FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN
Unlucky Numbers
The hard-fought campaign to rid SSFL of radioactive toxins suffered a major setback on April Fool’s Day. The Department of Energy (DOE) announced that the site would not have to undergo a meticulous environmental review and maximized cleanup before the property is released for unrestricted use. The cleanup would use DOE standards rather than the approximately 300-times more stringent EPA standards.
“The government is breaking its promise to clean up Rocketdyne to the strictest EPA standards that it signed on to in 1995,” said Daniel Hirsch, president of the environmental watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap. Hirsch is also a member of the EPA-sponsored Santa Susana Field Laboratory Workgroup, which is made up of government agencies and community activists charged with monitoring the cleanup of SSFL.
And there is a lot to clean up. SSFL’s radiological facility, site of the two partial meltdowns, was also the site of nearly a dozen experimental nuclear reactors, a plutonium fabrication facility, and a “hot lab” designed to disassemble radioactive fuel rods, according to environmentalist Hirsch. Plus, it was the site of a burn pit where radioactive waste was ignited, burned, and released into the air. A sodium burn pit at SSFL has been found to contain perchlorate. Water readings as high as 1,600 parts per billion (ppb) of perchlorate have been found in the eastern area of the lab overlooking the San Fernando Valley, where the chemical was once disposed and where munitions and propellant testing took place. State-suggested acceptable levels for water are 2ppb.
Also, approximately 1,890 pounds of perchlorate were burned at SSFL from 1960 to 1990. No studies have been undertaken to determine the hazards of breathing in airborne perchlorate or its effects due to skin exposure through contaminated water droplets.
A vocal critic of Rocketdyne, Hirsch first discovered information about the 1959 partial meltdown when he was a lecturer at UCLA. A student obtained a film showing Rocketdyne workers struggling to clean up the disabled reactor. Hirsch fed the information to the press and has been the bane of Rocketdyne ever since. “Now, instead of a one-in-a-million fatal- cancer-risk-cleanup level, as mandated by the EPA, the DOE will allow an approximately one-in-3,333 chance of contracting an incurable cancer,” Hirsch said. “The government is breaking its promise to the community.”
“The government is getting away with murder,” says Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of the Los Angeles-based public health group Physicians for Social Responsibility. “The Energy Department, by trying to save a buck or two, is endangering workers, residents, and generations to come.” Parfrey is also a member of the cleanup Workgroup.
Indeed, the hard science seems to support this claim. A comparison of some DOE cleanup levels for radionuclides versus the EPA’s Preliminary Remediation Goals (PRGs) is unsettling. For example, allowable plutonium-239 levels could be 5,576 times higher than the EPA’s PRG. Tritium-3 would be 198,137 times higher. Iron-55 would be 786,250 times the EPA’s PRG, resulting in 1,761 cancers per generation based on population density if SSFL were developed residentially.
DOE officials have publicly stated that the chances of someone dying from cancer by living on the site would be less than the odds of someone getting killed from all the truck trips required to remove the 450,000 cubic meters of contaminated dirt from the 90-acre radiological site at SSFL. Instead, a proposed $100 million cleanup would remove only 5,500 cubic meters or about 1 percent of the poisonous soil from the site.
“It’s outright immoral to let people build homes up there on radioactive waste,” says Parfrey. “But then again, the Department of Energy brought us the nightmares at the Nevada Test Site, Tennessee’s Oak Ridge facility, and the Hanford complex in Washington State. It’s up to the EPA and the State of California to protect us.”
The EPA is not pleased by DOE’s decision but says its hands are tied since the decision came from the “highest level,” or the Executive Branch, according to Stuart Walker, the federal EPA’s “Superfund Radiation Issues” expert. Speaking at a community meeting sponsored by the EPA and the Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB) in Simi Valley on April 24, Walker said that Rocketdyne wasn’t a Superfund site, which is a designated polluted place cleaned up to the strictest EPA levels – because no one lived at the site. Ironically, he pointed out that if homes were built at SSFL and the EPA found the pollution levels ¯ exceeding its standards, the homes would have to be torn down and the DOE would have to resume cleanup. He stated that the only way Rocketdyne could be given Superfund status was through a citizens’ petition drive, which he admitted had never succeeded at other polluted sites around the country. He added that it could be possible if Governor Gray Davis petitioned the federal government himself, but environmentalists dismiss this as a pipe dream.
Decanting and Deceiving
Even the pollution found so far on SSFL might be underestimated. Rocketdyne tests the water and soil there, but there have been questions about its methodology. After referring to the DOE’s method of sampling as “old science,” Walker also decried Rocketdyne’s history of decanting and filtering suspect water at SSFL. That practice was never condoned by the EPA, he said. He stated that it skewed the results so much that they were essentially meaningless, and that Rocketdyne’s records could be suspect.
This alleged bad practice began in 1989. A report by a company subcontractor, Groundwater Resources Consultants Inc., advised the company how to reduce high concentrations of radionuclides found in the water there. “It is likely that high gross alpha and beta [radiation] activity is correlated with high sediment content in samples,” the report stated. Rocketdyne then contacted Dr. George Uyesugi of the California Department of Health Services Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, who advised it on decanting and filtering methods.
