Lies & Deceit  

2021: The Department of Energy’s Fraudulent report

The DTSC was required to do the radioactive assessment for buildings owned by the Department of Energy (DOE) at the Santa Susana Field Lab. Instead, the DTSC allowed the DOE to do the ETEC Radiological Survey Report for Buildings 4462 and 4463.

  • DOE didn’t want to find contamination so they instructed their contractor to make the buildings look benign and write a blatantly false report.

  • And then the DOE sent it to the DTSC and the DTSC approved it.

  • The DTSC kept the report off the public website until we demanded it. 

  • We had to fight with everything we had to make sure the debris went to a low-level radioactive waste facility instead of the dump they planned to send it to. 

DETAILS:

The thing to remember when looking at this is that everything is compared against background (naturally occurring radiation) for it to be AOC compliant. 

For example, if the background level shows a radioactive level of 2 cpm (Counts Per Minute), then a sample at 2 cpm wouldn’t be considered radioactive for the cleanup. If the background shows 2 cpm and the sample showed 4 cpm, it would be considered radioactive and must be remediated. 

So getting an accurate background reading is essential. When the EPA did the $40 million study for Boeing’s property: “Background threshold values (BTV) were estimated based on established background data collected from unimpacted background (reference) locations approximately 3 to 6 miles outside the SSFL property boundaries.”

But you’ll see right away in this report that instead of using EPA’s background numbers, DOE took its background data at locations only a few feet away from where they took the samples, in the contaminated area. 

Doing this has huge potential for inflating the background, because the “background” measurements would very likely not be “natural background” but would instead be picking up DOE’s contamination they’re supposed to be sampling. So if they got a background reading in an area they suspected to be contaminated of 2 cpm and then two feet over their sample was also 2 cpm, then technically it wouldn’t count as contaminated under the AOC and wouldn’t be cleaned up. 

But even worse- the Department of Energy doesn’t have the authority to determine background levels anyhow!

Under the terms of the AOC, EPA is to set the background levels. “US EPA, in the course of conducting its radioactive contaminant background study, will determine local background levels and detection limits.” (The AOC’s “Agreement in Principle” page 2). 

Further reading

Department of Energy (DOE)’s 2019 Final Environmental Impact Statement breaks both the NEPA and RICRA laws for not allowing residents to comment on the statement. A Record of Decision has not yet been made- meaning it isn’t law yet.