Page One

Berkeley scored a victory against the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), after a regional regulatory board ordered the lab to implement the highest possible standards to clean up contaminated groundwater at its Berkeley Hills campus. 

At a community forum on the cleanup Tuesday evening, the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Water Quality Control Board—acting on a written request from the city—announced that it will order the lab to reduce contamination to levels allowable for drinking water—a standard lab officials say might be impossible to achieve. 

“The public got a good deal today,” said Berkeley Hazardous Materials Supervisor Nabil Al-Hadithy, attending the forum sponsored by the State Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC)—which will supervise the cleanup. 

In recent years, the water board has lowered standards for cleanups, allowing municipalities and other entities to decontaminate areas that pose a public health risk, but not requiring them to return the polluted groundwater to drinking standards. 

Although they found that the contaminants buried underneath the lab pose little threat to the surrounding community, the water board sided with Berkeley, holding that restoring groundwater to drinking standards would benefit the community. 

The city’s victory was not total, however. The DTSC, which has final say over the cleanup of contaminated soil, will permit a risk-based decontamination—meaning that the lab will can ignore the majority of the sites where cancer risks are minuscule. 

Residents at the meeting cheered the Water Board ruling, but criticized the lab for not giving more input into the cleanup process and for ignoring the nuclear waste which they claim also lies in the soils and waters underneath the lab. 

Al-Hadithy and residents also questioned whether the lab’s overseers in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) would pay for the more thorough cleanup sought by the water board. Hemant Patel, a project manager at the DOE, said he expected Congress to allocate about $3.5 million annually through 2006, which he said should be enough to meet the drinking water target. 

Most of the chemical contamination at the 71-year-old lab occurred decades ago, before hazardous waste disposal laws enacted in the 1970s ended indiscriminate dumping of toxic chemicals on the lab’s 200-acre campus. 

For the past 10 years the lab—which conducts research in physics, biology, geology and chemistry—has worked to identify contaminated areas, brainstorm ways to decontaminate the sites and perform some cleanups.  

Now, with the DOE requiring the lab to have all cleanup mechanisms in place by 2006, LBNL has until May to present for DTSC approval a plan to perform the requisite soil and groundwater remediation. Approval is expected to take about a year following a public comment period—leaving the lab roughly a year and a half to perform the cleanup. 

DTSC scientists at Tuesday’s meeting asserted that lab employees and visitors face no health risks, but acknowledged that some contaminated soils and groundwater plumes would have to be cleaned.  

Of the 29 contaminated soil sites, DTSC required cleanup at the four sites where the theoretical cancer risk was rated above 100 cases per million, the common standard used for “institutional” properties. 

The water board mandated that groundwater be cleaned to a higher standard: a theoretical cancer risk of 1 incident per 100 million. Under that benchmark, the lab will have to restore 11 of the 13 contaminated sites to drinking water standards. 

Although the city sought equally strict standards for both surface and ground water cleanups, Al-Hadithy said that groundwater poses a greater health risk because it slowly migrates downhill from the lab towards residential areas and is more difficult to manage if not cleaned up. 

Groundwater at the site is not used for human consumption, but the city had argued that in case of emergency or for future uses at the site, the community would benefit from being able to tap the groundwater for public use. 

The decision of the water board surprised city officials, who feared that with federal cleanup money dwindling, the water board would hold the lab to less rigorous standards. 

In 1996, the water board pioneered a relaxed cleanup standard—quickly adopted nationally—that allowed localities to pave over contaminated soils and groundwater to isolate them from human contact, rather than paying for costlier decontamination. Under those standards, Emeryville famously sealed huge plots of contaminated land as sites for shopping centers over them. 

The DTSC only has jurisdiction over chemical pollution, infuriating neighbors who insist that nuclear contamination—which falls under the authority of the DOE—also poses serious health risks. 

“They should have combined the chemical and radioactive information into one document,” said Pamela Shivola of the Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste, which has attempted to monitor lab activity for years. “We’ve received only a partial picture only analyzing a partial risk.” 

DTSC toxicologist Calvin Willhite replied that there was no scientific data to support a synchronistic effect between chemical and radioactive waste in soils or groundwater. 

Neighbors questioned claims by lab officials about the Summary of Radionuclide Investigations approved by the DOE in September, which held that there was no need to cleanup nuclear material in the soil, much of it produced from years of testing tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. 

Shivola said she has never been made aware of the lab’s study, which officials say is available for review at the public library. 

A senior scientist who requested anonymity said that tritium levels in the soil and groundwater around the lab are within acceptable standards, but that purifying some of the chemically contaminated groundwater sites to drinkable standards would be impractical.  

“If you spent the whole budget of the United States you cannot clean all of this,” he said. “We will attempt it but we will prove that it is impossible.” 

Most of the chemicals are solvents used to remove grease, he said.