Navy Keeps Quiet About Hunters Point Radiation Hazards for Nearly A Year

The pride San Francisco takes in its lengthy Naval history conveniently covers for their betrayal. To trace the extent of their duplicity, you’ll need a Geiger counter. Long after the last mushroom cloud erupted from an American bomb, their effects continue to endanger the population. We see how haphazardly the city’s former industrial waterfront converts to bland luxury condominiums. Imagine some developer foolish enough to build a kids’ bayside playground on radioactive sand. Horrors of the past eddy and gust around SF’s Hunters Point, harbingers of a cancerous future. 

After WWII ended, the US military transported hundreds of young soldiers deep into the Nevada desert for a series of training exercises that would alter the course of their lives, down to their DNA. The purported reason was to steel the soldiers against what would surely be the future of combat: live atomic warfare. They were marched into the frosty pre-dawn morning, put in crude trenches, and ordered to cover their eyes. In three, two, one, the bomb went off. 

“There was extreme heat—extreme heat. There were people screaming and running. There was panic and people screaming because of the heat,” said one surviving veteran in 2019.

“Everybody started yelling, some people calling out for their mothers. And some of the trenches collapsed,” said another. “The whole clump of ground, it was ten yards this way, fifteen yards this way, ten yards back…” 

“A few guys were having a little trouble, they were throwing up. It was a normal thing, I guess.” 

Radiation doesn’t wash away. It lingers in the atmosphere, conceals itself in rain, soaks into the soil and the food we grow in it. Livestock grazes on contaminated grasses, rolls around in toxic dust, drinks from irradiated springs. You need not stand in the shadow of a mushroom cloud to die from its poison. It can find you decades later, hundreds or even thousands of miles away. 

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed once apiece from high altitude, meaning less radiation on the ground. Weather slowly cleansed the stricken cities of lingering isotopes, the long-term radionuclides diluted by rain and scattered to the winds. Eventually what bore the marks of the world’s first (hopefully only) nuclear attacks were the people who lived through them. However, the US military reportedly set off 105 nuclear bombs in the South Pacific, starting in April 1946 at Bikini Atoll. 

Those tests were conducted to study the effects of nuclear blasts on Naval ships. As usual, the United States removed the atoll’s Native people to a resourceless, barren land hundreds of miles from home. 93 ships were anchored in and around the shallow lagoon, the food source of local Bikinians for generations. The ships’ passengers: 5,400 test animals. Five ships sank when the nuclear fireball consumed the atoll, the rest heavily damaged. Aboard those still afloat, most of the test animals died instantly or soon after from horrific burns. These ships were subsequently towed across the Pacific, trailing radiation to their destination port of San Francisco. 

The first nuclear explosions to take place after WWII occurred at Bikini Atoll. Operation Crossroads was a set of nuclear tests the Army called “shots,” codenamed Able, Baker, and Charlie. Charlie didn’t happen, but Able and Baker did more than enough damage to account for it. Many vessels from the tropical test site were towed straight to Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. 

The nuclear Trojan Horses that sailed beneath the Golden Gate carried an unstoppable force. It blanketed the ships like snow. It was on and below deck, in every crevice and piece of gunnery. The fallout, mostly vaporized coral and sand, contained hazardous radionuclides like Iodine-131, which causes thyroid cancer. Iodine-131 decays to radiation levels considered safe for humans in eight days. But the carcinogenic isotopes are legion. Strontium-90 and Caesium-137 take 30 years to decay. Americium-241, a plutonium byproduct, hangs out for 432 years. Plutonium-239 remains dangerously radioactive for 24,110 years. 

Almost eighty years into that nearly quarter-of-a-million-year sentence, Plutonium-239 is causing trouble locally. In 1946, irradiated ships like the USS Independence were docked at Hunters Point for study and decontamination. That fallout, carried by chemical suds, came sliding off the deck and down the hull, wafting onto the dock, sinking into the bay mud. The Navy eventually scuttled the still-radioactive USS Independence off the Farallon Islands, but the damage to San Francisco had already been done. 

In November 2024, the Navy quietly conducted some tests in Hunters Point where contaminated ships once dropped their irradiated anchors. Samples revealed Plutonium-239 at twice the levels the EPA considers “actionable.” Worse still, the plutonium was discovered clinging to an air filter. The excessive plutonium at Hunters Point is airborne. 

The Navy failed to warn the SF Health Department that radiation levels at the artificial peninsula remain at unsafe levels. The danger stems not simply from Pu-239’s multi-millennia half-life, but a much more imminent encroaching liability: San Francisco’s urban development. “The City and County of San Francisco is deeply concerned by both the magnitude of this exceedance and the failure to provide timely notification,” wrote SF Health Officer Dr. Susan Philip to the Navy. “Such a delay undermines our ability to safeguard public health and maintain transparency. Immediate notification is a regulatory requirement, and is critical for ensuring community trust and safety.” (SFGate)

While the radioactive parcel is not presently zoned for residential use, its hazardous dust floats into neighboring, populated areas. The plutonium adrift around Hunters Point will not cause the sort of radiation sickness witnessed in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Fukushima. Rather, it’ll settle in the lungs, emitting radiation straight into the body, increasing one’s likelihood of cancer with every breath. Cellular damage from proximity to radiation is cumulative. As for your body’s chances at recovery, what’s done is done. It’s why radiologists must leave the room when you’re getting x-rayed, why Chernobyl’s legendary Liquidators had to work fast. Every exposure counts. There is, for the body, a nuclear point of no return. 

Hence, San Franciscans deserve to know: Hunters Point is still dangerously radioactive.