CONNECT Series Community Update – May 13, 2026

OK, so welcome. Welcome to this community meeting, which is being hosted by the Department of Energy's Environmental Management Program. This meeting or this session is second in a series of meetings that's being called whoops. See, I'm already not doing what I'm supposed to do. The series is called the Community Outreach Neighborhood Notifications Engagement, Collaboration and Training or Connect Sessions Series. My name is Wendy Lowe, and I'll be facilitating the meeting tonight. Thank you so much for your interest in the ongoing cleanup program at the Energy Technology Engineering Center or E-Tech located in Area four and the northern buffer zone at Santa Susana Field Lab. Three little housekeeping things. Please silence your cell phones. The bathrooms are locked. And if you need to go to the bathroom, please see. Yeah, they'll they won't escort the men into into the restrooms, but they'll take you to them. And then also, if you haven't yet, please sign the sign in sheet before you leave so that we have a way to contact you in the future. So as we began, I need to inform you that the presentation this evening is being audio recorded and the audio recording is going to be and the presentation slides are going to be posted on E-Tech's website. In compliance with DOE's order three three three point one, we are assuming that everyone present consents to the recording. If you're not comfortable with being recorded, please wait until the presentations have ended and we stop the recording. If you've attended Connect, if you attended the Connect meeting on January 28th, the first one, you already know that this series of meetings is informational in purpose. They're not public comment meetings and we will not be recording any comments today. They also don't serve a purpose of being regular to support regulatory decisions. OK, before we get too far along, I want to introduce the other or give the other two people that are going to be presenting an opportunity to introduce themselves. So with that, OK, morning, everyone. Many of you already know me. I'm Dr. Josh Mengers. I'm the federal project director for the Department of Energy's cleanup at SSFL, also known as E-Tech. My Ph.D. is in mechanical engineering, and I'll I'll keep it brief since I already know any of you. So pass it off to Karen. I'll also say good morning. You're supposed to laugh until the afternoon or good evening. I was waiting for it with Josh. That was the first joke of the night. But you guys will get better. But I wanted to introduce myself. I'm Karen Edson. I'm a public affairs specialist on the headquarters communication stakeholder and engagement team for DOE's Office of Environmental Management. And I have nearly 20 years of federal service dedicated to environmental communications and been supporting the E-Tech team for about five years and really pleased to be with you tonight. Thank you. They're going to be tag team in a little bit, so it's not going to be like orderly, but you'll get it. You'll get it when it happens. So the agenda for this session will include three informational presentations. The first one will be a recap of questions that were asked at the first Connect meeting and the answers that those they provided for those questions. The second one is going to tell you a little bit more about the Department of Energy's environmental management program. And then the third will provide an update or a history, an overview of the history of the site and clean up to date and then bring you up to date on what's currently going on at the site. So then following the presentations, we'll have an opportunity for people to ask questions of the two presenters. And then towards the end of the session, we're going to invite your feedback on this session and share some resources that you may be interested in knowing about. So DOE is committed to the idea that a community working together has the greatest chance of finding solutions that will serve everyone's needs. So with that larger goal in mind, I'd like to propose some guidelines for this session. First, we know there are very wide differences of opinion in the room, different perspectives, different knowledge, different backgrounds, different opinions. And we because that serves that idea of helping the community, knowing what matters to everyone. We hope that everybody will appreciate that diversity of perspectives because it's important to moving forward with developing solutions that you can all support. So second, in order to support everyone's ability to learn from the diversity of opinion in the room, I'd like to ask that you listen to other people with a goal of understanding where they're coming from, not a goal of how are you going to argue their point of view? So listen to people that say things that are different from what you believe so that you can understand where they're coming from. And then third, as part of my job as a facilitator, is to help ensure that we maintain a respectful space for the conversations to happen today. I hope you will agree that we want to make sure that everyone who's here tonight is treated with kindness and respect. I would note that video and audio recording are allowed at this as a public meeting and to ensure that