U.S. Will Seal Lab’s Radioactive Building

The U.S. Department of Energy intends to stick by its decision to seal and monitor a building containing low levels of radioactivity rather than decontaminate it, as part of a $37.3-million cleanup of Rockwell International’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory west of Chatsworth, a department official said Thursday in Simi Valley.

The decision to seal the structure, known as Building 24, and allow radioactivity in its concrete walls to decay to natural background levels over the next 10 to 50 years, was the subject of a protest outside the gates of the laboratory earilier this month.

At a public meeting Thursday night on the Santa Susana cleanup plan, Department of Energy official Roger Liddle was told citizens had been assured the entire Santa Susana site would be cleaned up within a few years. “We’ve been led to believe all along,” that “nothing would be left for years and years to come,” said Sheldon Plotkin, a member of the Southern California Federation of Scientists.

“Some of us feel as though you made a big mistake” in deciding to seal the building “and the excuse being used . . . is money,” Plotkin said. “What recourse do we have?”

“I think your recourse has been exercised,” Liddle replied.

About 45 citizens and officials attended the meeting at Simi Valley City Hall.

Earlier Liddle had defended the decision to save at least $4.4 million in cleanup costs by sealing Building 24, which once shielded four small, experimental nuclear reactors.

The small amount of radioactivity remains fixed in a portion of the building’s concrete with no chance of the material floating into the air or leaking into water, energy officials maintain.

“You have contamination that’s very low, going nowhere,” Liddle said, and sealing the building “was a practical decision of risk versus expense.”

The cleanup plan covers decontamination projects through fiscal year 1996. “It would not be true to say we’ll never do it,” Liddle said, referring to removal of Building 24. But “it is true that we do not intend to do anything other than surveillance” of the building through 1996, he said.

The cleanup plan, the estimated cost of which has been revised from a previous figure of $34.6 million, covers 25 separate projects, some of which are well under way. They involve removal of chemical and low-level radioactive contamination from soil and buildings, and upgrading of pollution controls on equipment at the Energy Technology Engineering Center at the lab in the Simi Hills.

Santa Susana was once a thriving center of nuclear research that operated in semi-secrecy.

Between the 1950s and 1986, more than a dozen small nuclear reactors operated there and nuclear fuel was manufactured and recycled under government contracts.

Nuclear work began to decline there in the 1960s and cleanup of contaminated buildings and soil began in earnest in 1974, but with little public awareness of activities at the site.

Rockwell official Gerry Gaylord said the cleanup plan covers merely the final phases of decontamination at the site.

At the peak of nuclear work, 150 million curies of radioactivity were present at the site, Gaylord said, compared to about 60 curies today.

“We’re really at the tail end” of cleanup work, he said.