Excessive radiation still at field lab





Despite past efforts to clean up the site, an independent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study found that high levels of radioactive contamination still exist in the soil at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory north of Oak Park.

“It’s good news in that they found it and they are going to clean it up. It would be better if they found nothing,” said Dan Hirsch, longtime cleanup activist and president of the nuclear watchdog group the Committee to Bridge the Gap. “Members of the community always distrusted the claims that everything is okay up there. . . . Now the experts have gone up there and said the public was right all along.”

Assemb lywoman Julia Brownley (D-Santa Monica), who has also fought for a thorough cleanup of the former Rocketdyne facility, said the findings are disappointing but prove the strict cleanup standard set by Senate Bill 990 is needed.

“This confirms what we were worried about. This begins to answer critical questions about what’s still up there, where, how much and how bad?” Brownley said. “ These findings by the EPA completely undercut any arguments that a lesser level of cleanup will be safe.”

The field lab is a 2,850-acre site about two miles south of Simi Valley in the hills above the west San Fernando Valley and Oak Park. Three parties responsible for cleaning up the contaminated soil and groundwater at the former rocket engine and nuclear test site: the Boeing Company, NASA and the Department of Energy.

In 2008, the DOE and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency entered an agreement under which the DOE would provide funds to the EPA—nearly $40 million of which came the following year via stimulus money—to conduct a comprehensive radiological site characterization of Area IV, believed to be the most contaminated portion of the field lab.

Although it was the DOE and its contractors that used Area IV during the mid-1950s to 1988, Boeing has controlled the majority of the property since 1996.

Over the past couple of years the EPA conducted a historical site assessment to identify what kind of radiological contaminants remain and where they are. This was followed by a gamma scan of the property to find radiation “hot spots,” which were then sampled by EPA beginning in October 2010.

Cleanup advocates in the surrounding communities say they are glad to have a study they can trust and are not surprised that more work needs to be done.

“It’s gratifying that they were finally able to do the study because the more information we get the better,” Oak Park resident Eric Estrin said. “It’s an issue that a lot of people care a lot about but nobody has a lot of hard information on it, and the information that has been supplied to us by Boeing has not been reliable. And that’s been borne out again by these findings.”

Approximately 2,500 samples were taken across Area IV. The EPA has received lab results for about 1,100 samples, and of those about 90 exceeded “radiological trigger levels,” or any contamination above what would naturally occur in the soil. The DOE has committed to cleaning up contamination found above those limits.

The majority of these hits were found in the area where a sodium reactor experiment, which suffered a partial nuclear meltdown in 1959, was once located.

“From my perspective we kind of had a preview of coming attractions from the gamma scanning that we had done,” said Gregg Dempsey, an EPA radiation expert and senior technical adviser for the radiological study. “I think the Department of Energy knew there were some issues, and our charge was to find out where they were so they could get them cleaned up.”

According to the EPA’s report, a total of 437 samples were collected in the hot area. Of those, 75 samples exceeded radiological trigger levels.

“Seventeen percent, one out of every six samples, is still con- taminated at the partial meltdown site . . . that was twice declared clean by Boeing,” Hirsch said.

There were 60 hits of elevatedlevels of radionuclide cesium-137, exposure to which can increase the risk of cancer. In addition, there were nine hits for carbon-14, nine hits for strontium-90 and eight hits for tritium.

Seven of those excess readings ran as high as 100 to 1,000 times the radiological trigger levels.

“It was unnerving to hear that after the site had been cleaned up twice before,” said Oak Park resident Cindi Gortner, who lives three miles from the field lab. “I believe they didn’t expect to find much given that it had been cleaned up before, but they certainly found a lot, in my opinion.”

Hirsch said that when the area was cleaned in the past the standards Boeing had to meet were much lower.

“ When Boeing cleaned it up before they used a really lax cleanup standard, very unprotected, which DOE has said they’ll do better than. Even with that lax standard they missed a lot of the contamination,”Hirsch said. “So it was a sloppy job that was done.”

The EPA will conduct a second round of sampling to verify its results and, more importantly Dempsey said, determine the extent of the contamination around each hot spot. He said that sampling should be completed sometime in July.



Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *