Judge sides with Boeing in rocket site cleanup

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Posted on Wed, Apr. 27, 2011 06:13 PM
Judge sides with Boeing in rocket site cleanup
The Associated Press


A federal judge has ruled that a state law that laid out stringent cleanup standards at a contaminated rocket engine test site outside of Los Angeles was unconstitutional.

The ruling this week was a victory for the site's current owner Boeing Co., which claimed that it was being unfairly singled out and that the cleanup rules were unreasonable.

The state law, passed in 2007, required that the 2,850-acre Santa Susana Field Laboratory be cleaned up to standards above Superfund requirements. Santa Susana was the site of rocket engine tests for decades and housed up to 10 nuclear reactors, including one that had a partial meltdown in 1959.

Contamination at the lab has been a source of long-running controversy as the metropolitan Los Angeles region expanded and pressed closer to the site.

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/04/27/2831305/judge-sides-with-boeing-in-rocket.html

[villager]

1. so... no "state's rights" when they're not convenient to our corporate overlords?

Well, the bagman -- why do we even bother to call them "judges," anymore, since that would infer an unwarranted respect? -- got the ruling "right" as ordered...

[TheMadMonk]

3. Don't know if it was California or elsewhere, but I know of cleanup...

...requirements for nuclear sites in some places which demand the amount of radioactivity present be reduced to an arbitrary level which is all too often below that of natural background radiation for the regions in which the sites are located.

I'm all for making businesses clean up their own messes, but not legislating the physically imposible is not how to go about it.

[plumbob]

5. Then of course, you have Superfund sites in Ector County in Texas

where chromium is heavy enough in the water supply to appear visibly as a yellow color in a drinking glass straight from the tap. The requirement was to write letters to everyone in the area with a well advising them to not drink the water, nor bathe in it if you were pregnant or expected to be pregnant.

The companies appealed, and the government had to write the letters and mail them at taxpayer expense, instead.

The nearby city of Odessa extended its water lines out there and sells water at 150% the city rate.

The companies have never been required to do a damn thing. The water is still ruined, and no on is working on it.

So here we have businesses not only not cleaning up, they're not even out postage for their confessions......

[Devil_Fish]

7. didn't you ever learn that your supposed to leave a place cleaner then how you found it? NT

[TheMadMonk]

9. And if the only remotely practical method was to remove 10 feet...

...of soil and replace it with soil taken from elsewhere?

Which only leaves the minor problems of disposing of 30,000 acre feet of soil classified as nuclear waste, and filling up a 30,000 acre foot hole in the landscape somewhere else, subject to exactly the same strictures as the original site.

Are you at all familiar with the concept of "recursive absurdity"?


Cleaner, as in taking steps to reverse even earlier human changes I might come at. BTW Do we include Indian, or are we assuaging only our Western colonial and industrial guilt here?

Attempting to "improve" on nature with the radiological equivalent of "Bubble Boy" antisepsis? Surely you can see just how ludicrous that idea really is?

And relistically, wouldn't we and the world be far better served cleaning up ten, such multi-thousand acre sites to "tollerable" than one site to "pristine". Particularly when demand will quickly see ten more industrial sites being created on uncontaminated soil for one tenth the price.


The most cost effective, AND (overall) environmentally friendly way to deal with "Superfund" sites is to remove any real nasties from as many sites as possible and then reused those sites for some useful industrial purpose, rather than spending a motza "returning" one little packet of land back to nature whilst simultaneously taking away land elsewhere.

There is also merit in the idea of working from both ends, quickly rehabilitating and reusing the cleaner abandoned sites as well as the dirtiest. As much as we do need to clean up the messes we have left behind ourselves, we also have to minimise the impact of future mess, which means minimising the rate at which we expand into unsullied territory.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

10. proper boy scouts never join the US Chamber of

Commerce, or their biggest members.

[villager]

2. a DU dupe

But I'll stand by a single iteration of my post!


;-)

[Kolesar]

4. Rockwell International had a similar nuclear dump problem at Rocky Flats, Colorado

The owners of Rockwell International had political connections and they got away with all kinds of pollutin' and nukin'. Rocky Flats finally caught up with them in the 1990s. They paid a fine, put some money into clean up, and sold that federal business to another very big corporation.

[Javaman]

6. Just wait, in a few years, it will be dressed up as a new suburb. nt

[hunter]

8. That's what this is all about.

Developers are jonesing for this area and the "cleaner" it is (by public perception and government decree) the more profits they will make. This is all about opening up the area for macmansions and mini ranches and country clubs. This is about increasing property values.

The absurdity of the situation is that affluent suburbs are far more toxic than the crap Rocketdyne left.

The same people who will spray potent neurotoxins, mutagens, and carcinogens on their property to kill weeds and insects, the same people who will drive their cars and fill the air and waterways with their car crap, the same people who will happily pave over wildlife and suck the water out of and destroy distant ecosystems, the same people who send a barrel or two of garbage to the landfill every week, these same people will carry on about lesser incidences of chemical or radiological contamination.

Here's an idea: lets clean up this area, remove all existing roads and structures, and leave it as wilderness. The native flora and fauna will not complain.