Fallout

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• Courtesy of TimePix

  

  The USS Independence was irreparably damaged in atomic bomb tests near Bikini Atoll.

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Gessleman says that the carcasses of dead animals constituted much of the cargo on the barge his tug regularly towed; those animals had been used in experiments at the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at Hunters Point, the military's leading laboratory for applied nuclear research, and at the University of California's Lawrence Laboratories. There were other kinds of waste inside 55-gallon drums that were loaded onto the barge, but Gessleman doesn't remember what that waste was; in fact, he's not sure, now, that he ever knew what was in the barrels.

The routine was always the same: Barrels were collected on the barge until it was full, and then it sailed out the Golden Gate and dropped its load into the sea. On a few occasions, Gessleman remembers, a representative from the Atomic Energy Commission came on board the ship and told the captain that measurements showed the radiation levels were too high, and the ship should be cleaned up before the next load.

Another part of Gessleman's job was to shoot holes in the barrels that didn't immediately sink, so that they would. He says he did his job -- shooting about 10 to 20 barrels once or twice each week -- which means that many of the Navy's radioactive waste containers were breached before they ever reached the bottom of the sea, and became part of what is known as the Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Site.

The Farallon waste site is a triangle-shaped piece of seascape that sits about 30 miles west of San Francisco. It encompasses most of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, a gorgeous refuge of marine and other wildlife that includes some of the most fertile commercial fishing waters in the Pacific. The islands themselves are home to one of the nation's largest populations of breeding seabirds, along with thousands of sea lions. The waters surrounding them are rich with fish and bottom-dwelling sea life. In fact, in recent decades, divers in the area have brought up at least 50 species of worms and crustaceans previously unknown to science.

Certainly, this seems a ridiculous place to situate the nation's first and largest sea dump of nuclear waste. In the mid-1940s, however, the Defense Department and, indeed, the federal government as a whole were much more concerned about keeping nuclear trash out of enemy hands than they were about the environment. The waters near the Farallones were seen as a convenient spot, far enough away to be out of sight, close enough to be under control.

Government officials have long acknowledged that the dump site contains some 47,500 barrels of low-level radiation waste generated by Navy and University of California nuclear laboratories. And yet, neither the Navy nor anyone else has ever been able to produce any kind of accounting or documentation that confirms the numbers of barrels dumped or describes the contents of the barrels. Government officials have speculated that the waste was trash, a mix of junk and laboratory accessories, some of which had been exposed to small amounts of radiation, none of which posed a threat to human health.

But such assertions grossly underestimate the extent of Cold War-era research in the Bay Area and the types of radioactive materials used in that research. Although official government statements continue to refer to the Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Site as a "low-level" waste repository -- that is, a place containing radioactive materials that have short "half-lives," and that would therefore decay quickly and be diluted by sea water -- there is good reason to believe that something far more dangerous is parked at the bottom of the ocean near the Farallones.

Once-classified military documents and former government employees strongly suggest that the Navy's "low-level" designation is incorrect, and that significant amounts of high-level, extremely long-lived radioactive materials are sitting on the ocean bottom near the Farallones. To wit:

- The Navy's own documents, declassified at the request of SF Weekly, show that significant amounts of the nuclear bomb component plutonium, which has a half-life of 24,000 years, and similarly long-lived "mixed fission" products were used at the nuclear laboratory at Hunters Point. The Navy has asserted that all nuclear materials used at the NRDL were subsequently disposed of at the Farallon waste site.

- An entire radioactive ship, the 10,000-ton aircraft carrier USS Independence, is believed to have been sunk in or near the waste site. The carrier itself was clearly "hot" when it went down. It had been used as an atomic bomb target and a nuclear laboratory, and it was packed full of fresh fission products and other radiological waste at the time it sank.

- Two government officials say the Navy told them thousands of barrels containing "special" wastes -- that is, high-level, long-lived radioactive materials -- were dumped in the Farallon site.

In the decades since World War II ended, many scientific studies have shown that radioactive materials dumped at sea can enter the marine food chain through bottom-dwelling organisms, such as clams and mussels, and that radiation can accumulate in fish and other, higher-order animals that feed on the bottom-dwellers. It is also widely accepted that eating fish that have taken in significant amounts of radioactive material can be dangerous to humans, increasing the incidence of cancer and other radiation-linked diseases.

For as long as the public has known about the Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Site, government officials and scientists alike -- including those who don't agree on the potential hazard of the Farallon dump -- have said that the area should be monitored. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's own contractors have said the site contains material that might be transported into the food chain, or even onto beaches or into San Francisco Bay.

Yet, more than 50 years after radioactive waste was dumped at the heart of a major fishery just off San Francisco, there has been no comprehensive study or regular monitoring of the site, the fish that swim there, or the fish that have been caught there and sold for human consumption.

Both the Navy and the U.S. Department of Energy have for years maintained a position that is internally inconsistent: They have repeatedly claimed that they do not know for certain what is in the Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Site, and, simultaneously, they have repeatedly asserted that whatever was dumped in the Farallones is not dangerous. Not only does the position defy common sense, it ignores volumes of declassified government records detailing some of what was dumped in the Farallones. And the government has access to reams of documents that remain classified, and that would almost certainly describe radioactive materials used in government labs and dumped in the Farallones.

