Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment

by Joseph Mangano

  When I was there, there were dead rats floating belly up and bloated little snakes swimming in it. It was the nastiest thing. You could see the sheen from chemicals and stuff.

  With the public release of the report and media reports that followed, the true battle to understand what had happened at Santa Susana, how to clean up the site, and how badly it had affected local health had begun. It was a battle that would last for decades, and (as of mid-2012) have no end in site.

  In the Santa Susana epic, the year 1989 proved to be a turning point. Not coincidentally, this year signaled the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Accordingly, it was a year when new Energy Secretary James Watkins pledged to clean up the toxic legacy of nuclear facilities under DOE control. These world events paved the way for progress in the efforts to understand and remediate Santa Susana, which had been growing throughout the 1980s. At the core of the Santa Susana movement, similar to any progressive movement in a democratic society, were rank and file citizens. In 1989, Hirsch began to dedicate his efforts full time to the Committee to Bridge the Gap. In addition, four local women who had gotten to know each other while serving on the Susana Knolls Homeowners Association board took action. This board was not a nuclear-focused or Santa Susana-focused group, but one that aimed to ensure that surging suburban development in the area didn’t totally obliterate the pristine remnants of the Simi Valley. The women became close, and found that they shared numerous concerns, one of which was the relatively obscure Santa Susana lab and the potential environmental health risks it had made.

  On the other side of the battle line in 1989, ready to contest any efforts to discover environmentally unsound practices, were factions of industry and government. North American Aviation was still active at Santa Susana, continuing to conduct rocket-related operations. It was also trying to restart nuclear work at the site; Rockwell International was attempting to secure federal permission to process radioactive fuel elements, in fairlylarge amounts (up to eleven pounds of enriched uranium and 4.4 pounds of plutonium). Government opposition to making public any findings of contamination and health threats would be led, of course, by the US Energy Department, the successor to the AEC that had led the American program of nuclear weapons development, and “peaceful” atomic programs designed to improve public opinion of the atom. DOE had the blessing of military leaders; even the end of the Cold War arms race had failed to halt the military’s desire for atomic superiority.

  After learning of the Energy Department’s 1989 report on Santa Susana, the four women at the Homeowners Association met to discuss the developing situation, and decided to form the Rocketdyne Cleanup Coalition. The concern they felt for their health, along with that of their families and neighbors, from revelations of extensive contamination at Santa Susana was clarified by Marie Mason during a February 2011 interview with the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles:

  Well we were horrified, because we were raising our children here. This is like paradise. I mean, we all have creeks running through our yard. Our children played in the creeks when they were little.

  With the grassroots mechanism in place, other players were inspired to join the Santa Susana fight. One was the media. When the May 1989 Energy Department report was released, Los Angeles Daily News ran a long article and editorial on Santa Susana in which it asked

  How could a major defense contractor under the direction of a government department have allowed its facilities to become so contaminated? Part of the answer seems to lie in ignorance and apathy.

  Another member in the battle against Santa Susana was elected officials. Some recognized that the issue was entering the public arena, and joined the fight in 1989. Congressman Elton Gallegly, whose district included the Santa Susana site, jumped into the fray, criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency as being “insensitive to the human needs of our communities.” After statements such as this, a final component that would determine Santa Susana’s fate – regulators – emerged. The EPA quickly became involved in the investigation of Santa Susana – a potentially promising development, since EPA (unlike DOE) had no direct involvement in the nuclear weapons or power programs. With citizens, media, regulators, and elected officials now poised to investigate, there was a chance that the secrets of what had happened there in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s would finally be revealed.

  The multiple investigations of Santa Susana focused on two areas: environmental contamination and health risk to local residents and workers.

  The Energy Department had a conflict of interest in the investigation of Santa Susana. The Department, which was responsible for ensuring safe practices at nuclear-related sites, was the very group that (as the successor to the AEC) had for decades maintained a policy of keeping unsafe practices secret from the public. With DOE not likely to be helpful or objective, advocates turned to another federal agency with authority over a place like Santa Susana, namely, the EPA. In July 1989, Congressman Gallegly followed his critical comments against the agency by ordering it to inspect the radiation monitoring program at the site, just to get an idea of whether it was feasible to assess the contamination. A team from the EPA’s National Radiation Lab in Las Vegas found some deplorable practices that would create obstacles for any effective assessment, all of which were unknown to or ignored by the Energy Department. Years later, in testimony to a US Senate Committee chaired by California’s Barbara Boxer, Hirsch described some of these scandalous practices:

  Santa Susana Field Lab was washing radioactivity off vegetation before monitoring; it was burning the vegetation to an ash, driving off the volatile radioactivity in the vegetation before monitoring; it was similarly heating soil samples to high temperatures to drive off the volatile radioactivity before monitoring.

  The EPA also documented that operators at the site filtered groundwater samples and disposed of the radioactivity, thus reducing the true levels of contamination. The report concluded that without correction, the system of radiation measurements at Santa Susana could not possibly assess where and how much radiation had been dumped at the site.

  The DOE and EPA, two federal agencies with some overlap in their respective missions, were now at odds with each other. The EPA was much more likely to find unsafe practices at Santa Susana and report it to the public than the DOE. Congress had oversight powers over these and other federal bodies, and some members of the California delegation urged cooperation between the two. But this was not going to happen easily, as both groups wanted primary authority. Finally, in 1995, a joint DOE/EPA policy was reached, declaring that all DOE sites (including Santa Susana) would be cleaned to EPA standards.

  But troubles followed. In 1994–1995, Rocketdyne conducted a survey of the infamous Area IV at Santa Susana, where the ten reactors had been and other nuclear operations had occurred. The DOE accepted the report from its subcontractor, but the EPA was critical. In a 1997 letter to Boeing (which had recently purchased the Santa Susana site), the EPA took issue with, among other things, the desirable levels of radiation in the soil that the DOE wanted to achieve, terming them far too high and inconsistent with EPA legal requirements. In March 2003, the DOE defied the EPA by announcing the site would be cleaned up, but to standards that fell woefully short of EPA’s; would only clean up a very small portion of the radiation-contaminated soil; and would allow residential use at the site in as little as ten more years – and claimed that these policies were consistent with the DOE/EPA agreement. The EPA, naturally, was furious with the DOE.

  Seeing that the DOE was taking an obstructionist position and that it would have to be forced into being vigilant about monitoring and cleanup, opponents filed a lawsuit in US District Court in 2003. The plaintiffs included the Committee to Bridge the Gap, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the City of Los Angeles. Four years later, the case ended in a resounding defeat for the DOE. In a forty-six page opinion, the Court challenged the DOE finding (based on the 1994–1995 Rocketdyne survey) that Santa Susana presented “no
significant impact” to the local environment. It leaned strongly on the 1997 EPA letter to Boeing, also noted in follow-up letters to President Bill Clinton from California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer as its basis to rule against the DOE:

  The EPA was highly critical of the Rocketdyne survey, faulting its methodology on several accounts and ultimately calling for it to be scrapped and redone… The letter itself focused mainly on the fifteen millirems per year radiation exposure screening level employed in the survey… cited a number of problems with how the survey was conducted which “leads to the conclusion that the survey could have missed radionuclides in the ground or buried sources” … cited several problems with the way the survey analyzed data… and cited the survey’s exclusion of 25% of Area IV from the study.

  The Court found that DOE had violated the National Environmental Policy Act that gives EPA its powers, and banned DOE from transferring or selling Area IV until it had developed an acceptable Environmental Impact Statement. The Court also asserted its jurisdiction over the matter until it deemed that DOE had met its legal obligations to decontaminate the nuclear portion of Santa Susana. Those pressing for a speedy and comprehensive cleanup had won a clear victory.

  The suit against DOE was not the only legal action targeting Santa Susana. In February 2004, a class action suit was filed by local citizens, many afflicted with diseases such as cancer, against Boeing. The case was eventually settled for an undisclosed amount, but not before some disturbing information had been presented. Dr. Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research testified that the amount of radioactive iodine-131 released into the air during the July 1959 meltdown at Santa Susana was about 260 times greater than that released during the Three Mile Island meltdown two decades later. Makhijani’s figure was just an estimate, and one that was challenged by others, but it lent credence to the belief that the 1959 incident had been the worst in US history.

  In 1998, local resident Margaret Ann Galasso was one of 132 local residents suffering from illnesses that sued Boeing. Seven years later, her attorneys led by Barry Cappello accepted a $30 million settlement, asking that the 132 residents agree to it with the provision they not divulge anything about the settlement. Galasso signed, but when she found she would only receive $31,000 (a small amount considering she needed to pay bills to treat her uterine cancer), she forfeited the money by going public. A transcript of an interview with CNN correspondent Drew Griffin stated:

  All I kept getting were papers, papers, papers. Sign this, sign that, sign this, sign that. I kept taking the papers and throwing them into a box. The purpose of the settlement was to my mind, it is to make Mr. Cappello rich.

  As the turf battle between EPA and DOE for authority over Santa Susana raged, the state of California also entered the picture. In 2006, the state legislature established the Santa Susana Field Lab Advisory Panel, which was supported by funds from both state (California EPA) and federal (DOE) agencies. The group heard some strong statements from expert witnesses about contamination from the 1959 meltdown. Nuclear engineer David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists contradicted the original claim of Atomics International that the only types of radioactivity that escaped into the air were krypton-85 and xenon-133 gases. Lochbaum asserted that as much of 30% of the reactor’s total amount of iodine-131 and cesium-137, an enormous amount, was released.

