COLD WAR WATCH : Mending a Nuclear Site

When the U.S. Department of Energy decided in 1993 to open up eight former nuclear sites to economic development, it figured to be a tough sell. The Community Reuse Organization locations included the Hanford site in Washington State, Oak Ridge in Tennessee and Rocky Flats in Jefferson County, Colo.

Those are familiar names in the nuclear bomb network, and they are among the most contaminated places on earth.

Oak Ridge supplied the Manhattan Project. The Hanford Atomic Weapons Plant turned nuclear fuel into plutonium, and a structure at Rocky Flats was recently featured on “Nightline” as the most dangerous building in the U.S.

Rocketdyne’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory is a Reuse location that was a testing site for nuclear power plant parts. By comparison to Rocky Flats, its cleanup will be easy, and DOE officials say that residual radioactive waste should be removed by 1997.

Some 50 firms have contacted Santa Susana’s Energy Technology Engineering Center to make use of the facility’s scientists and technology. Most of the firms want to test and demonstrate new products before taking them to market. That’s a welcome and unexpected show of interest that may help keep the facility operating.

In the state that has been hardest hit by the military base closings and defense and aerospace industry cutbacks that resulted from the end of the Cold War, it is somehow fitting that the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, of all the old government nuclear sites, has the best chance for survival.