Rockwell Asked to Divulge All Nuclear Plans for 3 Plants : Environment: Activists praise decision to close the Santa Susana ‘hot lab’ but are concerned about further atomic work.

Environmental and neighborhood activists Thursday called on Rockwell International to disclose if it intends to do nuclear work in the future at its Santa Susana Field Laboratory west of Chatsworth and its De Soto Avenue and Canoga Avenue plants in Canoga Park.

At a news conference and in a letter to Bob Paster, president of Rockwell’s Rocketdyne Division, nuclear opponents praised the firm’s announcement last week that it will close the nuclear “hot lab” at Santa Susana. But they said the company should reveal its plans for the rest of Santa Susana and the Canoga Park plants.

“The mere fact that Rockwell has announced the closing of one building does not mean the issue is dead,” said Don Wallace, president of the Rocketdyne Cleanup Coalition.

“There are many remaining questions that we want answered,” Wallace told reporters and 30 supporters who gathered near the boundary of the 2,668-acre Santa Susana lab on Woolsey Canyon Road.

Wallace also released a copy of a three-page letter to Paster, signed by Wallace and Dr. Richard Saxon, local president of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, that seeks clarification of Rockwell’s intentions regarding nuclear work.

A Rocketdyne spokesman declined comment, saying Paster had not yet read the letter.

Rockwell, which had been seeking a 10-year extension of a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to operate the hot lab, last Friday stunned and thrilled its critics by announcing that it would instead close the hot lab next fall. Rockwell cited public fears and the hot lab’s flagging business as the reasons. But Rockwell’s statement said nothing about nuclear work elsewhere, and company spokesmen since have declined comment.

With its remote-control manipulators and heavily shielded rooms, the hot lab in recent years has been the center of nuclear processing at Santa Susana. From about 1960 until 1986, it was used to declad spent nuclear fuel for the Department of Energy by breaking open fuel rods to extract plutonium and uranium, which were then used in manufacturing atomic bombs and nuclear fuel at federal reservations.

But the hot lab’s closure will not automatically spell the end of nuclear projects at the research complex in the Simi Hills. That’s because nuclear work could be done--and has been done in the past--in areas of Santa Susana not under the NRC license but under DOE control.

In addition, nuclear work was done in the past at the Canoga Avenue and De Soto Avenue plants, which still use strong irradiation devices in experimental and manufacturing work.

Wallace called Rocketdyne’s main business in the area--the manufacture and testing of rocket engines--”a valuable asset to our community.” It’s “the nuclear side of Rockwell’s business . . . we want to close,” he said.

In remarks at the news conference and in the letter to Paster, Wallace called for Rockwell to support his group’s request for a health study of Santa Susana employees and neighbors by an independent research organization.

He called for citizen involvement in planning and overseeing cleanup of contaminated soil, water and buildings at Santa Susana, where the DOE has proposed spending about $45 million over a seven-year period to remove chemical and radioactive pollution left by past work.

Among those turning out for the news conference was rock singer Tom Petty, who said he came as “a concerned citizen and resident of the San Fernando Valley. I’ve been reading about it in the papers, and I’m interested. I just came to hear what they had to say.”

Although nuclear work at Santa Susana has been at low ebb in recent years, 16 small nuclear reactors were there between the 1950s and the early 1980s, along with fuel decladding and fabrication projects.

A truck hauling a crate with an atomic symbol on it rumbled out of Santa Susana and past the gathering, injecting a note of irony as all heads turned.

Some speakers expressed fear that one of the hot lab’s final experimental projects--called TRUMP-S, or Transuranic Management by Pyropartitioning-Separation--involved incineration of radioactive materials and creation of airborne hazards.

But Bob Tuttle, radiation and nuclear safety manager for Rocketdyne, said later that the experimental work does not involve incineration. “Pyro . . . refers to high-temperature chemical processes” but “there’s no combustion” of radioactive material, he said.