Federal energy department officials Thursday released documents showing that dozens of nuclear workers at Rockwell International in Canoga Park and its Santa Susana Field Laboratory were exposed to excessive radiation levels on occasions in the 1960s.
The records reveal no overexposures in subsequent years, and an energy department official described the 1960s events as “minor overexposures” with “no health consequences” for the workers.
But the records, provided to the Times by the Department of Energy under the Freedom of Information Act, do not include two overexposure events that Rockwell officials have said took place in the 1970s and 1980s. The records also do not mention the fact that Rockwell recently paid settlements in at least three workers compensation cases involving cancer deaths allegedly caused by radiation exposure. Rockwell paid the settlements in 1987-88 without admitting liability.
The documents released Thursday are called “unusual occurrence reports,” which the DOE requires contractors such as Rockwell to file after safety or equipment problems.
Dick Nolan, special assistant to the manager of the DOE’s San Francisco operations office, said the unusual occurrence files would not include alleged deaths from chronic exposure to low level radiation, such as the three workers compensation cases, because they “don’t relate to any particular event.”
‘Serious Responsibility’
Pat Coulter, a spokesman for Rockwell’s Rocketdyne division, said the firm recognizes its “very serious responsibility” to operate safely.
For more than three decades, Rocketdyne and Rockwell’s Atomics International divisions have worked for the energy and weapons programs of the DOE and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission. While most nuclear projects have been carried out at the Santa Susana lab in Ventura County just west of Chatsworth, work has also been done at the company’s plants on Canoga and De Soto avenues in Canoga Park.
Rockwell also works for DOE at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory and until recently ran the plutonium production plants at the agency’s problem-plagued Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington. In addition, Rockwell manages the DOE’s Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver, which is the subject of a criminal inquiry by the FBI and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over alleged hazardous waste violations.
The documents released Thursday describe several episodes between 1960 and 1967 in which the radiation dose to workers at Santa Susana or the De Soto plant exceeded allowable limits of 3 rems per calendar quarter or 5 rems per year, as measured by film badges worn by the workers. Five rems is roughly equivalent to 100 to 200 chest X-rays, or up to 50 times the natural background radiation from the sun, rocks and soil.
Radiation Dose
Although 5 rems is not considered a high radiation dose, experts say a worker exposed to that level for 30 years has up to three extra chances in 100 of dying of cancer.
According to a report on a 1961 incident, an employee was assigned duties in a nuclear reactor room at the Santa Susana lab although his quarterly exposure was already near the 3 rem limit. His dose then rose to 3.455 rem, prompting AEC officials to ask Rockwell “why necessary precautions were not taken . . . to prevent the overexposure,” according to correspondence in the report.
Rockwell responded in a letter that the work required such special skills that the exposure “could only be distributed among three qualified individuals,” including the worker who was overexposed.
In another episode, workers at the De Soto plant were exposed to high levels of dust from enriched uranium while making nuclear fuel for several months in 1966 and 1967, the documents show.
The documents do not say how many workers were exposed, but in an interview Rocketdyne’s manager of radiation and nuclear safety, Robert J. Tuttle, said 41 employees underwent medical testing because of the incident.
The fuel fabrication involved devices called “jaw crushers” used to reduce a uranium and aluminum mix to coarse powder. Workers were supposed to have been protected by shields, but dust leaked around the seals, according to a report.
In addition, Rockwell’s safety effort was based on the wrong standard for airborne uranium, according to the report. The company was observing a standard six times weaker than the proper limit for the form of uranium involved, according to the documents.
Corrective Steps
In 1967, the company took corrective steps and performed medical tests that showed uranium particles in the lungs of a number of workers. Tests showed the workers were slowly excreting the uranium as it was transferred from their lungs to their bloodstream and gastrointestinal tract.
Tuttle said he believed 30 workers were found to have uranium in their lungs, but he said the levels were low, with only about three of the employees having the maximum amount of uranium in their lungs allowed by health standards.
Rocketdyne spokesman Pat Coulter said none of the employees involved in this incident later filed for workers compensation.
“To the best of our knowledge, they have all continued on with their normal lives,” Coulter said. “Some of them are still working for Rockwell; some of them have retired; some of them have died and some have left the company.
“Those kind of unusual occurrences are going to happen when a company does business–I don’t care what kind of company it is,” Coulter said. “We fully recognize we have a very serious responsibility to the public, and that’s why we monitor our activities so closely. That’s why when there is a deviance, we record it and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Most of the unusual occurrence reports involved minor equipment malfunctions with no apparent impact on workers or environmental safety.
One overexposure in 1974 and another in 1982 were not mentioned in any of the reports. In both cases, workers sustained excessive radiation exposures to a hand.
Incidents Exempt
But Tuttle of Rocketdyne said both incidents were exempt from the DOE reporting system–one because it involved an employee of an outside contractor and the other because it occurred in a part of the Santa Susana complex that is licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The files included no reports dated before 1960, and therefore made no mention of the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Santa Susana in 1959.
