Radioactivity Tests Now in Doubt at Rocketdyne Site

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged Tuesday that it is backing away from an agreement to check for radioactive contamination as part of a decade-long cleanup at the Rocketdyne nuclear testing facility near Simi Valley.

The research and development at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory was done under contract with the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Energy. The DOE is in charge of the cleanup that has been widely criticized as inadequate by residents and elected officials.

“We’d previously thought and pretty much said our Las Vegas lab would be doing the study. But it looks like that’s not the way it’s going to go,” said Larry Bowerman, a San Francisco-based manager of hazardous site cleanup for the EPA.

The EPA announcement follows a Bush administration bid to cut $467 million from the Department of Energy’s annual cleanup budget at dozens of nuclear testing and production sites across the country.

The sites include three in California--the Rocketdyne facility, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near Oakland and the nearby General Electric Vallecitos Nuclear Center.

Of the three, Livermore would face the most drastic cut in its annual cleanup budget, dropping from $21 million to $11 million. That would probably delay or reduce ground-water cleanup of volatile organic compounds remaining from years of Navy aircraft training.

“They cut the money, we have to do less,” said Bert Heffner, environmental community relations manager at the facility, which is managed by the University of California. “We don’t get to argue.”

At the Rocketdyne facility, a cut of $3.7 million--down about 22% from this year’s funding--could delay by at least two years the cleanup of ground water, of soil and buildings at a site where years of Cold War-era nuclear and rocket engine testing was conducted.

Additional cuts would probably delay the start of a cleanup effort at a small lab at the GE facility, where fuel rods were once tested, said Roger Liddle, an energy department official who oversees environmental projects in California.

Liddle said his department is in no way backing away from its responsibility to clean up any of the sites. Instead, he said, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham simply wants managers to look for efficiencies in the way the cleanups are being done.

But nuclear watchdogs say that, taken together, the EPA’s recent decision involving the Rocketdyne site and the proposed budget cuts demonstrate the Bush administration’s weak commitment to public health and the environment.

“It’s no coincidence,” said Dan Hirsch, a Santa Cruz-based nuclear policy activist and a longtime critic of the operations at Rocketdyne. “This may be one of the first concrete examples of the Bush administration’s generic anti-environment and anti-California policies.”

The debate could come to a head tonight at a public meeting in Simi Valley, where officials from various state and federal agencies are expected to formally deliver the news about the proposed energy cuts and the EPA decision to a roomful of homeowners who live near the Rocketdyne site.

“There’s going to be a lot of outrage and anger,” said Barbara Johnson, a 31-year resident of Santa Susana Knolls and a public member of a working group established by the EPA to monitor the cleanup. “The public has been let down. These government agencies have not fulfilled the promises they’ve been making to us for years.”

Jed Harrison, director of the EPA’s Radiation and Indoor Environments National Laboratory in Las Vegas, said the agency’s recent decision not to launch a radiation survey has nothing to do with the administration’s environmental policies.

The resources and manpower involved simply “exceeded this laboratory’s capabilities,” he said.

Liddle echoed those comments, adding that the energy department had “no involvement in EPA’s decision to not actually do the survey” and would “welcome any assistance EPA wants to give us in terms of providing a second eye.”

The radiation survey at Rocketdyne will still get done, Liddle said. It will simply be performed by the Department of Energy or a subcontractor.

But Hirsch said the reason he and residents want the EPA involved is that the agency had indicated that it would send Gregg Dempsey, a scientist at the Las Vegas lab, to direct the radiation survey.

In 1989, Hirsch said, Dempsey was the first outside researcher allowed onto the site as part of a national examination of such testing facilities. At the time, Dempsey highlighted several testing techniques that he found questionable, including a practice of washing or burning vegetation samples before testing them for radiation.

“Certain problems exist within this laboratory that make me question the validity of some, if not all, of their environmental data,” Dempsey wrote a report after his visit.

Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) are pressuring the EPA to reconsider its involvement in the radiation survey at Rocketdyne, saying the energy department has poor credibility with residents.

“Rescinding these pledges would only add to suspicions that decisions about the cleanup of this site are based solely on fiscal policy with little regard for health risks,” Boxer said in a letter to EPA Administrator Christie Whitman.

These congressional members, along with Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Woodland Hills), say they will work to restore full funding for the cleanup of sites throughout the state.

But Gallegly bristled at conspiracy theories about the Bush administration.

“This is the kind of bunk that is being promulgated by some hard partisans,” he said. “If they would only focus on what I’ve been focusing on--to get this cleaned up--then we could move forward in a positive direction.”