New Field Lab Study to Be Meeting Topic

Dissatisfied with Rocketdyne’s own study of radioactive contamination at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory near Simi Valley, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ordered another study.

EPA officials are to discuss the new study tonight at a 7 o’clock public meeting at the Simi Valley Senior Citizens Center, 3900 Avenida Simi.

The EPA feared that the tests had not revealed “potentially unknown areas of contamination,” EPA project manager Thomas Kelly wrote earlier this month in a letter to Phil Rutherford, an environmental official for Boeing North American’s Rocketdyne division.

Tonight’s meeting among the EPA, Rocketdyne and neighbors of the field lab will also address the progress of decontamination and declassification of the Department of Energy’s former nuclear studies area at the rugged field lab.

Rocketdyne hosted nuclear research there by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and later the DOE from the 1950s through the 1980s.

At various times, there were 16 atomic reactors operating at the field lab, one of which suffered a partial fuel meltdown in 1959.

Radioactive elements have since been found in the ground water in and around the field lab, and UCLA researchers have nearly completed a health study of 5,000 past and present Rocketdyne workers who were exposed to radiation. The study is due out Sept. 11, a deadline that has been pushed back several times since last year.