There were no unusual occurrence reports for 1968-1973, but DOE and Rockwell officials said they believed there were no reportable incidents because nuclear work was at a low ebb. Nolan said Rockwell was directed by the DOE to make an exhaustive search for documents, but that it is possible some were lost.
Rockwell officials acknowledged paying three claims since 1987 to survivors of workers who died of cancer. They said that in settling the claims, they were not admitting the employees got cancer as a result of working conditions.
The widow of John F. Zaverl of Sepulveda, who died of lung cancer at age 59 after 18 years with Rockwell, claimed the cancer resulted from occupational exposure to radiation and asbestos, although Zaverl also smoked. She got a settlement of $11,500 in 1987, according to records on file with the state Workers Compensation Appeals Board.
Rockwell paid a $90,000 settlement to survivors of William D. Lane of Canoga Park, after a doctor hired by Rockwell’s lawyers agreed it was “more probable than not” that radiation exposure “played a role at least” in Lane’s fatal leukemia, according to state records.
Cleanup Work
Lane, who was 49 when he died in May, 1986, worked from 1959 until the year he died at the Santa Susana lab. According to his family’s claim, he “was physically engaged” during part of this time in cleanup work resulting from the 1959 reactor accident at the lab.
According to the claim, Lane’s widow sought pension benefits that Lane would have received had he lived to age 50.
But Rockwell “refused to make an exception in this situation, showing a callous indifference” to the family, according to the claim.
Rockwell produced data showing that Lane’s radiation exposures were always within health limits, never exceeding the annual maximum of 5 rems.
Over the years, Rockwell operated 16 nuclear reactors at Santa Susana, most of them small research reactors and none as large as commercial power reactors run by electric utilities. Most of the reactor work was done in the 1960s, with the last reactor shut down in the early 1980s, according to Tuttle.
A small reactor, known as the L77, operated at the De Soto plant from about 1960 through the mid-70s, Tuttle said.
It was the largest of the Santa Susana reactors–the 600,000 watt “Sodium Reactor Experiment”–that suffered a partial meltdown in 1959 that was not widely publicized for twenty years. At the time of the accident, company officials issued a highly technical press release in which the words “accident” and “meltdown” did not appear.
The Atomic Energy Commission later criticized Rockwell for running the reactor despite weeks of abnormal behavior by the device before and after the accident.
Rockwell and AEC officials have said the accident did not expose workers or the public to radiation hazards.
Industrial Radiography
Rockwell currently does industrial radiography at the Canoga plant, using powerful X-rays to examine engine components of rockets and the Space Shuttle. The company also uses radioactive material there to study the effects of cosmic rays on computer chips.
At the De Soto plant, the company operates a gamma irradiation facility to test the effects of radiation on electronics.
Tuttle said the firm does not use plutonium at either plant. Plutonium is a man-made radioactive material that does not emit penetrating radiation but is considered a potent carcinogen if inhaled.
At the Santa Susana lab, Rockwell has conducted fuel decladding operations that involved the handling of plutonium, but that work ceased after 1986. However, Rockwell hopes to gain future contracts for decladding work. Decladding involves stripping of metal shielding from nuclear fuel rods, and removal and packaging of plutonium and other fuel byproducts, for future use in power production or weapons manufacturing at other government reservations.
Several buildings at Santa Susana are now undergoing decontamination of radioactivity, and a DOE report scheduled for release in August is to outline cleanup needs and costs for other problems of chemical and radioactive pollution.
A DOE report this spring identified several contaminated areas at Santa Susana, including ground water beneath the lab, a leach field that was supposed to have been used only for sewage disposal and a disposal site known as the sodium burn pit. The DOE said the pollution poses no immediate risk to the public and Rockwell claims none of the contaminants have seeped off-site into surrounding soils or ground water.
Extent of Contamination
However, the DOE reports said Rockwell’s ground water monitoring program has been too skimpy to fully determine the extent of contamination under the site or to lay to rest fears that contamination had spread off the site. Rockwell announced earlier this month it would install 18 more monitoring wells on the property.
The DOE report said the highest radiation level recorded so far is 4,900 picocuries per gram of soil in the leach field–a level 200 times above natural background but not hazardous to workers or neighbors.
The highest ground-water pollution reading under the site involves the chemical solvent trichloroethylene, TCE, found at a level of 660 parts per billion.
The energy research portion of the lab complex occupies only about 290 acres of the 2,668 acre complex.
The highest known level of contamination is outside the DOE area, in an area where Rockwell tests rocket engines for NASA and has used large amount of solvents to flush fuel residues from the engines. In that part of the plant, TCE has been detected in ground water at levels of up to 11,000 ppb–2,200 times the drinking water standard.
Rockwell has begun cleansing tainted ground water in that area under the state Superfund toxics cleanup program.