The US navy knew of potentially dangerous levels of airborne plutonium in San Francisco for almost a year before it alerted city officials after it carried out testing that detected radioactive material in November last year, public health advocates allege.
The plutonium levels exceeded the federal action threshold at the navy’s highly contaminated, 866-acre Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. It was detected in an area adjacent to a residential neighborhood filled with condos, and which includes a public park.
The city is planning to redevelop Hunters Point with up to 10,000 housing units and new waterfront commercial districts. The property was used as a staging ground 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 several billion dollars to do a proper clean up, said Jeff Ruch, senior counsel with the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility nonprofit, which is involved in litigation at the site.
“It’s been one thing after another after another,” Ruch said. “What else is in the closet? We don’t know and we’re not going to search the closet to find out.”
The navy did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.
The test results became public on 30 October when the city released a bulletin altering residents to the issue. The tests had been conducted the previous November. Since the bulletin became public, attorneys, public health advocates and nearby community members have been attempting to get more information, and last week met navy officials for the first time.
In the bulletin, city health officials said: “Full transparency with our communities and the department of public health is critical, and we share your deep concerns regarding the 11-month delay in communication from the navy.”
The navy claimed the reading may be in error, though public health advocates and attorneys so far remain skeptical. The navy did not deny that it withheld the results, and Michael Pound, the navy’s environmental coordinator overseeing the clean-up, apologized at a recent community meeting for not releasing them sooner.
“I’ve spent a fair amount of time up here getting to know the community, getting to know your concerns, transparency and trust, and on this issue we did not do a good job,” Pound said.
The navy during the 1950s used Hunters Point to decontaminate 79 ships irradiated during nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific Ocean. That caused radioactive waste to be spread throughout the shipyard, and the Environmental Protection Agency in 1989 listed the yard as a “superfund” site, a designation for the nation’s most polluted areas.
About 2,000 grams of plutonium-239, a highly radioactive material and one of the most lethal substances on the planet, is estimated to be at Hunters Point, per a report provided to the EPA by nuclear experts on failures in the site’s clean-up. Air exposure can cause cellular damage and radiation sickness, while the inhalation of one-millionth of an ounce will cause cancer with a virtual 100% statistical certainty.
An array of other toxic and radioactive substances are also on the site. Hunters Point held a secret navy research lab 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 navy are legally required to ensure that dust kicked up during the clean-up does not present a health risk to workers and nearby residents, said Steve Castleman, supervising attorney of Berkeley Law’s Environmental Law Clinic. It is engaged in litigation with the navy and the EPA, in part claiming that the government is failing to meet clean-up standards that have been strengthened since the project started.
The navy took 200 air samples for plutonium in November 2024 and found one that was at a level two times higher than the federal action threshold, according to Castleman and the EPA. The exposure levels at which plutonium can cause cancer are very low, but the low levels also makes it difficult to measure, Castleman said.
The navy has claimed it re-checked that sample and the second reading was a non-detect, the EPA said. The navy has also said the levels in the air and the amount of time at which people are potentially exposed is safe, Castleman said.
But the navy’s history of dealing with the records has generated skepticism among neighbors and public health advocates, Castleman added.
“Can you trust them to report this 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 of the data used by the navy so our agency could verify the findings ourselves.
“[The] EPA will prioritize the review of the Pu-239 results to make a final determination on what risk there is to the public.”
The EPA is overseeing the clean-up, but Ruch characterized it as a “98lb weakling” that is failing to protect residents. The navy has said it did not carry out nuclear work on 90% of the site, so the EPA is not requiring it to look for radiation in those areas, despite radioactive material turning up across the yard, Ruch said.
The EPA disagreed, and said “the site has been fully characterized” and “the vast majority of historic radiological material at the Hunters Point site has been removed or remediated” despite that it regularly turns up on site.
Workers in the 1950s initially tried cleaning the ships returning from nuclear testing with brooms, Ruch said, using the anecdote to illustrate how little the government knew about how to work with radioactive material. Crews later sandblasted the ships, and the grit was reused around the yard, Ruch said.
The navy sent ships with goats into the blast zone, and the radioactive material in or on the animals was likely spread through Hunters Point either in contaminated feces, or when the animals were incinerated, experts say. The navy also burned irradiated fuel on site.
One parcel on the site has been turned over to developers, and residents living there say unremediated contamination is behind a cluster of cancer and other health problems.
The city and federal government have proposed capping the property with four inches of clean dirt, but Ruch said that is insufficient because it still risks exposing people to whatever is underneath, which still remains a mystery.
“There are several thousand tons of radioactive grit that have never been accounted for that were buried,” Ruch said. “Where was it buried? The navy doesn’t know and it doesn’t want to look.”
