nuclear-news

Brownley’s release asserts that the new samples collected are up to 1000 times higher than the “radiation trigger levels” approved by state and federal officials in 2010, when state officials reached agreements deemed, at the time, “historic,”  with NASA and the Department of Energy for cleanups. 

But I want to call your attention to reporting at what I consider to be an authoritative source of information about Santa Susana, Michael Collins’ Enviroreporter.com . Collins links to previous reports issued by the EPA  to suggest that new data is revealing even higher levels of contamination than Brownley is representing. The key is understanding the “radiation trigger levels,” numeric values above which the agencies are supposed to clean up their patch of dirt. Collins compares current power point presentations with the agreements themselves, and asserts that the gap between background, or pre-existing levels, and the “radiation trigger levels,” or RTLs, is actually way bigger than the EPA is letting on:

By the side of the Area IV road on the way to the SRE, cesium-137 clocked in at 24,657 times its background as shown in a July 2011 U.S. EPA “Radiological Background Study Report” for Rocketdyne . Yet EPA’s RTL in the PowerPoint is over 25 times background.

On a scenic bluff overlooking Simi Valley next to where the SRE once stood, leukemia-causing strontium-90, which has been found at high levels at Rocketdyne-adjacent Runkle Canyon  where KB Home hopes to build hundreds of homes, inexplicably had an RTL over 37 times its actual background. The switch was done by the same agency that generated the data in the first place, the U.S. EPA.

Like the cesium-137, strontium-90 was found in high levels all over the study area including the same scenic view spot at over 1,626 times background.

Radioactive heavy water tritium had an RTL over double its actual background and was found in soil 198 times what EPA had determined was normal background….. http://www.scpr.org/blogs/environment/2012/03/06/4973/santa-susanna-pollution-data-raises-more-questions/