Rocketdyne Site Spared Strict Review

A former nuclear testing site at Rocketdyne’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory near Simi Valley will not have to undergo a rigorous environmental review before the contaminated property is cleaned up and cleared for unrestricted use, including housing, federal officials announced Tuesday.

The Department of Energy said the site of a nuclear reactor meltdown in 1959 would pose no significant threat to human health or the environment after it is cleaned up to at least minimum standards for radioactive contamination set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Cleanup of the site is expected to be completed by 2007.

The decision drew immediate fire from antinuclear activists, Rocketdyne neighbors and U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), an outspoken critic of the lab’s cleanup operations. Boxer said she would appeal directly to the EPA to conduct a full-scale environmental impact review.

“The Department of Energy is authorizing the release of a witches’ brew of radioactive and chemical contaminants” by allowing a less extensive review of the property, Boxer said in a prepared statement. “We need a full and complete cleanup of the facility.”

The decision regarding the hilltop laboratory in Ventura County could have repercussions for other mothballed nuclear testing sites around the country operated by the department during the Cold War. It is sure to add fuel to the debate about what lengths and costs the federal government should go to clean up radioactive remnants of the Nuclear Age for future generations.

Simi Valley resident Dawn Kowalski, 24, said she was appalled that families might one day live atop a radioactive landscape, with its commanding views of the Santa Monica Mountains to the west and the San Fernando and Simi valleys below.

“There’s children’s and people’s lives at stake,” Kowalski said. “We know more and more about low-level radiation causing big health risks. People probably wouldn’t be allowed to grow vegetables in their gardens. What a way to live. It’s such a beautiful spot, people will want to live there anyway.”

Although the outdoor field lab stretches across 2,668 acres, the decision applies to only 270 acres, including 90 acres where the federal government conducted its nuclear research. Rocketdyne is a division of aerospace giant and military defense contractor Boeing.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Rocketdyne conducted nuclear research under contract for the Energy Department and the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1956, the company began operating test reactors at the site. Research continued despite a number of spills and accidents, including a partial fuel meltdown in 1959. Nuclear operations were shut down in 1989.

The Energy Department considered two scenarios for cleanup and selected the plan that calls for clearing away 5,500 cubic meters of contaminated soil instead of 450,000 cubic meters. The option does not require the government to conduct a full environmental study of the effect the radioactive contamination would have on people and wildlife.

The other option would have required the more extensive review at a cost of “a couple million dollars” to taxpayers, said John Belluardo, a spokesman for the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration office in Oakland.

“We issued a finding of no significant impact,” Belluardo said. “When the site is cleaned up according to the alternative we have selected, there would not be any harm done to human health or the environment.”

In reaching its decision, Belluardo said, the Energy Department found there was a greater probability of someone getting killed in an accident caused by the thousands of truck trips that would be taken up and down the mountain under the more exhaustive effort than a resident contracting cancer in the next 40 years from contamination left behind under the selected option.

Mike Lopez, director of the Department of Energy office in Oakland, said the cleanup plan falls within the range for radiological decontamination set by the EPA.

Lopez said the cleanup effort will cost about $100 million, while the alternative would be double that amount.

Antinuclear activist Dan Hirsch, who has been fighting for full cleanup for decades, said federal officials simply chose the most expedient and less costly alternative.

He said Energy Department officials made an agreement in 1995 to clean up the site using the most stringent requirements.

“They are breaking their promise to clean it up to more protective standards and will leave, by their own admission, 99% of the radioactively contaminated soil in place,” Hirsch said Tuesday.

“Kids could end up playing on soil contaminated with plutonium and strontium and cesium from the old meltdown up there, just because [the department] wants to save money.”