EDITORIAL NUKING THE VALLEY THE PUBLIC DESERVES THE TRUTH ABOUT BRADLEY LANDFILL.

TO think, all the time that Rocketdyne was removing radioactive waste from its Santa Susana Field Laboratory, it was moving it - to the Bradley Landfill in Sun Valley.

Rocketdyne, which has since been taken over by Boeing, could have sent the waste out to a far-away contamination site, say somewhere in the Mojave Desert, nowhere near any major civilian centers or the groundwater supplies they depend on. Instead, it decided to dump the radioactive materials in a major urban area, just a short distance away from Polytechnic High School.

Now there's not just one contaminated site in the San Fernando Valley, but two.

Not to worry, say officials from the U.S. Department of Energy, which is overseeing the Rocketdyne cleanup. This is the safe, environmentally friendly sort of nuclear waste. It's very low-level. If you drank the groundwater it contaminates and ate food grown in its tainted soil, you'd still be much safer than the average nuclear power plant employee.

Great.

Of course, if it's as safe as they say it is, how come they never bothered to inform local communities that they were dumping it so close to home? How come Bradley's neighbors never got to weigh in on the decision?

For much of the past decade, contaminated soil removed from the Rocketdyne site in the hills between Chatsworth and Simi Valley has found its way to Bradley, without state regulators or local officials ever knowing about it.

State health officials facilitated this practice by discarding the standard for low-level radioactive waste used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in favor of a less-stringent DOE standard. That made it easy to send Rocketdyne's waste to Bradley without reporting it to local communities, state regulators or even the landfill's operators.

It took a state Senate inquiry into the changed regulations to bring news of the dumping to the public. Even now, state officials say there's no way to know for sure exactly how much radioactive material is in the Bradley Landfill and the risks of contaminating the groundwater.

It's a failure of government at all levels, from state regulators who created an enormous and potentially dangerous loophole to DOE officials who allowed Rocketdyne to exploit it. As government agents and agencies played their games and looked the other way, the lives and safety of local residents were put at risk.

Now the community must live with the consequences of a decision that it never had the ability to affect.

The risks of low-level radioactive contamination might be slight, but they're also unnecessary. The place for such materials is clearly not in highly populated residential areas, at least not without the consent of those who have to live with it.

Once again, our public institutions have let us down. In ordering an investigation, Mayor James Hahn needs to seriously follow through to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.