EDITORIAL RADIOACTIVE INACTION FEDS HOPE TO SHIRK THEIR RESPONSIBILITY FOR CLEANING UP THE FORMER ROCKETDYNE PLANT.

FOR 40 years, the San Fernando Valley was home to much of the military and technological research that helped America win the Cold War. So what does it have to show for its patriotic effort?

About 30,000 truckloads of radioactive dirt.

That's what the Department of Energy hopes to leave behind at the former Rocketdyne nuclear research facility in the Simi Hills when its ``clean-up'' effort is supposedly complete.

If the DOE gets its way, only 7,500 cubic meters of soil contaminated with

low-level radioactive waste would be removed from a 90-acre portion of the 270-acre facility.

In total, some 98 percent of the contaminated soil would still be there. It would pose a cancer threat 300 times greater than the standard the Environmental Protection Agency urges for its Superfund projects, the same standard that neighbors hoped the DOE would apply to the Rocketdyne clean-up.

This on otherwise beautiful land with panoramic views of the San Fernando and Simi valleys, land that if properly scrubbed would make for valuable business or housing developments.

But if the Santa Susana Field Laboratory gets only the second-class clean-up that the DOE proposes, what developer would want to build there? Who would want to do business or live atop tons of dirt contaminated by forty years of rocket and nuclear fuel research?

After all, health studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, have shown that external radiation at the nuclear research lab was associated with elevated cancer rates. As many as 6,000 of the plant's former workers may have been harmed by the radioactive materials that were used there - many of which the DOE would just as soon leave in the ground forever.

The community will be stuck with tainted lands, the byproduct of more than a half century of tainted federal policy.

It took a 1989 Daily News expose of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory's contamination even to force the DOE to begin to deal with the problems, and since then, the bureaucracy has mostly dragged its feet.

Now, after a dozen years, the department's best solution includes leaving tons of carcinogenic soil exactly where it is.

It's disgraceful.

But there's still hope.

The DOE will be holding two ``public input'' forums today. The two-hour sessions will be held at the Grand Vista Hotel, 999 Enchanted Way, Simi Valley, starting at 2 p.m and 7 p.m.

Go tell the department officials what you think, and let your voice be heard. Let them know that the San Fernando Valley deserves better, that your community shouldn't be a nuclear-waste dump or a long-term cancer hazard.