U.S. Proposes $34.6-Million Cleanup Plan for Rockwell’s Nuclear Lab

U.S. Department of Energy officials Tuesday released a draft cleanup plan to spend $34.6 million during the next six years to decontaminate Rockwell International’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory west of Chatsworth and upgrade pollution controls.

The proposal outlines more than two dozen specific projects for Santa Susana, ranging from cleanup of chemicals and metals to removal of asbestos waste. But the major expense will be to clean up radioactively contaminated buildings and soil at the lab in the Simi Hills, where Rockwell has done nuclear work for the government for the past 35 years.

The draft plan covers the Rockwell site and four other DOE research installations in California.

The $34.6 million for Rockwell, which is subject to funding decisions by the White House and Congress, is a reduction from a recent DOE estimate of $45 million.

Dick Nolan, special assistant to the manager of the agency’s San Francisco operations office, said the prior estimate included funds spent during the last fiscal year, whereas the $34.6 million is for the fiscal years 1990-95.

Nolan said the estimate was reduced because Rockwell has done some cleanup work on its own. And in the case of one building slated for costly cleanup, the plan advised that to save money the building merely be kept under surveillance for 70 years, by which time the radioactivity would decay to harmless levels.

But other data in the plan was confusing or at odds with prior information, and DOE officials were unable to explain some of the discrepancies.

In listing three areas as the only known sites of “unconfined or outdoor radioactive contamination” at Santa Susana, the plan ignored contamination of ground water by low levels of radioactive tritium discovered last summer by the Environmental Protection Agency at Building 59, which formerly housed a small test reactor. Nolan said he did not know why this was overlooked.

Two different schedules were given for soil and ground water testing at Rockwell’s De Soto plant in Canoga Park, where the company once had a small atomic reactor and fabricated nuclear fuel. The $500,000 testing program--the only project in the plan outside the Santa Susana lab--is aimed at assuring that no chemical or radioactive contamination remains at De Soto.

In one place, the plan said the work would start next fall--and in another that it would start this month and be finished in June.

Nolan said he did not know which date was correct, and Rockwell officials declined to comment.

The plan stated that past environmental testing at the site provided “comprehensive assessment level results.” This appears at odds with contentions by the EPA and DOE itself that ground water monitoring at Santa Susana has been inadequate.

Of the $34.6 million, about $25 million would be spent to clean up radioactive contamination in four areas: Building 59; an old waste disposal site called the sodium burn pit; the “radioactive materials disposal facility,” where radioactive wastes are stored pending off-site disposal; and the “hot lab,” a heavily shielded complex in which nuclear materials are handled by remote control. The hot-lab cleanup alone could consume about $10 million, the draft plan said.

Rockwell officials said they did not receive the document until Tuesday afternoon and would not comment until they review it.

They declined to discuss the disclosure in the plan that a joint DOE-Japanese experiment-- aimed at developing a method to separate the most long-lived radioactive elements from nuclear waste--will not be done in the hot lab, but at some other site. Rockwell previously said the experiment was one of the last it would carry out in the hot lab before decommissioning it a year from now.

DOE officials said they will take comments on the draft plan during the next two weeks, and then will send a final draft to DOE headquarters in Washington.

Altogether, the proposal calls for spending $393.2 million at five California sites, including Santa Susana. Nolan said more than $300 million would go to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Santa Susana was once a flourishing center for nuclear research. Sixteen small nuclear reactors operated there, and nuclear fuel was manufactured and recycled there under contracts with DOE and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission. But in recent years, most of the nuclear work has been cleanup from past activities.

Santa Susana remains the site of DOE’s Energy Technology Engineering Center, where Rockwell tests non-nuclear components for nuclear reactors and other energy systems.