filming is not disruptive and that we're respectful of all attendees and their comfort levels. We've designated two places where the cameras can be here and here. And so we're hoping that this is going to work tonight. And we've also asked that they not record devices or notepads. So anything that you write down is your private information. And I would appreciate everyone's help in observing these guidelines. So with that, Dr. Mengers will make his first presentation. OK. Yes, let me just check. My blue light is on. So here we go. At our last Connect meeting in January that Wendy just told you about, you guys asked some excellent questions. I see many familiar faces. It's great to have you back. And in the interest of transparency and achieving this safe cleanup, we wanted to start by answering these questions. So you see on the screen, you have the handout of the questions. The summary of those questions with detailed answers. I don't want to read it word for word, but I do want to give you some highlights of those questions. So the first question is about the contamination on site. Our work focuses on the localized contamination, cleaning that up from DOE's previous research at SSFL. In soil, the contamination includes chemicals like PCBs, dioxins and some heavy metals. Also, radionuclides like cesium and strontium. It is not widespread. We have comprehensive studies that have mapped these areas precisely. I'll get into that more later in the presentation. For groundwater, mainly chlorinated solvents that we have, such as TCE. And we have a network of over 100 wells that monitor those plumes. The second question on public access to our information. So you have the QR codes on the handout that you can use to scan to go to our website, where we post our quarterly and annual air monitoring and groundwater monitoring reports, as well as a link to our annual site environmental report that summarizes all that information. Who decides the final cleanup standards? So the Department of Toxic Substances Control, DTSC, is the lead regulatory agency. We work together with them to develop detailed work plans that they must approve before our work will begin. There's the next one. OK, number four is on how our waste is disposed. So we follow a strict regulated process. First, the waste is characterized on site, then it's transported by licensed haulers to ensure that the transportation is safe. All of the waste will be hauled, has been and will be hauled in trucks with secure covers. Any hazardous waste are transported in approved closed top containers. The destination is determined by the waste type. So all the shipments have to meet the receiving facilities waste acceptance criteria. Radioactive and hazardous wastes will be shipped to licensed facilities out of the state for permanent disposal. OK, hopefully this one works again. There we go. Number five on contamination migration. Based on decades of data, evidence shows that DOE related contaminated contamination is localized and contained on the Santa Susana property. DTSC in 2017 conducted an analysis and they have a report that's linked to on your on your sheet. And in that report, they concluded, and I'll quote, the contamination at SSFL does not pose a health threat to users of Brandeis Barding Institute Institute or any other offsite areas. We continue our monitoring, though. So I mentioned our groundwater wells. So we strategically place those those wells in the direction of groundwater flow towards and even beyond the property boundary. And the data from those wells have have not detected any site related DOE related contamination that's leaving the site on the soil. We have extensive soil sampling that includes an independent study from the US EPA that shows the contamination is contained within area for and then the northern buffer zone attached to area for an air monitoring. We have ongoing air monitoring around the perimeter of the site. And the data from that air monitoring shows that the air quality is no different than other air quality air monitors in the region. And finally, if the soil is safe to walk on. Yes, the soil is safe to walk on any contamination that has been found is bound into the soil itself. It's not loose dust. Following the questions about this at the last meeting, I wanted to ensure that we're in compliance with federal standards. And so I went out there with our radio radiation specialists, the radiation protection professionals to those localized areas with the highest radiological readings. We walked on the soil and then we use their sensitive equipment to scan our boots to see if any of the contamination have been transferred. The data received from that shows that there was no transfer of the contamination from the soil to our boots, which is consistent with federal regulations and health principles. So a lot of detail in there written in more information there. If you have any questions, obviously reach out to that us. And with that, I'll hand it off to Karen to give an overview of the cleanup across the country. Thanks, Josh. So I'd like to provide an overview of our office so we can zoom out before we zoom in on the site today. As you may know, the Department of Energy, Office of Environmental Management, or EM for short, is responsible for managing