The Department of Energy said Thursday it has reached a modified agreement with California officials to dismantle its final eight buildings at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Ventura County, Calif.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management finished taking down the 10th and final building covered by a May consent order at the former Radioactive Materials Handling Facility complex at Santa Susana. The department announced demolished the final structure, a materials storage and processing site, in a Thursday press release.
The just-announced amendment to the May consent order clears the way for the eight remaining DOE-owned buildings at the former Energy Technology and Engineering Center (ETEC) research site in Area IV of Santa Susana Field Laboratory. The deal will fulfill DOE’s commitment to complete building demolition at ETEC, the department said in a press release.
Demolition of former Radioactive Materials Handling Facility complex buildings down to the slab started in July. The work is done by contractor North Wind Group. The buildings are mostly 1960s and 1970s vintage facilities that include systems for nuclear auxiliary power criticality testing, buildings for pumping and mechanical cleaning, along with an office building and structures used for reactive metals storage and hazardous waste treatment.
At this stage, a couple of the buildings were little more than “sheds,” Todd Shrader, DOE Environmental Management’s No. 2 official, said during a conference presentation earlier this year.
When announcing the original consent order in May, the DOE said it was demolishing the buildings out of an abundance of caution to ensure that the old structures don’t catch fire during one of California’s frequent wildfires and spread contamination through the air to neighboring parts of Simi Valley.
The department is also publishing a record of decision in the Federal Register within days outlining planned groundwater remediation activities at the site where nuclear and liquid metals research occurred from the 1950s until site operations ended in the late 1980s. The actions will address areas where there is presence of chemical solvents and metals from historic site activities.
The record of decision is dated Nov. 2 and signed by DOE’s senior adviser for environmental management, William “Ike” White. The document indicates DOE intends to use a combination of treatment and monitored natural attenuation for most of the affected groundwater. The agency plans to use monitored natural attenuation for a landfill trichloroethylene plume, according to the decision.
Boeing and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration control most of the 2,700-acre Santa Susana property used for rocket-engine research for decades. The DOE leased about 450 acres of the property and did nuclear energy and related research on the roughly 90 acres that comprise ETEC.
“The actions being announced today further demonstrate the Department of Energy’s strong commitment to address the environmental legacy from government research in the Cold War era,” Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said in Thursday’s presser.
The amended order on consent was signed Oct. 30. The California Department of Toxic Substance Control said in its Friday press release that it is ordering DOE to tear down the final eight buildings.
“We continue to follow the safeguards outlined in the 2010 Administrative Order on Consent that protect the health and safety of nearby communities,” the state agency’s director, Meredith Williams, said. “Significant progress has been made since work began under the May order, and today’s action marks the next phase of a long-awaited cleanup in an area vulnerable to wildfires.”
“The Trump Administration is again congratulating itself on efforts to clean up only a very, very small amount of its SSFL contamination, when in fact all of it should have been cleaned up long ago,” said Denise Duffield, associate director of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles in a Thursday email.
“DOE signed an agreement in 2010 that required it to fully clean up its grossly contaminated soil by 2017, but that cleanup hasn’t begun, and DOE’s Final EIR stated its intent to violate the agreement and leave the vast majority of the soil contamination not cleaned up,” Duffield said. “The community will hold its applause until DOE finally and fully complies with the 2010 cleanup agreement.”
