[CPEO-MEF] RADIATION, REUSE: At Hunters Pont (CA), "City Sat on Plutonium Findings, Then Faulted Navy Over Delay"

[Lenny Siegel <Lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

City Sat on Plutonium Findings, Then Faulted Navy Over Delay
Newly released emails show San Francisco officials learned of detection weeks before alerting the public, raising fresh questions about transparency at the Superfund cleanup site

by Chris Roberts
San Francisco Public Press (CA)
December 8, 2025

San Francisco health and redevelopment officials waited nearly a month to alert the community about a suspected plutonium detection at the Hunters Point Shipyard, even as they criticized the U.S. Navy for keeping the discovery under wraps.

The city’s decision to elevate the urgency of the finding set off a public outcry at the Navy’s expense. Still, it is unclear how much health danger the incident posed. Navy officials cautioned that the detection could be a false positive, and one radiation expert said the city’s reaction “exaggerated” its scientific significance, resurfacing doubts about the future of a massive and complex real estate project.

“The levels are very small and the health impact negligible,” said Kai Vetter, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied pollution at the shipyard. “From the point of communications and perception, it is quite damaging.”

The dispute came to a head in a sharply worded Oct. 30 letter from San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, which charged that the Navy failed to promptly disclose a November 2024 plutonium detection at the long-contaminated bayfront property. The Navy did not inform the city until about 11 months after the sample was retrieved, though the Navy said it took a long time to discover the issue and sort out whether it had found anything at at all.

…

For the entire article, see
https://www.sfpublicpress.org/city-sat-on-plutonium-findings-then-faulted-navy-over-delay/

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)




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