and directing the cleanup of contaminated nuclear legacy sites across the United States. We're established in 1989, and our mission is to address the environmental legacy from the Manhattan Project through the end of the Cold War, which includes cleaning up nuclear weapon test sites and government sponsored nuclear energy research sites like ETEC. Today, EM has successfully addressed contamination and restored environments at 92 of the 107 cleanup sites with some similar aspects and some varying in scopes of contamination. This map shows where EM is currently managing active cleanup. Now we have 15 remaining sites, along with DOE's management of the only deep geological repository, WIPP in New Mexico. Each site is unique. They vary in complexity of the cleanup mission, size, scope, geology, geography, stakeholders and community. So ETEC is one of the remaining 15 cleanup sites where our work continues. First and foremost, I'd like to say that our top priority is safety, safety and health of the public workforce and continuing to protect the environment. EM carries out our mission using sound business practices, innovative management, science and technology to reduce risk and costs within the regulatory framework. The remaining sites are the most challenging, but many will be substantially cleaned up by 2040, and some will be re-industrialized for community vitality and economic prosperity. For example, by 2040, radioactive waste will be treated and disposed of at the Savannah River site in South Carolina. You can see it on the map. And the Idaho cleanup project at the Idaho National Laboratory at Portsmouth and Paducah in Ohio and Kentucky. Old plants will soon be replaced by AI data center infrastructure and new power generation. At the Hanford site in Washington, the waste treatment plant is finally turning low activity tank waste into glass. To date, more than 56 million gallons of tank waste has been treated. Those are just a few examples. EM has a successful track record of safely managing complex contamination challenges across the country. Our approach is tailored to local needs and pulled from our extensive historical knowledge and network to help formulate cleanup approaches that are effective. I want to tell you that EM has the best of the best, the top engineers, geologists, scientists, experts in this field in the country. This enables the ETEC team to gain and learn from those best practices, lessons learned and troubleshoot challenges, not just in this room with Josh and the team, but across the country with this vast network of experts. Now that I mention it, I like to recognize the expertise in this room tonight and how much we value you and your thoughts in the cleanup. I guess that we'd have, I don't know, hundreds of years of expertise in this room of folks that have worked on Santa Susana Field Lab or worked on the ETEC cleanup site. I think I overheard this gentleman say he had 42 years. So we have a lot of expertise and we really appreciate you. EM is empowering our communities like you by strengthening partnerships and ensuring that they have a voice in the cleanup and the future of their community. All the support and knowledge in this room and across the complex help Josh and the team not only drive innovation and efficiency in the next steps of cleanup, but focus on priorities and reign in costs and schedules without sacrificing safety and effectiveness. EM is working smarter and maximizing opportunities to deliver more for you, the American taxpayers. Now, let's let Josh take us through the budget. Thanks, Karen. OK. Nope. The other way. There it is. Thanks, Karen. As Karen just described, the EM program is a massive national undertaking with a lot of expertise across many different facets. I wanted to take you through an example of our next year's budget. So this is our fiscal year 2027 budget request and describe how ETEC fits into that national picture. So you'll see ETEC down here at the bottom of this small site budget. And that reflects our current status. Most of the cleanup at ETEC has already been completed. I'll be getting into some of the details of what that means later in the presentation. But I want to put ETEC in perspective. The overall budget for for EM is eight point one billion dollars. ETEC, as you see, is ten million. That's about one tenth of one percent of the national portfolio for EM. This funding will go to our ongoing groundwater remediation studies and work towards our next phases of building demolition. And then on to soils. This smaller budget reflects the current reality on the ground that the risk at ETEC is not the same as the risk at the larger EM sites. And it's not just in next year's budget request either. This ratio of one tenth of one percent is consistent across life cycles estimates, even when we get to our larger field activities. So here's a different breakdown of of where the budget goes at EM. So I'll draw your attention. There are six different primary mission areas. I won't spend time on the left half because ETEC really only has the right three categories. So facility D&D, that's decommissioning and demolition, soil and groundwater, and then site services. Those are the activities that we have remaining at ETEC. And with that, I'll hand it back off to