U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry visited the site of the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory Friday, surveying the old rocket engine testing site nested in the hills above the San Fernando and Simi valleys.
The Department of Energy signed a ‘Consent Order for Corrective Action’ to address the contamination and three years later it inked another agreement an ‘Administrative Orders on Consent’ requiring a full cleanup be completed by 2017. The cleanup has not started yet.
The area was used to test rocket engines and conduct nuclear research during the Cold War. Currently, Boeing owns a majority of the land. In 1989, the Department of Energy released a report admitting that a partial meltdown of a sodium reactor had occurred in 1959 in Area IV, which the DOE still oversees. READ MORE