  In 2007, the California legislature passed SB990, which set standards for the Santa Susana cleanup. The bill empowered California’s Department of Toxic Substances to authorize a remediation of the site “to protect public health and safety” and banned any sale or transfer of the property by Boeing until cleanup was final. The standards were strict, along the lines of what the EPA intended, and much stronger than those that the Energy Department had proposed. Citizen groups hailed SB990 as the kind of strong regulatory tool needed to properly clean up the site 2008. Boeing had other ideas: it sued the state in 2009 over the law. About the only issue that regulators and legislators could agree on was the future use of the Santa Susana site; in 2007, Boeing and the State of California entered an agreement that eventually, the site would become state park land, off limits to any residential or commercial uses. The state legislature and EPA were not officially partners, but were certainly playing on the team opposing Boeing and the DOE.

  Despite some progress, very little cleanup had taken place at Santa Susana as the early years of the twenty-first century rolled along. The DOE, despite its resounding defeat in federal court, doggedly continued to resist attempts to make it assess and clean the site on anything but its own terms. It refused a request from Congress to conduct a joint (with the EPA) survey of the site in 2008. That year, DOE announced it had selected a company to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for Santa Susana; but it failed to reveal that the radiation portion would be done by Science Applications International Corporation, which had been recently sued by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and found guilty in federal court of a conflict of interest.

  In April 2009, the DOE announced it was allotting $41.5 million, mostly from the just-enacted economic stimulus bill, for environmental sampling of Area IV. Finally, in December 2010, state and federal officials (including DOE) agreed on a decontamination program, for Area IV and the Northern Buffer Zone (one-fourth of the total site) with an estimated completion date of 2017. DOE and the National Aviation and Space Administration would remove chemical and radioactive toxins from the site, to meet the specifications of the strict 2007 California state law. All parties seemed pleased with the agreement, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Committee to Bridge the Gap:

  DOE and NASA have now shown their concern for us their neighbors and for that we applaud them. We will soon be able to fall asleep at night and not worry about the contamination on the hill oozing down the mountain, or blowing off in the Santa Ana winds to rest on unsuspecting souls. December 6th is a historic day for nuclear and toxic waste cleanup and Southern California.

  Despite these advances, more than two decades after the initial recognition that a cleanup campaign was needed the work is still in its very early stages. Moreover, with Boeing still pursuing legal action against SB990, it is uncertain when the cleanup project will begin and end.

  As slowly as the effort to monitor and decontaminate Santa Susana has evolved, attempts to understand health risk have probably been slower. Part of the reason for this is that even when there is a sincere and objective desire to understand this risk, research can be difficult. Epidemiological and clinical studies are often long and time consuming, and methods used often are limited when attempting to determine cause and effect. Even when high disease rates in local populations are found, health researchers often are at odds about whether elevated rates represent “correlation” or “causation.” Even seemingly obvious studies linking factors like tobacco use and higher lung cancer rates need to be interpreted cautiously, since many other reasons can increase risk. Other problems in understanding risk of environmental pollutants include selecting diseases (cancer, other), selecting populations (male/female, children/adult, etc.), selecting type of measure (incidence, mortality), and selecting time periods to study.

  Methodological issues are one aspect limiting environmental health studies, but potential bias issues are most certainly another. The matter of who conducts studies, and whether they are objective experts has been hotly contested for decades. The fact that environmental contamination is typically produced by large industries with power to affect government, academic, and media officials can be a roadblock to conducting studies at all, to ensuring that they are constructed properly, and to attaining accurate results. The nuclear industry has evolved in a highly political environment since its beginnings, raising the chances that studies will be biased.

  The Santa Susana lab raises serious questions about health risk because of the extensive amount of known contaminants to which humans were exposed. The issue of whether plant wor
kers and/or local residents suffered from diseases in greater-than-expected rates is a crucial component of any investigation. In the decades of the 1990s and 2000s, there has been a struggle to understand health effects of contamination – a struggle that continues through 2011, and probably well after, even though many have had strong concerns for years.

  In October 1990, the California Department of Health Services prepared a report that found bladder cancer was 50% higher than Los Angeles County in the three census tracts of Canoga Park and Chatsworth, closest to Santa Susana. The study was not publicly released until four months later, prompting a furious response from California Assemblyman Richard Katz. “By keeping this critical report’s findings from the people directly impacted by the results, the DHS has in effect been holding the public hostage,” was how Katz described it.

  Even though the bladder cancer study was focused on local residents, early attempts at understanding health risk from Santa Susana were mostly on the health of workers at the plant. The cooperation of Rocketdyne was essential to any worker study, since it possessed worker exposure records (from badges worn daily by workers) and health histories, but the company was in no hurry to share these with any external health research experts. Then there was the DOE, which funded activities at Santa Susana. As the “boss” of Rocketdyne, the DOE was in position to authorize worker studies. But fearing unfavorable results, the DOE initially resisted funding these studies in the face of repeated calls by officials and citizens to do so.