Goo-ology
Michael Collins | Feb 22, 2010 | Comments 3
The answer is both according to Frederick S. Simmons of the Aerospace Corporation who wrote the 2000 book “Rocket Exhaust Plume Phenomenology.” The toxic fuels used in rocket tests don’t fully combust, according to Simmons, in this book that addresses rocket exhaust signatures in a war scenario but which are applicable to tests ignited at Rocketdyne.
“[T]here are other sources of inefficiency,” Simmons wrote. “These include viscous boundary layer losses, kinetic losses in the chemical reactions themselves, particulate drag losses, and losses in energy release caused by nonideal vaporization and mixing on a small scale. However, the most significant departure from the idealized flow as described above is consequent to two effects: the unmixedness of the reactants in the combustion chamber and, in the case of liquid propellants, incomplete vaporization.”
Simmons suggests that large droplets of fuel exit rocket engines. That would confirm that vast sprays of water could wash the so-called “witches’ brew” of rocket fuel contamination into the otherwise usually parched Simi Hills.
That’s a whole lot of goo. Now we know that a common sense suggestion by a Rocketdyne crew member in the early 1950s may have inadvertently helped further destroy the land and subsurface water which feeds the Los Angeles River.
It remains to be seen if this will concentrate cleanup around the test stands necessitating their removal. But thanks to Kraemer’s book, one key piece of the puzzle of Rocketdyne’s polluted past has come to light: rocket exhaust was hosed down and a slush of poison sluiced into the San Fernando Valley and eventually percolated into the lab’s groundwater giving rise to the term goo.
This goo won’t be easy to clean up with Boeing doing everything in its power to torpedo the State’s order to clean up the place to the highest standards. Years of hosing rocket exhaust led to years of hosing a public exhausted by decades of dealing with unrepentant polluters. At least with the rocket test stands, the community now knows where the hosing came from.
Filed Under: Blog • Rocketdyne
As an unwilling recipient of the fallout from an Ares test firing plume, I need help. I need to connect with people who have a working knowledge of the chemistry involved in the plumes from rocket test firing and in modeling the fallout range, please help! Email me at pollutionconcern@hotmail.com Thank you.
Thanks for your good deductive investigation expanding our knowledge of previous procedures and sources causing such extensive watershed and aquifer contamination. Mentioning the Los Angeles River as downstream recipient is still rare in most public media, thank you for linking it. I’d add that according to an EPA document around 90% of the total SSFL property is also the Bell Creek watershed. So a lot of ‘goo fortified’ surface water trickles and flows from outfalls and under the SSFL fencing to form Bell Creek in the Bell Canyon community, through four L.A. city parks, and past numerous households in West Hills and Canoga Park before becoming the L.A. River. In my experience seeing its name in print or search results is minor so far. When you have time and space any ‘Bell Creek Goo-ology’ worthy of EnviroReporter coverage would be appreciated.
We mistakenly neglected to allow comments on this blog post so please excuse our oversight which has now been corrected.
But, more importantly, did we jump to any conclusions regarding the use of water to hose down rocket exhaust in the so-called “flame bucket” that we write about here?
No, thank goo-ness.
The above passage about Rocketdyne worker Jim Benson coming up with a way to solve the flame bucket degradation problem documented events at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory circa 1950. But was this system to cool down the hot zone under the test stands used past that time or was it a temporary measure used at the dawn of the Cold War?
A passage in the same book, “Rocketdyne: Powering Humans into Space,” confirms that this practice was continued for decades. We derive this conclusion from the following passage excerpted, in part, on page 219 of this excellent book:
“On April 7, 1982, Engine 2013 test 901-364 was planned as a 500-second FPL flight mission simulation test. At 362 seconds the engine was destroyed by a failure which originated in the HPFTP turbine. The engine was burned and ripped out of the test stand. It was found 100ft. away from the base of the test stand, in the spillway built for the flame bucket coolant water.” (Our emphasis)
This means that Rocketdyne used this method to cool off the thousands of rocket engine exhaust flames for at least 32 years and probably for the life of the rocket testing facility that ceased in 2006, according to the report “Historical resources survey and assessment of the NASA facility at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, Ventura County, California,” released by Archeological Consultants, Inc. and Weitz Research in March, 2009.
56 years of hosing down the goo that has resulted in a grossly polluted facility that the land owner, Boeing, still is fighting to not clean up to standards mandated by state law.
And now, 60 years later, some community activists maintain that the rocket test stands should stay standing despite the now-obvious conclusion that they are the center of the chemical pollution that plagues the facility.
How the remediation of Rocketdyne, estimated to cost up to a billion dollars, can take place without excavating the area around and under the stands without the structures coming down has not been answered.
It seems unlikely that the community activists demanding that the rocket test stands stay in place have a solution for this vexing problem. And it seems unlikely that long-time community activists fighting for the cleanup of the lab since 1989 will settle for leaving polluted places at Rocketdyne intact simply to satisfy the whims of preservationists.