"Since acquiring our site in 1996, Boeing has made significant progress in our cleanup efforts," Boeing spokesperson Kamara Sams said recently, although the company turned off the water-purifying system in 2001. Boeing's groundwater remediation system, which consists of "air-stripping" towers that allow the TCE to evaporate into the open air, removed 10 gallons of the toxic goo from the water annually. There are varying estimates of the amount of TCE in Rocketdyne's groundwater from tens of thousands of rocket tests at the lab. Perchlorate has been found in water wells circling the site, including in adjacent Simi Valley. Three other main areas of the lab were devoted to rocket testing, which polluted the land and groundwater with the toxic rocket fuel oxidizer perchlorate and the engine solvent trichloroethylene. Santa Susana hosted other sensitive projects, which in turn left their own more-public toxic legacies. Four years ago, United Technologies bought the Rocketdyne unit from Boeing, but Boeing kept the contaminated site. ![]() It was merged into Rocketdyne, which Boeing acquired when it bought Rockwell International in 1996. ![]() The site was owned by Atomics International, a division of North American Aviation. The federal Atomic Energy Commission and the private Atomics International chose the land high in the hills above the farthest end of the west San Fernando Valley precisely because the work could be dangerous and the population sparse. A portion of the facility was dedicated to nuclear research, while other portions were marked to develop powerful rocket engines such as the Delta II. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory was built on 2,850 acres in the mid-1940s. "We don't know how much or if any was released."Īccording to an analysis of a five-year study by a panel of independent scientists convened years after the incident, the SRE accident spit out up to 459 times the amount of radiation released during the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island. "We know there was a fuel meltdown," said William Taylor, the current spokesman for the U.S. What exactly vented remains in contention. ![]() Pure sodium - not to be confused with table salt, or sodium chloride - was a risky metal to use since it catches fire when exposed to air and explodes when mixed with water.ĭue to the experimental nature of the SRE, it was built without a containment structure - the distinctive large dome associated with nuclear power plants - so any radiation vented hot out over the San Fernando Valley, which the city of Los Angeles was busily annexing. Unlike most conventional reactors that circulate water to be heated by the fuel rods in the core in order to turn steam turbines, the SRE used sodium because it could operate under lower pressure.
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