Flats opened in 1952 to produce plutonium detonators for nuclear bombs. For more than two decades it was run by Dow Chemical, before Rockwell took over in 1975.

During Dow’s tenure, an atmospheric scientist discovered higher levels of plutonium in soil downwind from the plant than in upwind areas. Dow had secretly buried hundreds of barrels of radioactively contaminated lathe oil, which was leaking into soil and being scattered by the wind.

Minutes of Meeting

With the source of the contamination sure to be discovered, Dow officials met to discuss a program of damage control. According to minutes of a April 3, 1970, meeting, filed as an exhibit in subsequent court cases, one Dow official asked:

“Do you suppose we ought to sneak an article in the paper saying recovery operations have started if that is what we decide to do? Or should we wait until they find out and then admit we’re up to something?”

“We probably don’t even know who it was who made the decision to bury the God-damned stuff,” said a second official.

“We can always blame it on Venable,” said a third, mentioning a Dow official who had been transfered to Chile.

“I’ll drink to that,” the second man said.

After Dow, Rockwell came on the scene as something of a white knight. But there were problems on its watch, culminating in an extraordinary raid in June by dozens of FBI agents and Environmental Protection Agency officials seeking evidence of possible criminal violations of hazardous waste and clean water laws.

In a 116-page affidavit supporting the warrant request, the FBI said there was “probable cause to believe” that Rocky Flats officials had “illegally operated . . . an outdated and unpermitted” hazardous waste incinerator.

Memo Differs

In addition, although Rockwell and Energy Department officials from the early to mid-1980s “repeatedly stated to the public and certified to government agencies that Rocky Flats was in compliance with federal and state environmental laws,” an internal Energy Department memo told a different story, the affidavit said.

According to the July, 1986, memo, Rocky Flats was “in poor condition generally in terms of environmental compliance.” Some of its waste facilities were “patently ‘illegal,’ ” the FBI quoted the memo as saying.

In a formal statement, Sam F. Iacobellis, president of Rockwell’s aerospace division, which includes Rocky Flats, said Rocky Flats officials “have not and will not subordinate health and safety . . . to production requirements.”

He said “the hard evidence we have seen thus far indicates the incinerators were not operated on the dates alleged or otherwise illegally.”

Rocketdyne spokesman Pat Coulter said it’s unfair to link problems at Rocky Flats with Rocketdyne’s operations here. Rocky Flats “is a different facility run by different people with a different mission,” according to Coulter. He said that at Rocketdyne, there is a “commitment on behalf of the most senior management to run their business safely and ethically.”