Field Lab Cleanup

The Times coverage of the Rocketdyne Cleanup Coalition press conference plus subsequent Rocketdyne tour and demonstration of the contaminated building No. 24 failed to present much of the message the coalition tried to convey: Not decommissioning the entire Santa Susana Field Lab facility at this time means that our children or our children’s children will have to do it. There will never be a time in the foreseeable future when it will be acceptable to build a house on the site unless that site is cleaned up. Radiation levels will not decay down to acceptable levels for this type of use for at least a couple hundred years.

DOE and Rocketdyne have been promising us for many years that when their nuclear work was completed, as it is now, they would clean up the facility. Now they are arbitrarily and unilaterally deciding to renege on this promise.

We environmentalists are sick and tired of being lied to and manipulated by such agencies as DOE and such corporations as Rockwell/Rocketdyne. The only way to stop their unethical behavior is to confront the institutions involved, which is what we are trying to do.

The precise level of present contaminating radioactivity has nothing to do with the basic problem. Concentrating on that aspect is exactly what DOE and Rocketdyne would like everyone to do, so the main issues never get addressed.

SHELDON C. PLOTKIN

Los Angeles