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.
That probably won’t sit well with a group of five Californians in Congress — Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and four members of the U.S. House of Representatives — who want an update by the head of the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) on why the cleanup is dragging on so long beyond the once anticipated 2017 completion date.
The lawmakers made the request in a Thursday letter to the head of the California EPA, Jared Blumenfeld.
“The final environmental impact report will be released next year, at which point DTSC [the Department of Toxic Substances Control] will move quickly to implement the last phase of cleanup at the site,” Allison Wescott, the agency’s deputy director of communications, said in a Thursday email. California is proud of the progress made in the past two years, including demolition of the final 18 DOE buildings, Wescott added.
“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 Monitor 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.
The timing of the final set of building demolitions that started in 2020 was in part to allay citizen concerns about another wildfire — such as the November 2018 Woolsey Fire, which burned burned 96,000 acres, including parts of the nuclear areas of Santa Susana — could spread airborne contamination to nearby homes in Southern California.
On Thursday, the Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles released a study to be published in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity saying the Woolsey Fire did spread radioactive contamination well above background levels several miles off-site. The study contradicts an earlier assessment by the California Environmental Protection Agency and its toxics department saying no contamination was released.
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.