Karen to discuss a few more of the EM sites in detail. Great. Thank you, Josh. Yep. So now we looked at EM sites across the country and we looked at the budget. Now I want to share information on the other EM sites here in California, as well as sites at similar stages in cleanup. Some sites are working through complex challenges at the end of long cleanup, and all of them are collaborating with federal agencies, communities like you and state regulators to help find solutions to local needs. These partnerships are key to our success. Here in California, the two additional EM sites are at active operational laboratories where EM will likely have a continuing cleanup mission. This is unlike the ETEC site where the field lab has been closed for some time. So here on the left, you see the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And this is EM's cleanup effort is targeted on cleaning up historical contaminants, such as solvents and metals from laboratory operations. The goal is to make the site safe for continued scientific innovation, supporting future research and maintaining environmental stewardship. And here on the right, you'll see the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. And EM is focused on cleaning up legacy soil groundwater contamination resulting from decades of research and testing. The mission is to ensure this site is safe for ongoing scientific work and eventual reuse. And this is a really important goal because the site is otherwise on a really small footprint. So when we're able to clean up a portion of their site, it frees up more land and opportunities for more continued research and development and for the local community. So now I'd like to look at some more sites at EM that are similar in timeline, size and budget as ETEC, where most of the work has been completed and EM is nearing the end of the mission to complete cleanup. So here on the left, you'll see the West Valley Development Project in New York. And here EM is cleaning up radioactive waste and residual contamination from a former nuclear reprocessing facility. This site's mission is to protect public health and the environment like we do at all EM sites and to enable future land use to contribute to the region's long term vitality. Just last year, the West Valley safely completed the largest, most complex demolition of a radioactive contaminated facility to date, removing a five story and over 35,000 square foot building. This is a significant change to the skyline after two decades of preparation. Like ETEC, the West Valley site is a non-defense site and has oversight from their state regulator. The majority of cleanup is done, including the removal of the last building. And then here on the right, can anybody? Well, you can see that it's Moab. But has anyone visited Moab recently or taken any family vacations there? Stunning. Moab, Utah is remediating. Moab, Utah site EM is remediating a former uranium mill site. And this is located near the Colorado River. You can see it right there in the photo. The former mill site at Moab processed naturally occurring uranium ore, which created a huge tailings pile. And Josh will delve deeper into how naturally occurring radioactive materials are relevant to ETEC and explain how the cleanup drivers are different than a site like Moab. The Moab mission is to remove and safely dispose of contaminated material, reducing environmental risk and supporting recreation and conservation efforts for the region's future. And I asked if you were in Moab recently. I had the opportunity to go out there last month, and the purpose was to gather with the community to celebrate a huge milestone. So the tailings pile that I mentioned, that was the complete removal of that pile, 16 million tons away from the Colorado River. And this is a huge win for not just the community, but also for the Department of Energy and everyone in the region. The Moab team engages very closely with the community as ETEC does. And we really value this. And part of the reason why we have these connect series so we can have the opportunity to meet with you, to hear from you and to also be in the community at local events. Just last weekend was it? We were at the Simi Valley Street Fair and really value that time that we're able to have those types of stakeholder engagement events. So cleanup completion does not mean that DOE is just done with the site. In many cases, DOE's Office of Legacy Management steps in where EM's work ends. DOE continues to be a partner in long term stewardship to ensure that institutional controls remain effective and the remedy is safe and protective for the community and the environment. These cleanups demonstrate EM's commitment to restoring sites for safe community use, supporting ongoing scientific missions and ensuring that land is available for future generations. Each site, however, unique. They all reflect EM's focus to address legacy contamination, maintain safety and enable opportunities for the communities post cleanup. So I'm going to turn it back to you now, Josh. Thanks, Karen. All right. Hopefully I've got this down now. So let's start with the history of ETEC. Karen has given a great overview of that expertise that EM has at nuclear cleanups across the country. Now, what does that mean for