California Cleanups: Santa Susana

​Located 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles, the Santa Susana Field Laboratory is one of the most contaminated sites in the nation; a former nuclear reactor and rocket testing facility, home to a partial nuclear meltdown and numerous other radioactive accidents and toxic chemical releases.  Since 2007, it has been under a legally binding cleanup agreement requiring restoration of the site by 2017, yet groundwater and soil clean-up has yet to begin.

After repeatedly promising to enforce a 2007 legally binding cleanup agreement with Boeing, the Newsom administration secretly negotiated an 800-page agreement in 2022 that “supersedes” the prior order by substantially relaxing key cleanup requirements, allowing hundreds of times higher levels of toxic chemicals than previously permitted, and leaving much the contamination onsite.