ROCKETDYNE LAB CLEANUP PLAN ASSAILED STATE, FEDERAL REGULATORS SEEK TOUGHER STANDARDS.

Byline: Erik N. Nelson Staff Writer

State and federal environmental regulators have blasted the U.S. Department of Energy's plan for radioactive cleanup at the Rocketdyne Santa Susana Field Laboratory as inadequate and called for a more thorough study of the contamination.

The sharply critical comments on the environmental assessment, which the department was pressured to conduct, comes on the heels of the revelation that low-level radioactive waste from Rocketdyne's Simi Hills facility was dumped in a Sun Valley landfill.

At the same time, California legislators have taken steps to tighten the state's radioactive cleanup and disposal standards so they are much tougher than those used by the Department of Energy on the Boeing-owned land.

The DOE's plan is to decontaminate the land so that residents who someday might live on the site would have a cancer risk of one in 10,000. Activists are urging the 1-in-a-million cancer risk preferred by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

``The tide is turning against DOE's plans to abandon the cleanup of this contaminated site,'' said Dan Hirsch, a spokesman for the Committee to Bridge the Gap, who has long monitored cleanup at the site. ``Both the EPA's and the state toxics agency comments place DOE in a major bind.''

In an April 26 letter, the EPA said the Energy Department had failed to provide enough information on the extent of the contamination to justify setting the exposure limit of 15 millirems of radiation per year.

``We feel that additional investigation of the site needs to be done before that kind of decision can be made,'' said the EPA's Larry Bowerman, western regional chief of corrective action for the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.

At the state Department of Toxic Substance Control, which governs chemical decontamination at the site, officials made similar comments about the DOE's environmental assessment.

Gerard Abrams, senior engineer and geologist at DTSC, said the DOE used 149 surface soil samples taken in 1994 at no more than 6 inches deep to determine the extent of radiologic contamination, but should have gone down to bedrock - some 10 feet deep.

DOE officials said they cannot respond to the agencies' comments but are reviewing them for their final environmental assessment report.

The decontamination of the 90-acre Energy Technology Engineering Center began after Energy Department-sponsored nuclear research, begun in the mid-1950s, ceased in 1988.

Criticism of the cleanup standard has come from various parties, including California's two U.S. senators.

The EPA has said it would do its own soils radiation survey, if the Energy Department agrees to foot the bill, estimated at $18 million. The two agencies are still haggling over that plan.

Boeing spokesman Dan Beck said the company's environmental engineers are doing continual sampling all through the cleanup process, checking contamination of soil that's cleaned up, as well as soil left on the site. All levels have been within the company's 15 millirem-per-year standard.

Meanwhile, state Sens. Shiela Kuehl, D-Los Angeles, and Gloria Romero, D-Rosemead, hope to win passage this year of bills that would reduce that threshold to zero.

``Since the feds haven't acted sufficiently to protect Californians, I think it's my job to establish high standards in the state,'' said Kuehl, whose district includes parts of the San Fernando Valley.

Kuehl's bill, which sets radioactive cleanup standards a property must meet before it can be sold, is due to be taken up next week by the full Senate.

Romero's bill would prohibit any radioactive material from being dumped in municipal landfills.

During hearings on the bill, officials learned that the Bradley Landfill in Sun Valley, which took material for years that is believed to contain traces of radioactive elements that fell within the Energy Department's standard.

DOE spokesman John Belluardo said it would not be appropriate to comment on pending legislation.

Belluardo noted that under the 1954 federal Atomic Energy Act, contamination arising from Energy Department research is regulated solely by the department itself.

Opponents such as Hirsch, however, hope that strongly worded comments from the two environmental agencies will help it in court challenges to the cleanup plans.

And Boeing's Radiation Safety manager, Phil Rutherford, said the two bills could effect the cleanup if they become law, although he said they would result in ``severe legal problems.''

``It's not possible for one state to impose a regulatory limit based on a zero threshold if no other state does,'' he said.

All enforceable standards have some numerical value, he added. For example, federal drinking water standards allow radiation exposure of 4 millirems a year, which equates to a one-in-10,000 cancer risk.

``We're all exposed to an average of 300 millirem per year. Our cleanup standards are 5 percent of that,'' Rutherford said.

U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who spearheaded efforts to get EPA more involved in checking the DOE's cleanup oversight, issued a statement Friday saying she was encouraged by the EPA's stance.

``EPA's comments clearly show that more work must be done to ensure that they protect the current and future neighbors of the Rocketdyne site,'' Boxer wrote. ``EPA has listed many critical issues that call into question the DOE's commitment to a thorough cleanup of this site.''

Activist Hirsch said the current pressure on the Energy Department should help prevent what he and elected officials consider a minimal cleanup effort.

``DOE's proposal was to clean up only 5,000 (cubic meters of contaminated soil) and leave the remaining 400,000 in place and then release the land for unrestricted residential use, where children would be playing on top of this contamination,'' Hirsch said.

Invoking the Buffalo, N.Y., suburb where residents were beset by chemical contamination in the 1970s, Hirsch said, ``This is a radioactive Love Canal in the making.''