Although the buildings have been torn down, there is still plenty of remediation work left for the Department of Energy in coming years at its portion of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a spokesman for the California Department of Toxic Substances Control said.
“The soil cleanup is expected to finish around 2034,” Russ Edmondson, a spokesman for the California agency regulating remediation being carried out by Boeing, DOE and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the 2,800-acre property in Simi Valley, said in a Monday email.
Groundwater remediation will take longer because the conditions at the site limit the rate of cleanup, Edmondson said in response to a Weapons Complex Morning Briefing inquiry.
The DOE announced recently it has removed, over 15 months, the final 18 buildings left from research that ended in the 1980s at its Energy Technology Engineering Center (ETEC) at Santa Susana.
The DOE buildings demolished since 2020 have been taken down to the slabs and foundations, Edmondson said. But the building slabs will remain until soil cleanup begins. The DOE is responsible for cleaning up soil and groundwater at the 470-acre Area IV, which includes ETEC.
In a final environmental impact statement, published in February 2019, DOE said it preferred to return this area to “open space” for recreation at radiation levels low enough to protect human health and the environment. But California criticized the plan, saying it failed to live up to DOE’s prior commitments to restore the property to “background” radiation levels.
Under an open space scenario, the soil cleanup cost could be $43 million. Although other more extensive remediation alternatives could run the bill up to $773 million, according to the impact statement.
DOE signed an Administrative Order on Consent with the state Department of Toxic Substances Control in 2010 to remediate soil to background levels, Edmondson said, and the state agency “will verify that DOE fully complies with the order.” DOE is also party to a 2007 Consent Order for Corrective Action where DOE agreed to clean up groundwater at its sites in Area IV.
North Wind Portage is DOE cleanup contractor at the site, where the agency did nuclear research from the 1950s into the 1980s. The Liquid Metal Engineering Center for the former Atomic Energy Commission was originally started at Santa Susana to support the government’s fast-breeder reactor program. It was rechristened by DOE as the Energy Technology Engineering Center (ETEC) in 1978, according to a DOE website. Boeing and NASA did rocket research at Santa Susana.
