Dan Hirsch was invited to the table.

In January, after years of railing against the owners of a polluted rocket engine and nuclear test site in the hills south of Simi Valley and against the regulators in charge of overseeing the cleanup, Hirsch found himself at the table with other community members and California's secretary of environmental protection.

He suggested the state enter a written agreement with the community, just as it had with Boeing Co., which owns the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Secretary Linda Adams took him up on the suggestion, preserving in writing a stringent cleanup bill that faced gutting under the agreement with Boeing.

"This is probably the highest state official that we have been able to meet with, and the meeting changed things," said Hirsch. "I knew where I wanted to go. I was skeptical I was going to prevail."

Hirsch, 57, is the elder statesman of field lab activists, having been involved in the fight for nearly 30 years.

To his supporters, he is a reserved hero, fluent in the language of policy and science. To those he challenges, he seems more like a bombastic, exasperating thorn in the side.

"He is the most intelligent guy I have ever met," said John Luker, a newer activist from Box Canyon. "You can't underestimate him."

Began with an accident

Hirsch, a Harvard-educated lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, is the co-founder of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nuclear watchdog group. Ten people form the core of the group, he said.

Hirsch has been involved in a number of nuclear issues, but his involvement with the field laboratory literally began with an accident.

Hirsch, who was born in Oakland and raised in St. Louis and west Los Angeles, lectured at UC Los Angeles from 1975 to 1983. During that time, while reading about nuclear power in Los Angeles, he came across a vague mention of an accident at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.

Later he would point his students to the reference when they decided to research nuclear issues in the wake of the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979.

Using the university's school of engineering library, Hirsch's students found documents from Atomics International, a subsidiary of North American Aviation, which operated the nuclear research site at the lab, starting in the 1950s and continuing through the 1980s.

Michael Rose, then a UCLA graduate student studying film, who worked with Bridge the Gap, described discovering the occurrence of the meltdown at the field laboratory as causing a "great excitement."

Hirsch and his students took the news to the media, starting the first wave of organizing around the field lab.

'Very little to smile about'

"He is formidable," Rose said of Hirsch. "He is honest and tenacious and he has a sense of humor and a sense of decency and desire to make the world a better place."

There have been times Hirsch wanted to walk away. Most recently, during the period between the Assembly passing the cleanup bill, SB990, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signing it. If it didn't pass, Hirsch wondered, what hope would there be?

"I basically made a promise to the community to help," Hirsch said. "I did it without any recognition about how long it would take. Every project I have taken on has taken longer than I expected."

While Hirsch is known for prickly, heated exchanges with regulators and Boeing Co. officials, Rose and others describe him as a man who is reserved and whose deep spirituality informs his activism.

Hirsch spent the New Year's holiday this year at a monastery that has been a restorative refuge for him over the years, but he does not identify with one particular religion.

Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, described Hirsch as dogged and committed. She said his years of testifying at every hearing related to the lab, but seeing little changing, left him frustrated.

Now, he has had to learn to accept victory, she said.

"There was very little to smile about," Kuehl said of the past. "The community had backed him and looked to him, elected' him as the most knowledgeable person. More and more people knew he was right."

Hirsch isn't sure if victory is permanent or fleeting.

"The fight just keeps going on and on and on," he said. "Who knows, maybe it won't."