us here and for the cleanup that DOE has at the Santa Susana Field Lab? Here on this photo, you'll see an aerial shot taken from just towards the end of our R&D operations, 1985. And I'll go into some more of the work that we had had done starting in the 1950s. DOE and its predecessor agencies conducted liquid metals and nuclear research in Area 4. We've been remediating Area 4 for decades, even before those operations ended. You see, 1988 is when all nuclear research ended. And then a decade later, in 1998, we finished all of our research at the site. And we've been focused just on the remediation ever since. So over the next few slides, I'm going to be giving you some details about some previous remediations that we did. And I'm going to focus on two areas, the Sodium Reactor Experiment or SRE. I'll just be using that acronym in the interest of time. So SRE is the Sodium Reactor Experiment and then the former Sodium Disposal Facility or FSDF. Before I get into that, I wanted to cover some facts. The SRE was a 20 megawatt thermal sodium cooled graphite moderated experimental reactor. It operated from 1957, April of 1957, through February of 1964. Today, it would be classified as a micro reactor for context. So SRE was 20 megawatts thermal. Diablo Canyon has two units that are 3,400 megawatts. On November 12th, 1957, SRE made history, becoming the first nuclear power plant to generate electric power for commercial use when it lit up the city of Moorpark. And for that, it was designated a nuclear historic landmark by the American Nuclear Society. But I'd be remiss if I did not note that there was an accident at the SRE in July of 1959. So this is sometimes called a temperature excursion by engineers like myself. You may have heard it been called by other names, such as a partial nuclear meltdown. In this incident, 13 of the 34 fuel rods did experience some partial melting. After that incident, the reactor was shut down for repairs and upgrades, and then it was restarted in September of 1960. The reactor was used for various testing programs and generated over 37 million kilowatt hours of electricity over its seven year life. So that 37 million kilowatt hours in 2022 numbers from the Energy Information Agency, that would be 3,400 household annual energy use. So quite a bit of energy. Let's turn over to the FSDF, also known as the Sodium Burn Pit. It operated from 1956 until 1978. Its purpose was to clean sodium and a sodium potassium alloy called NAC from non-radioactive components before disposal. It consisted of a rectangular concrete lined pit filled with water and two earthen basins called the upper and lower ponds. The components with sodium were cleaned by exposing them to water. So if anybody is familiar with how sodium reacts with water, it's exothermic. It generates heat, quite a bit of heat. And some of the former workers described it kind of like firecrackers going off. So after the cleaning, whatever material remained were subsequently removed from the ponds and then disposed of off site. While the facility was not designated for radioactive materials, components with radiological contamination sometimes were inadvertently introduced. And this left, in addition to the solvents and mercury, some other radiological contamination, primarily cesium 37, which had been in soils. So diving into the SRE, I went too far. Did I? The SRE, I did not go too far. The SRE is pictured at the left at the start of its operations. Then there were two phases of cleanups that I want to cover. So you see from the 70s to the early 80s, decontamination and decommissioning. We have a lot of D's here followed then around the turn of the century with building demolition. So decontamination and decommissioning, what do those mean? Decontamination are specific actions to remove radioactive materials, while decommissioning is an overarching set of activities to safely remove any of the contamination. So decommissioning includes decontamination and then it terminates the license and allows for the release of the property for other uses. During that D&D process in the 70s, 80s, DOE decided to retain the SRE building superstructure as a primary reason was for containment of any potential contamination there and then came back later on for the building demolition. OK, so the decommissioning final report is available on our website. You see pictured on the on the left there. If anybody's interested, you're welcome to download it. If you have questions, please feel free to reach out to us. We're happy to work with you on those. But I do want to go through some of the details and show a little slideshow with some pictures of of the cleanup. So in the middle, you'll see a photo of 140 inch diameter plug that was removed in January of 1977. So this plug is the portion up here. It would provide shielding from the radiation in the core to any of the workers in the high bay area during operations. So that was removed. Once that was removed, they were able to get in with a plasma torch and cut out the ring shield that you see on the picture on the left, which was then put on into a transport vehicle. Both of those were transported off site for disposal at an approved site. It's on your right, his left. Sorry, I turn around and I OK. Yes. Thank you, Wendy. But