EPA CALLS DOE'S SANTA SUSANA CLEANUP SCIENCE 'OUTDATED'.

Byline: Rachel Uranga Staff Writer

A key EPA official criticized a Department of Energy cleanup plan that would remove only 2 percent of the nuclear radiation on a 90-acre plot of the Santa Susana Field Lab above Chatsworth, calling the science ``outdated.''

Stuart Walker's comments Thursday in the hours before a community meeting on issues surrounding the former Rocketdyne site marked the first time that the Environmental Protection Agency has publicly criticized the plan since it was released weeks ago.

``They (DOE officials) are not actually following their own policy,'' said Walker, an EPA specialist on radioactive waste.

In 1995, the two departments entered into a joint agreement to clean up the lot so that it eventually could be sold for housing. But the DOE, which sponsored nuclear research at the site from the mid-1950s to 1988, is the one legally charged with decontamination. The EPA has no regulatory authority over it.

Mike Lopez, the site's project manager for the DOE, defended the department, saying it is in compliance with the agreement.

``It is a policy difference between DOE and EPA over what's consistency,'' he said.

The DOE's final cleanup plan allows a one-in-3,333 cancer-death risk rate while the EPA's counterplan provides a rate between one in a million and one in 10,000.

Both U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Los Angeles, have blasted the DOE's plan, vowing to seek legislation to raise the cleanup standard.

Thursday's meeting was called by the EPA after complaints from several activists dissatisfied with the DOE's decontamination of the Energy Technology Engineering Center and concerned about how perchlorate used throughout the 2,800-acre lab has been handled.