US navy accused of cover-up over dangerous plutonium in San Francisco
US Navy knew there were potentially dangerous levels of plutonium in the air in San Francisco for almost a year Before public health advocates alerted city officials after tests detected radioactive material in November last year.
Plutonium levels exceed federal action threshold in Navy extremely contaminated866 acres Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. It was detected in an area adjacent to a residential neighborhood full of apartments and including a public park.
The city plans to redevelop Hunters Point with up to 10,000 residential units and new waterfront commercial districts. The property was used as a staging area for nuclear weapons testing, and the discovery marks the latest in a series of controversies and cover-ups of dangerous, radioactive material at the site.
The Navy is trying to avoid spending billions of dollars to do a proper cleanup, said Jeff Ruch, senior counsel for the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which handles cases at the site.
“It was 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 were announced by the municipality on October 30. a newsletter directs residents to the subject. The tests were done last November. Since the bulletin was made public, attorneys, public health advocates and members of the surrounding community have been trying to get more information and met with Navy officials for the first time last week.
“Full transparency with our communities and the public health department is critical, and we share your deep concern about the 11-month delay in communication from the Navy,” city health officials said in the release.
While the Navy has argued that the reading may be inaccurate, public health advocates and lawyers remain skeptical so far. The Navy has not denied hiding the results, and Michael Pound, the Navy’s environmental coordinator overseeing the cleanup, apologized at a recent community meeting for not releasing the results sooner.
“I’ve spent a fair amount of time here getting to know the community, learning about your concerns, transparency and trust, and we haven’t done a good job of that,” Pound said.
In the 1950s, the Navy used Hunters Point to decontaminate 79 ships exposed to radiation 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 shipyard as a “superfund” site for the nation’s most polluted areas.
Approximately 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. report The EPA was notified by nuclear experts about failures in cleaning the facility. Exposure to air can cause cellular damage and radiation sickness, while inhaling one millionth of an ounce will cause cancer with virtually 100% statistical certainty.
A number of other toxic and radioactive materials are also found in the area. There was a secret Navy research laboratory in Hunters Point where animals were injected with strontium-90. In 2023, the Navy and a contractor were accused of falsifying strontium-90 test results.
Steve Castleman, supervising attorney for Berkeley Law’s Environmental Law Clinic, said the EPA and the Navy are legally required to ensure that dust created during the cleanup does not pose a health risk to workers and nearby residents. it’s busy case The Navy, the EPA and, in part, the government allegedly failed to meet cleanup standards that have been strengthened since the project began.
The Navy took 200 air samples for plutonium in November 2024 and found one at a level more than twice the federal action threshold, according to Castleman and the EPA. Exposure levels at which plutonium could cause cancer are very low, Castleman said, but low levels also make it difficult to measure.
The EPA claimed that the Navy rechecked the sample and that it was not detected on the second reading. The Navy also said the levels in the air and the amount of time people were potentially exposed were safe, Castleman said.
But Castleman added that the Navy’s history of tampering with records has raised suspicion among neighbors and public health advocates.
“Can you trust them to report this honestly?” he asked, adding that the navy had not yet made public data to support its claim.
An EPA spokesperson said in a statement that the agency “requested all data used by the Navy so that we could verify the findings ourselves.”
“[The] “EPA will prioritize review of the Pu-239 results to make a final determination as to what the risk to the public is.”
The EPA is overseeing the cleanup, but Ruch called it a “98-lb weakness” that fails to protect residents. Ruch said the Navy said it did not conduct nuclear work on 90% of the site, so it did not require the EPA to search those areas for radiation, even though radioactive material was found throughout the site.
The EPA disagreed and said that despite regular occurrences, “the area has been fully characterized” and that “the vast majority of historic radiological material in the Hunters Point area has been removed or rehabilitated.”
Ruch said that in the 1950s, workers tried to use brooms to clean ships returning from nuclear tests, and used the anecdote to show how little the government knew about how to work with radioactive material. Crews then sandblasted the ships, Ruch said, and the sand was reused around the shipyard.
Experts say the Navy sent ships full of goats to the blast site, and radioactive material in or on the animals was likely spread to Hunters Point either through contaminated feces or when the animals were burned. The Navy also burned irradiated fuel in the area.
A parcel on the site was transferred to developers and residents living there. to say Untreated contamination is behind a host of cancers and other health problems.
The city and the federal government have suggested covering the property with ten inches of clean soil, but Ruch said that’s insufficient because it still poses a risk of people being exposed to whatever’s underneath, and that remains a mystery.
“There are several thousand tons of radioactive sand buried and never accounted for,” Ruch said. “Where is he buried? The Navy doesn’t know and doesn’t want to look.”
