U.S. Delays Cleanup of Rockwell Lab Building : Radioactivity: Energy officials hope to decontaminate the site when the process becomes cheaper and safer.

The U.S. Department of Energy said it has decided to monitor and contain a radioactively contaminated building at Rockwell International’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory east of Simi Valley rather than immediately undertake a costly cleanup.

DOE officials assured Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), who represents the area, that Building 24 at the Rockwell site in the Simi Hills, where Rockwell has done nuclear work for the government for the past 35 years, poses no health or safety risk and requires no imminent action.

R.P. Whitfield, associate director of DOE’s Office of Environmental Restoration, told Gallegly that the DOE decided to postpone indefinitely the planned demolition of the building until new technologies are developed to make the process safer and less expensive.

Whitfield said he expects such methods to be available in five to eight years and the cleanup to be done in 10 to 12 years.

In the meantime, the DOE will spend $15,000 a year for containment and twice-monthly monitoring instead of commencing a $4.4-million cleanup in the 1992 fiscal year. The DOE had said in a draft plan in November, 1989, that the monitoring was a cost-saving alternative to the cleanup.

Following a 45-minute meeting in his office attended by five DOE officials, Gallegly said he was satisfied “that there’s not an imminent health and safety concern out there.”

At the same time, he told Whitfield and his DOE associates that, given intense public concern, “10 to 12 years, from a perception standpoint, is not acceptable to me” to do the cleanup.

The radioactivity is in concrete vaults and a reinforcing bar beneath the Rockwell building, which are secured behind two padlocked doors, said Roger Liddle, DOE’s restoration project manager at Santa Susana. The above-ground portion of the structure is used as a warehouse.

Rockwell has found that the amount of radioactivity outside Building 24 is no higher than levels that occur naturally in soil and rays from the sun, said Clark Gibbs, general manager for Rockwell of the Energy Technology Engineering Center, which Rockwell operates under contract with the DOE at Santa Susana. The levels within the vaults are 20 to 40 times greater than those that occur naturally, but the secured structure is far from any public area, Gibbs said.

“We thought it would be a vain waste of resources” to go in and clean it up, he said.

Times staff writer Myron Levin contributed to this story.