EPA to Oversee Radiation Cleanup at Rocketdyne Lab

Under pressure from environmental activists, federal inspectors have agreed to oversee cleanup of radiation at Rocketdyne’s controversial Santa Susana Field Laboratory.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has agreed to pleas from the Rocketdyne Cleanup Coalition, a group of lab neighbors and activists who demanded the EPA double-check cleanup and testing by Rocketdyne and the Department of Energy.

EPA officials are scheduled to outline their monitoring plans during a meeting at 7 tonight at Simi Valley City Hall.

The coalition has been pushing the EPA to assign its inspector, Gregg Dempsey, as an independent monitor for the cleanup of radiation that leaked into the ground and laboratory buildings during 30 years of nuclear research at the 2,668-acre field lab between Simi Valley and Canoga Park.

Dempsey, who won the coalition’s confidence in 1989 when he found evidence that radioactive tritium had leaked into a drain at the lab, now oversees a staff of 20 at the EPA’s Center of Environmental Restoration Monitoring and Emergency Response in Las Vegas.

It is likely his staff will monitor the cleanup instead, said Julie Anderson, director of the EPA’s Waste Management Division, in a letter to the coalition last week.

Coalition spokesman Daniel Hirsch said Tuesday that he and fellow members hoped that Dempsey would personally oversee the cleanup by Rocketdyne and workers from the Department of Energy to ensure it is done properly.

Lori Circle, Rocketdyne’s environmental spokeswoman, said, “We’re absolutely in support of this. We actually have had discussions with the EPA and offered to do what we could, even so much as a funding effort, if that will provide them with the oversight that the community has requested.”

Rocketdyne operated 16 small nuclear reactors between 1954 and the early 1980s, one of which suffered the rupture of some nuclear fuel rods in 1959. The company ended its nuclear research in the late 1980s.