Public health advocates allege the U.S. Navy knew about potentially dangerous levels of airborne plutonium in San Francisco for nearly a year, before it alerted city officials after testing last November detected radioactive material.
Plutonium levels at the Navy’s heavily polluted, 866-acre Hunters Point Naval Shipyard exceeded federal action limits. It was discovered in an area adjacent to a residential neighborhood filled with condos, and which also includes a public park.
The city plans to redevelop Hunters Point with 10,000 housing units and new waterfront commercial districts. The property was used as a platform for nuclear weapons testing, and the discovery is the latest in a series of controversies and cover-ups of hazardous, radioactive material at the site.
Jeff Ruch, senior counsel at the Public Employees Environmental Responsibility nonprofit, which is involved in litigation over the site, said the Navy is trying to avoid spending several billion dollars to do a proper cleanup.
“It’s just been one thing after another,” Ruch said. “What else is in the closet? We don’t know and we won’t search the closet to find out.”
The navy did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
The test results became public on October 30 when the city issued a bulletin alerting residents to the issue. The tests were conducted last November. Since the bulletin became public, lawyers, public health advocates and members of the surrounding community have been attempting to obtain more information, and last week met with Navy officials for the first time.
In the bulletin, city health officials said: “Full transparency with our communities and the public health department is important, and we share your deep concerns about the 11-month delay in communication from the Navy.”
The Navy claimed that the reading may have been an error, although public health advocates and lawyers remain skeptical. The Navy did not deny that it withheld the results, and Michael Pound, the Navy’s environmental coordinator who is overseeing the cleanup, apologized at a recent community meeting for not releasing them sooner.
“I’ve spent a lot of time here getting to know the community, getting to know your concerns, transparency and trust, and we haven’t done a good job on this issue,” Pound said.
During the 1950s the Navy used Hunters Point to decontaminate 79 ships irradiated during nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific Ocean. This caused radioactive waste to spread throughout the shipyard, and in 1989 the Environmental Protection Agency listed the yard as a “Superfund” site, a designation for the most polluted areas of the country.
About 2,000 grams of plutonium-239, a highly radioactive material and one of the deadliest substances on the planet, is estimated to be at Hunters Point, according to a report provided to the EPA by nuclear experts on failures in the cleanup of the site. Exposure to air can cause cellular damage and radiation sickness, while inhalation of one millionth of an ounce can cause cancer with almost 100% statistical certainty.
A range of other toxic and radioactive substances are also at the site. Hunters Point housed a secret Naval Research Laboratory where animals were injected with strontium-90. In 2023, the Navy and a contractor were accused of falsifying strontium-90 test results.
The EPA and the Navy are legally required to ensure that dust blown during the cleanup does not pose a health risk to workers and nearby residents, said Steve Castleman, supervising attorney for Berkeley Law’s Environmental Law Clinic. It is engaged in litigation with the Navy and EPA, partly claiming the government has failed to meet strengthened cleanup standards since the project began.
According to Castleman and the EPA, the Navy took 200 air samples for plutonium in November 2024 and one of them had levels twice the federal action limit. The level at which plutonium can cause cancer is very low, Castleman said, but even low levels make it difficult to measure.
The Navy claimed it retested that sample and the second reading was not detected, the EPA said. The Navy also said the air level and the length of time people could potentially be exposed to it are safe, Castleman said.
But the Navy’s history of mishandling the records has raised skepticism among neighbors and public health advocates, Castleman said.
“Can you trust them to report it honestly?” he asked, adding that the Navy has not yet provided data to the public to support its claim.
In a statement, an EPA spokesperson said the agency “has requested all data used by the Navy so that our agency can verify the findings itself.
“(EPA) will prioritize reviewing the PU-239 results to make a final determination on what the risk is to the public.”
The EPA is overseeing the cleanup, but Ruch described it as a “98lb weakling” that is failing to protect residents. The Navy has said it has not conducted nuclear work at 90% of the site, so despite there being radioactive material in the yard, the EPA is not required to look for radiation in those areas, Ruch said.
The EPA disagreed, and stated that “the site has been thoroughly characterized” and that “the vast majority of historical radiological material at the Hunters Point site has been removed or remediated” despite it continuing to visit the site regularly.
Workers in the 1950s initially tried to clean ships returning from nuclear testing with brooms, Ruch said, using an anecdote to illustrate how little the government knew about working with radioactive material. Crews later sandblasted the vessels and the grit was reused around the yard, Ruch said.
Experts say the Navy sent ships with goats to the blast zone, and radioactive material in or on the animals spread through Hunters Point, either in contaminated feces, or when the animals were incinerated. The Navy also burned irradiated fuel at the site.
A parcel at the site has been turned over to developers, and residents living there say uncontrolled contamination is behind the cancer and other health problems.
The city and federal government have proposed limiting the property to four inches of clean dirt, but Ruch said that’s inadequate because it still puts people at risk of coming into contact with whatever lies below, which still remains a mystery.
“There are thousands of tons of radioactive grit that were never accounted for, that were buried,” Ruch said. “Where was it buried? The Navy doesn’t know and doesn’t want to look.”
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