before I move on, I want to point out the core cavity liner that you see here. There's also what's called a biological shield that's not labeled, which is a large amount of concrete that would shield any of the neutron and any radiation from that core from exposing other areas. So that'll come up later in the slide. So I wanted to point those areas out for when I get to them in the next slides. The decommissioning took place starting from the east of the high bay. And then the picture on the left you see from December of 1978 is a demolition of the primary fill tank vault. I want to note in this photos, you see this grid with numbers on it. This is part of a systematic radiological survey to characterize the contamination that helped to guide the decontamination work and ensure that it met the cleanup standards of the day. I'll also point out, you see, this plastic was put on. So not only was the building kept for containment, but other practices were were kept were done to keep the workers safe on during that time frame. The middle picture is from March of 1979 that shows what's called a high ran high ram, which was used to demolish the concrete around the fuel storage tubes as part of their removal. So you'll see that there's water being sprayed on there as well, again, as a safety precaution. And then the picture on the right is from a week later, also in March of 1979, when the workers would come in after that that concrete was removed to remove the fuel storage tubes. On the left, you'll see I mentioned that core cavity liner. So this is after that biological shield, that amount of concrete outside of the core was removed. This is that SRE core cavity liner that's being removed from August of 1979. And the middle is from a few weeks later, also in August, when wooden shoring had been installed to allow further excavation of that core cavity after that core cavity liner had been removed. And then on the right, you see that large backhoe or high excavator in the SRE high bay area that is continuing the excavation of the core of the SRE. After the excavation, backfill was brought in and compacted. You'll see the compaction with this vehicle carrying a trailer that's that's compacting that dirt. And then the photo on the right is from December of 1980 after the core had been removed and that backfill had been compacted. Argonne National Laboratory conducted radiological surveys between 1979 and 1984 as part of the certification process. They reviewed the remedial actions and the radiological survey reports, which led them to in September of 1985, the SRE complex and associated areas were released for unrestricted use. After that release, then the buildings were able to be demolished. That decision was made to demolish them in the late 90s towards the end of the the century shown here in these photos. And here is a good before and after of the SRE during operations in this building right here. Building 4143 was the SRE building. And then you can see in 2000, all of the building has been remained. The core was decontaminated and then the building was subsequently subsequently demolished. And so that work had been completed. So what about the FSDF? You'll see here is also this this interim measure, interim soil removal, interim report. And this was done from 2000 to 2002. It is also available on our website for download. And you'll see this, the yellow boxes in this map show all of the samples that were taken to understand and characterize where the contamination was. And I'll just point out. So I mentioned the upper pond and the lower pond. So upper pond, lower pond. This is a before picture. And then during the remediation that all of the soil that was contaminated was taken out down to bedrock. So that's this lighter areas that that sandstone, which we see many outcrops on site, it was taken out to to bedrock for remediation. I'll show you more photos over the next slides. So before the top left is an aerial photo facing south with this tarp on the black tarp is on that upper and lower pond area. The white tarp is in an area that they called Channel A, part of an outfall that was also remediated as part of as part of this intermeasure. The top middle is some workers sampling suspect hazard soil from an excavator bucket on the top right and bottom left. I like these photos because this tube goes out to a vacuum truck. They were vacuuming up the soil. They were sweeping up the soil down to bedrock. And you'll see you can even see in this photo there's push brooms. They took it down to bedrock. Any of the areas of the bedrock where they thought may have some contamination, they chipped off some samples from those and were able to to test to see if there was contamination on the on the bedrock itself before, as you see on the lower right, that clean fill was brought in and it was revegetated. So here you see during operations, following the remediation, 30 oak trees were planted in request of the California Department of Fish and Game, now Fish and Wildlife. And then you can see a picture from just a week or two ago that I took. I tried to get the same angle, different time of day. The shadows are different, but you can see that the oak trees have grown up. Much of the native vegetation that we've planted has grown up. There's a good