HOT ZONE
The Santa Susana lab has had a well-documented history of problems since it opened in 1948. It is now in the midst of a $55 million cleanup, funded by Rocketdyne and supervised by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered after a 1989 Department of Energy study found radioactive contamination in soil and water near the nuclear-research portion of the lab. Several accidents involving nuclear reactors, including the partial meltdown the night the Nixon-Khrushchev debate was broadcast, have released radioactive gases into the atmosphere. In 1959, a fuel rod exploded at the lab while being washed with water, flooding the reactor with radioactivity that was vented outside; in 1960, a reactor pipe being moved outdoors for decontamination exploded and sailed across a ravine. Last year, Rocketdyne settled out of court with Brandeis-Bardin Institute, in eastern Simi Valley, over charges the company had polluted the institute’s groundwater and devalued its property. Two Rocketdyne physicists were killed in 1994 when the chemicals they were incinerating exploded. Following a federal grand jury investigation, Rocketdyne’s former parent company Rockwell International, pleaded guilty to felony counts of improper storage and disposal of hazardous materials and was fined $6.5 million.
Two class action lawsuits filed late last year charge that 84 claimants were made sick or put at risk because of substances released at Santa Susana and other Rocketdyne facilities. Attorney Edward L. Masry, whose firm helped win a $333 million settlement against Pacific Gas & Electric over cancers in Hinkley, California, has been doing extensive water and soil testing around Rocketdyne. Masry’s suit contends that approximately one million gallons of trichloroethylene, or TCE, a carcinogenic solvent used to clean rocket engine hardware, was deposited in unlined ponds during the ’50s and early ’60s and subsequently found its way into groundwater outside the facility. Rocketdyne is vigorously contesting the suits and insists its own tests prove that no hazardous levels of pollution migrated offsite. “The farthest we have found is about 800 feet off our property,” says Lafflam.
A team of epidemiologists from the UCLA School of Public Health studied the effects of radiation on 4,563 past and present Rocketdyne workers. Released last September, the study found that, while the overall cancer death rate at Rocketdyne is lower than that of the U.S. population as a whole (due to the “healthy worker” effect, which says that people who have jobs are generally healthier than those who do not), exposure to radiation create health risks at levels much lower than previously believed.
Members of a state-appointed panel of scientists and community members endorsed the study, and residents said that it demonstrated the need to examine people in surrounding neighborhood: (A 1990 state health department survey of cancer records found elevated levels of bladder cancer in the census tracts nearest the facility, although a review of the data in 1992 concluded there was no definitive link between the additional cancers and operations at the lab.) “What the UCLA study examined was the effect that the aggregate of radiation exposures had on the workforce,” says Dan Hirsch, founder of Committee to Bridge the Gap, a Los Angeles – based antinuclear group. “The $64 million question is whether or not the general public was also affected.”
Rocketdyne criticized the results of the employee study for the relatively small sample size used. Company officials pointed out that the study did not take into account other cancer-causing factors like smoking and the employees’ previous exposure to radiation and asbestos. Both the California Department of Health Services id the federal EPA determined that the radiation pollution at Santa Susana posed no health risk to the surrounding community, Rocketdyne officials add that no nuclear research has been conducted at the site since 1988.
The studies, conclusions and counterconclusions have done little to mollify the anger felt by some who grew up around the facility. “Over the years we lived there, we could hear the rocket engines going off, but we always assumed that [Rocketdyne] would look out for the safety of the surrounding community,” says Hecker. I never thought that there actually could be any danger. A stupid assumption, but you think a company like that would consider the health risks they are putting into the area. We always assumed they would take care of it.”
Barbara Johnson moved to Simi Valley in 1970. In 1990, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She has since filed suit against Rocketdyne and was a member of an oversight committee that worked with UCLA researchers on the study of the Santa Susana facility’s employees. “I had a call today from some people whose children are going to nursery school in Simi Valley and did I think it was safe,” she says. Johnson says she could empathize. “When I moved here, I had no idea they were carting plutonium through our neighborhoods. No idea.” Holly Huff’s family moved to the Santa Susana section of Simi Valley, four miles from the lab, in June 1959. “The meltdown was in July,” Huff says. “You can’t help thinking about it.”
Dan Beck, Rocketdyne’s public relations chief, strongly disputes that the company withheld information. “Back during the Cold War years, when KGB agents were working the San Fernando Valley, we were required to maintain a degree of secrecy. But we have never engaged in activities related to the environment that were secret. There have been times in the distant past where, perhaps, the company wasn’t as forthcoming in sharing information with the public as to the things that were going on, but we put that era behind us years ago. Since the ’80s, we’ve been very open, very responsive to the community. The idea of Rocketdyne being super secretive and hiding things just isn’t true.”
TODAY, THE ONCE STATE-OF-THE-ART Santa Susana field lab looks like it’s losing a battle -with nature. The rains of El Nino have given the usually sparse brown vegetation the strength to poke through the cracked asphalt of the roads connecting the ramshackle structures. The facility employs only 600, down from 6,000 in the Cold War go-go years of the 1960s, and is primarily devoted to rocket development and testing. The work to decontaminate and decommission the polluted areas is apparent at every turn. The remnants of long-dormant reactor housings dot the site, surrounded by piles of concrete that have already been cleaned. Workers chop up the last slabs of the old “hot lab” where the company used to strip the uranium off spent fuel rods. In the Radioactive Materials Handling Facility, stacks of bright yellow boxes filled with waste await transport to DOE disposal sites in Nevada and Washington State.
