Scrubbing the HOT LAB : Radioactivity: The job of decontaminating the reactor rooms at the Rockwell test site is ‘extremely safe,’ one official says, but all the safety measures make the work cumbersome.

With sandblasters and elbow grease, moon-suited technicians are stripping radioactive grime from the nuclear hot lab at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, the Rockwell International test site in the Simi Hills west of Chatsworth.

The $10.5-million cleanup, carried out by workers in plastic suits and respirators, is the end of the line for the 31-year-old hot lab, a heavily shielded workshop where intensely radioactive materials were handled by remote control.

The rugged rock formations are the most impressive features at the Santa Susana site, where the buildings look anything but sleek or high-tech. The hot lab itself is a dowdy matchbox of gray sheet metal 16,000 square feet in size.

The interior is not ordinary, however. Workers are reminded by a sign on the locker room showers: “Do Not Dump Radioactive Wastes or Wash Contaminated Material Here.” The guts of the building are four heavily shielded “hot cells” where radioactivity clings to fixtures and walls and most of the cleanup is being done.

Glistening with sweat after the morning shift, nuclear mechanic Patrick Fallandy peeled off his sweltering protective suit and ran a radiation counter over his hair and chest. Fallandy said his father worked for Rockwell before him and that he felt well-protected.

“I’ve always been pro-nuclear,” said Fallandy, 22. “It’s never scared me because I know all the precautions that are taken.”

Under federal regulations, nuclear workers can be exposed to as much as 5 rem of radiation per year--the equivalent of about 125 to 250 chest X-rays. But Rockwell project engineer Fred C. Schrag said the cleanup crews are exposed to only a small fraction of allowable limits.

The job is “extremely safe” because of precautions taken and because contamination is low to begin with, Schrag said. The cleanup is designed to make the hot lab safe for unrestricted use.

Decontamination of the hot lab, scheduled for completion by 1993, is part of a broader, federally funded cleanup at Santa Susana, where Rockwell’s Rocketdyne Division has worked since the 1950s for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and its successor, the Department of Energy. Under the $37.3-million cleanup plan, Rockwell over the next six years is to decontaminate former nuclear reactor buildings, clean up chemically tainted ground water and bring active non-nuclear energy operations up to environmental standards.

The hot lab cleanup is not the workers’ favorite job, but they say the problem is discomfort, not safety. “Wearing a plastic bag for a few hours kind of takes it out of you,” said Mark Spenard, 33, a senior nuclear mechanic, as he peeled off his protective suit at the end of a shift.

Crews wear respirators and plastic suits and booties to protect them from radioactive particles. Each worker wears a film badge and carries a pocket dosimeter to keep a running total of his radiation dose.

Schrag said radioactivity in the hot cells is low because some cleanup was done after each operation. He said the first step in cleaning the hot cells is to wash the walls with water to remove loose radioactivity. After that, the men use sandblasters to strip contaminated paint from the steel jacket covering the concrete walls.

The hot cells, surrounded by 3 1/2-foot-thick walls of steel and concrete, were used to examine and work on spent nuclear fuel and other highly radioactive materials. Technicians peered into the room through viewing ports of leaded glass and operated cranes and robotic arms, known as “master-slave” manipulators, with remote controls.

Now these cranes and manipulators are being dismantled and packaged for disposal as radioactive waste, although some less-contaminated manipulators are being saved for possible resale to other nuclear labs, Schrag said.

Over the years, radioactivity has also contaminated steel pipes and other fixtures through the holes where they penetrate the hot cell walls. These are being cleaned by an electropolishing process that uses acid and electric current.

According to Schrag, about 20 Rockwell employees are involved in decontaminating the hot cells--about half physically engaged in cleaning equipment, walls and floors, the others in oversight functions such as engineering and monitoring safety procedures.

The workers alternate as “hot” men--those working in the hot cells--and “cold” men, who stay outside and help with such gofer tasks as fetching tools.

During a recent shift, “cold” man Richard Raske, 26, a Rockwell machinist who lives in Chatsworth, said he wasn’t worried about the hazards of the work. “When you understand it, and you’re trained well, it’s like washing dishes,” Raske said. “You learn not to break a glass.”

The hot lab was the last active nuclear work site at Santa Susana, once a flourishing center for nuclear research. Nuclear work had been declining at the site for 20 years. With retirement of the hot lab, only the waste storage area known as the radioactive materials disposal facility remains operational to ship out cleanup wastes.

Rockwell continues to operate the DOE’s Energy Technology Engineering Center at Santa Susana, testing non-nuclear components of nuclear plants.

The 2,668-acre Santa Susana site, which sits on a rugged and once remote plateau in the Simi Hills, was established in the late 1940s as a rocket test site, for which it is still used. Its nuclear mission began in the mid-’50s on 290 acres at the northwest edge of the property.

Over the years, Rockwell operated 10 small nuclear reactors there and seven “criticality” facilities--nuclear devices that run at very low power. The company also manufactured nuclear fuel. Until 1986, the hot lab was used to declad, or dismantle, spent fuel rods so the uranium and plutonium could be recycled to DOE weapons sites.

The nuclear operation was born at the height of the Cold War, and for most of its 35 years operated in semi-secrecy, in contrast to rocket testing work of the site.

Every few years, concerned citizens or the press would discover the nuclear mission of Santa Susana, and a brief flap would ensue. The latest such controversy brought about the hot lab’s closure.

A 1989 DOE report disclosed the presence of low-level chemical and radioactive contamination in buildings and soil at Santa Susana. Although the report said the site appeared to pose no immediate health threat to workers or neighbors, it criticized environmental monitoring of the site as inadequate. The report also alarmed area residents by making clear there had been more nuclear work at Santa Susana than they had known.

The disclosures coincided with Rockwell’s request for a 10-year renewal of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission license under which the hot lab operated. Protesters contended the fast-growing area was no place for nuclear activity and that Rockwell’s safety track record was poor. Others fought the license out of opposition to nuclear power and weapons production.

With limited business prospects for the hot lab, Rockwell announced it would settle for a one-year renewal of the hot lab license to complete a last experiment.

But the one-year renewal also met with opposition. In April, Rockwell threw in the towel, closing the hot lab and farming out the last experiment to the University of Missouri.

Schrag, 58, a 28-year Rockwell veteran, said he was “somewhat sad” to see the hot lab closed. Environmental problems at Santa Susana, Schrag said, had been exaggerated. But “people looking at things and criticizing is a real healthy thing,” Schrag said. “That’s our society, for gosh sakes. That’s why I’m glad to be an American.”

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