habitat for many of the species and birds that are are on on site in that area in the FSDF. So how do we know if these previous remediations were effective? For that, I turned to US EPA data and they came out and from 2009 to 2012 and conducted a comprehensive radiological survey of area four in the northern buffer zone. It consisted of two parts. So first part was gamma scanning, which was a screening exercise. And it was followed up with soil sampling where they actually took soil samples and shipped them off site. And that was more of the characterization side of that. This image and today I'm mostly going to focus on those gamma scanning data. So I said it was comprehensive. The areas in blue are all the areas that were scanned. It was intended to scan all accessible portions of area four in the northern buffer zone. So over 75 percent of area four was scanned. The areas that were missed were from steep terrain, rock outcrops that didn't have have any soil on them. The structures that existed in the day, et cetera, including where GPS signal was lost and they couldn't collect the data there. They used that data to identify what they called potential gamma radiation anomalies, which is a mouthful. So they called them pea graves. And those were flagged for further review. This one takes a minute. It's a big file. I hope it's going. There it is. So these are the results that we got from area four in the northern buffer zone. A lot here. So let me walk through. So gamma radiation comes in and counts per minute. And there's a distribution. So it's not all one uniform. So there's a mean which is shown as zero here. And then the number of standard deviations above the mean or below the mean. So if anything was below the mean, it's shaded in gray. But then however many standard deviations it was above the mean, it's shaded in a different color going from green to yellow to red to sienna. So where EPA saw the data that was above for standard deviations above the mean, it got a red and a sienna color and it was flagged as a as a potential gamma radiation anomaly, that pea gray. So let's go in. I told you about the SRE. So let's look at that previous remediation. So building your eyes are good if you have a good prescription of glasses. Forty one. Forty three is the SRE building. But you can see that this is all gray area. So all of the remediation that was done for the SRE addressed that that building itself addressed that contamination. Now you can see if you can see very well, there's some areas around the edges that were identified as pea gray. So I want to flag here. The remediation was done at a time frame when there was a different standard of the day than the current background standard that we're talking about. So the when the EPA came in and looked at this, they're looking at a different standard. So just because a pea gray shows up in the SRE, it doesn't mean that the the remediation missed a spot. It was going working on on different standards. If you can see and I'm hoping I'm seeing some heads, not a thumbs up, thumbs down. There's blue circles and red or purple triangles. So the blue circles are naturally occurring radioactive material. So that's Karen had flagged uranium or that they processed at Moab. That's naturally occurring radioactive material that occurs everywhere. So when the gamma scanning had the spectrum that showed that the fingerprint of the radionuclides there were just naturally occurring and I'll describe that more. They were identified as not a gray, not a gamma radiation anomaly. But where they had site related activity. So you see these purple ones. They did have primarily cesium 137. They were identified as confirmed grays. And then we would use that data to help inform our cleanup. I want to contrast the SRE where we'd done this previous cleanup with the radioactive materials handling facility or the RMHF where the buildings had still existed. The cleanup wasn't conducted. A full cleanup in that area had not been conducted at that time. So here we change the color scale again. These aren't my graphs. These are the EPA. So just to confuse everybody even more, they now went to blue. And that's because now they have a specific isotope data. So if there's more cesium 137, then it gets a darker shade of blue. And if there's less, then it gets a lighter shade of blue. So in the RMHF where we hadn't done that, we know where the the contamination is. We know where we have to come back and do that remediation. And then the third area that I want to flag is a non-operational area here at the southern portion of Area 4. This is that this happens to be in Broughton's Milk Fetch Habitat. So these pea grays, all the ones in red and sienna, were all confirmed to be sorry, not confirmed to be. They were all verified as not a gray by following up with very specialized gamma spectral data to understand that it's really just that naturally occurring radioactive material or norm in in the Broughton's Milk Fetch Habitat, which is a non-operational area. So can we have a time? We have a time for questions, but I yeah. OK, well, we'll get to a great opportunity for discussions later. So so these these were the three areas I want to just summarize. So the the S. Let's not have conversations. Yeah, there's a presentation