In 2014, my daughter Grace was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. She was four. She has now survived cancer twice.

During her treatment, I learned about the Santa Susana Field Lab. It's a former nuclear and rocket testing site in the hills above Los Angeles. More than 700,000 people live within ten miles of it, and it has been linked to higher rates of cancer in the communities around it.

Boeing owns most of the site. It's now getting ready to tear down five old nuclear research buildings. One of them handled plutonium and had three radioactive accidents.

Boeing won a lawsuit in 2023. That ruling lets it treat these buildings as ordinary abandoned warehouses. The ruling relies on studies from the 1980s that used outdated rules. Even so, the buildings still showed signs of radiation. The plutonium building alone had 88 readings above normal background levels.

Plutonium-239 can cause cancer if even tiny amounts are breathed in.

The ruling also lets Boeing use weaker dust controls. It can send thousands of tons of possibly radioactive debris to recycling centers and regular California landfills. That puts workers, neighbors and future generations at risk.

What Boeing is doing is legal. That doesn't make it safe.

I'm asking Boeing to do one of two things:

1. Prove the buildings are no longer radioactive. That means modern, independent testing before and after demolition, with every result shared with the public. 
2. Or tear them down the safest way possible. That means covering the work areas and filtering the air, monitoring for radiation, stopping work on windy days, protecting workers, covering the trucks, and sending all debris to licensed low-level radioactive waste sites.

Sign if you agree that Boeing should either prove it's safe or do the job safely.

Melissa Bumstead, Parents Against SSFL

P.S. The full technical standards are at parentsagainstssfl.com/radioactive. To support cleaning up the whole site, sign at change.org/SantaSusana.