Rocketdyne Lab Cleanup Standards Are Called Lax

Federal regulators overseeing the removal of radioactive waste at a Rocketdyne test lab near Chatsworth are leaving too much contamination in the soil, potentially posing a long-term hazard to nearby residents, environmentalists and community leaders alleged this week.

Standards guiding the U.S. Department of Energy-led cleanup would leave up to 19,000 times more radioactive residue in dirt at the company’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory than would be allowed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, environmentalists say. The dangerous wastes are the fingerprint of 10 Cold War-era atomic reactors, some of which leaked, but are no longer in service.

Environmentalists are pressing for a more rigorous cleanup, which the Energy Department has resisted for months. The environmentalists say the department is cutting corners by adhering to lenient standards to save money.

“DOE and Rocketdyne have decided they are not going to clean up to a standard that is protective. It’s cheaper to leave it in place,” said Dan Hirsch, president of the Los Angeles-based Committee to Bridge the Gap, an anti-nuclear group that has served as a watchdog over the cleanup since 1979.

But a radiation expert for the state assures residents that additional cleanup is unnecessary because virtually all of the radioactive wastes in question are less harmful than they appear. More stringent cleanup would be costly and would not result in significantly more health protection, said Edgar G. Bailey, chief of the radiologic health branch for the state Department of Health Services.

“We’ve been aggressively pursuing our cleanup,” Rocketdyne spokesman Dan Beck said. “Existing [cleanup] levels give a measure of safety that is acceptable to the public and the agencies.”

Nonetheless, officials at Rocketdyne and the Energy Department, persuaded by the concern the issue has created in the community, say they are willing to consider a more thorough cleanup of the contamination.

Although that concession--offered Wednesday night at a public meeting in Simi Valley to discuss pollution at the lab--seemed to satisfy critics, it raises the possibility that cleanup costs could dramatically escalate.

The federal government has so far spent $55 million to remove radioactive soil, concrete and building materials from 300 acres on the western portion of the base. About 98% of the mess has been decontaminated and another $155 million will be spent to deal with the remainder by 2006, Beck said.

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Switching to new, more stringent decontamination standards in midstream would require another survey of the site and possibly culminate in another round of costly cleanup, officials warned.

“It means the work done so far may be a waste of time and money because it may have to be done again,” Joseph Lyou of the Committee to Bridge the Gap said Thursday.

Many residents at the Wednesday meeting, including those who have lived with the dread that pollution from the lab might be hazardous to their health, say they expect nothing less than a total cleanup at the 2,700-acre site.

“We should have this facility cleaned up to a pristine level . . . whatever the cost is,” said Dawn Kowalski, who lives near the base of the hills between Simi Valley and Chatsworth, the site of the lab. “We don’t want a Love Canal up on that hill.”

The dispute goes to the heart of every chemical or nuclear waste cleanup underway across the nation: How clean is clean?

As it is now managed, radioactive contamination is being reduced to limits considered acceptable by the Energy Department. Those limits are more permissive than those used by the EPA. For instance, the EPA requires any residual wastes left in the ground expose people to a risk of contracting cancer that is no greater than one chance in 1 million.

But the Energy Department’s standards for 21 radionuclides, including plutonium, cesium and strontium, permit enough residual waste to pose a cancer risk as high as one in 50, according to a comparison of standards compiled by the EPA. The danger is to an individual living atop the tainted soil, not people living miles away, said Tom Kelly, Rocketdyne project manager for the EPA.

Hannibal Joma of the Energy Department said while the standards may appear lenient, they provide an adequate level of protection and are similar to those used by other federal agencies, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“We have to strike a balance between how much money do we want to spend and how much do we want to drive that risk down. We’re doing our best to reach that balance,” Joma said at the meeting.

Bailey, the state radiation health expert, said the EPA’s limits are extraordinarily strict, in some cases requiring contamination to be reduced beyond so-called “background levels” found in soil everywhere. Further, most of the substances in question, he said, emit beta radiation, which is dangerous only if consumed, an exposure route Bailey considers very unlikely.