going on. OK. Yeah. OK. OK. So we solved it. It's all good. So let me just summarize. So the SRE, the previous remediation was conducted. We've identified some areas where we may need to to find that disparity between the previous standards and what current background is. RMHF still needs to do that. And we've comprehensively identified where the contamination is. And then there's non-operational areas that have naturally occurring radioactive material. So naturally occurring radioactive material. So what is that? It's elements like uranium, thorium, potassium that occur naturally everywhere. They're sometimes called primordial isotopes. They exist everywhere across Earth and they are not made by me. So what are some examples of those? So I think the poster child that maybe I think a lot of people in the room have heard of is bananas because they have potassium. Anytime any food that's high in potassium has some portion of it is potassium 40, which is a naturally occurring isotope. It's not just bananas. Coconuts, peanuts, sweet potatoes, et cetera, all have high amounts of of potassium in the norm. Garden supplies, phosphate fertilizers will have high amounts of norm in them. Building materials, concrete, granite countertops, bricks. They'll all have high amounts of these naturally occurring radioactive materials or norm. What about the site related act of radionuclides? So these are fission isotopes. What was identified is primarily cesium 137 in the gamma radiation, the gamma data. And that's from our past nuclear research. These are the areas that we would be going to clean up. What does the what the EPA found is that the 217 pigrays, potential gamma radiation anomalies, only 70 of those. So less less than one in three were from the site related activities such as cesium 137, cobalt 60, strontium 90. The other ones were the other 147 of them were just from norm. And those 70 locations are in very localized areas that are primarily around the RMHF. You saw a few around the SRE. There's a couple others here and there, but they're very localized areas. And we're using that data to help inform our cleanup. So I've told you about two cleanups at the SRE, the decommissioning and demolish decommissioning and then the subsequent demolition, the FSDF intermediation in 2000 to 2002. And then the data we got from 2009 to 2012 from the EPA study. But that's not all of these activities. So starting in the 70s, we demolished the Shield Test Irradiation Reactor Building 4028, 78, the SNAP-8 Environmental Experimental Reactor 4010. Building 4059, the SNAP ground prototype facility, etc. There's a long list of these. All of the buildings came down before and we're still working on the last few. So the the basement of Building 4024, we're developing the work plan to continue that remediation now. So a quick recap. Much of the remediation has been done at SSFL. I gave you those those examples today, but the contamination and the characterization is ongoing. So what have we done since we last talked in in January? So you'll see here in the pictures we have air monitoring going on. We have groundwater monitoring going on. We are studying soils to understand its agronomics to understand how we can revegetate after the the remediation is completed to a stringent standard. We need to understand the characteristics of those soils. And then we're also doing our groundwater pilot to treat the TCE in some of our areas in situ to understand if we can do a good work with that. So we're continuing that, continuing our ongoing environmental monitoring. And just much of that work has already been completed. And we're looking to to come back and to finish the job. So with that, you have a form that looks like this. And we would like your feedback on how this meeting went, as well as suggestions for topics for future Connect sessions. There's a QR code on the form that you can fill it out, hard copy, give it to us tonight, or you can go to the QR code and fill it out online if you know of somebody that would like to have been here, but couldn't come tonight. And we would like their feedback, too, because we want to schedule them at convenience of people that want to participate. So that's that. They're interested in future topics that would fit into this format. So if you have topics that you'd like to get presented, presentations about, you can submit those on the feedback form as well. These two QR codes, one takes you to the Connect site, which is the meeting that we're at tonight. So if you want it, when you when I say that we're going to post the recording and the slides, that's where you're going to find them. And then this is a larger site that's all about e-tech and the cleanup. So we wanted you to be able to see those slides so that you can see the QR codes. At this time, DOE is thinking about doing these meetings quarterly. We're talking about maybe February, May, August and November. Aiming for the third or second Wednesday of the month. But if those don't work, give us some feedback as to when you would rather see them done. So with that, I want I want to make sure that you signed the sign in sheet when you came. So we have your contact information to let you know about future sessions. And I want to thank you for attending today. Thank you very much.