The simple truth is that no one can say with any degree of certainty whether the Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Site and the fish taken there are safe, because no one has fully studied them. In fact, the U.S. government has gone out of its way to avoid learning or disclosing what it put on the sea floor 50 years ago.

The Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory was created at Hunters Point Shipyard in 1946 to handle and experiment with ships that were contaminated in the world's fourth atomic bomb explosion, which was part of the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests conducted at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. From humble, hasty beginnings, when it decontaminated ships that had been underneath the infamous mushroom cloud in the Pacific, the NRDL grew steadily bigger, and its work more complex.

The NRDL existed from 1946 until 1969; the Navy kept its very existence a secret until about 1950. At the peak of operations, the lab employed some 600 people -- mostly military and civilian scientists -- who researched the effects of nuclear weapons and how to mitigate those effects. The laboratory worked on projects for the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and took part in almost every nuclear weapons test the military performed. Along the way, scientists exposed thousands of mice, dogs, and larger animals to long-lived radiation, often in nuclear tests in the Pacific and Nevada.

Wellard Guffy was a supply officer at the NRDL from 1957 to 1960. Part of his job was to oversee the disposal of the laboratory's radioactive waste. In fact, his name was on the Atomic Energy Commission license allowing the laboratory to dump near the Farallones during that time. He remembers what was sent out to sea this way: "Look at the dictionary of radioactive substances; we had it all. Plutonium, tritium, extremely dangerous stuff," he says, adding that "a lot of it was much less dangerous than that."

Guffy's recollections aside, there is voluminous documentation strongly suggesting that high-level, long-lived radioactive waste has been dumped in the Farallones.

Historical records obtained by SF Weekly show that the NRDL regularly acquired and used, among other things, uranium, plutonium, thorium, cesium, and strontium -- potentially deadly radioisotopes with half-lives from 30 to (in the case of thorium) several billion years. The lab also used mixed fission products (that is, highly radioactive substances akin to expended nuclear reactor fuel). Along with the radioactive waste the lab itself generated, the NRDL also handled nuclear disposal for other defense-related entities, including McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento and the University of California, a leader in nuclear research. Government officials have asserted that all nuclear materials used at the NRDL were disposed of at the Farallon waste site. If this assertion is true, then the Farallones site must be home to a variety of long-lived, high-level radioactive poisons.

Then again, government officials have acknowledged that the site contains at least some long-lived nuclear material.

In a 1980 congressional hearing, David Hawkins, then-assistant administrator for the EPA, testified that the bulk of the nuclear waste in the Farallones consists of equipment, tools, lab clothing, and other materials contaminated with low-level, relatively short-lived radioactive substances. Still, he acknowledged that isotopes with the potential to adversely affect the environment for long time periods -- including strontium and cesium -- also had been dumped at the site.

"And, at times, they may have included small quantities of source materials such as uranium and thorium, or traces of special nuclear materials such as plutonium," Hawkins said, giving no indication of why he named those particular materials, and insisting that because there were no logs of what had been dumped, the government had no way to know for sure what is on the Farallones sea floor.

A decade later, another clue was dropped, this time during a meeting among representatives of state and federal agencies reviewing the Farallon site. At that meeting, according to two officials who were present, a U.S. Navy captain reported that the Navy was aware of having dumped some 9,000 containers of "special waste" into the Farallones area.

"Special waste" is a term that U.S. defense agencies use for high-level, long-lived radioactive materials, including uranium and plutonium, the latter of which, because of its long half-life, would be as dangerously radioactive today as it was 56 years ago, at the end of World War II. (Plutonium-239, the fuel of nuclear weapons, can cause cancer if even a tiny fragment makes its way inside the body, and has a half-life of 24,000 years. That is, half of a given mass of plutonium will decay in 24,000 years, or, to put it conversely, half the amount present today will still remain in 24,000 years.)

At the next meeting of the interagency group, U.S. Geological Survey geologist Herman Karl remembers, the Navy captain recanted his earlier report, saying that the Navy was not aware of any special waste dumped in the area. The subject was never discussed again in group meetings, Karl says. Another official who attended the meetings, and who requested anonymity, backs Karl's account of the two meetings. A third government official remembers the captain being part of the group, but nothing else.

Attempts to contact the Navy captain were unsuccessful.

In a prepared statement, Lt. Steve Curry of the Navy's Office of Information in Washington, D.C., responded to questions about the Farallon waste site this way: "The barrels in question contain mostly laboratory wastes generated during research activities and/or decontamination procedures." Curry said the EPA, in cooperation with the Navy, had investigated the site in 1975 and again in 1985. He went on to say, "A typical waste package observed during the 1985 investigation (after 30 years immersion) showed very little evidence of any effect of the deep sea environment other than a small area of mild implosion on the upper surface, and its concrete matrix showed very little spalling [chipping or flaking]."

Curry's statement fails to address the crucial distinction of whether these "laboratory wastes" are high-level, long-life radiation sources or lab equipment and materials that were slightly contaminated during NRDL research.

And the government's own research conclusively disproves Curry's suggestion that the waste containers in the Farallones remain largely intact. Studies by the EPA and other government-funded researchers, some of which have even been presented to Congress, clearly show that many of the 55-gallon barrels containing radioactive waste at the Farallon site have imploded, or are corroded and disintegrating.

The USS Independence was definitely sunk somewhere in the Pacific Ocean after it left Hunters Point Shipyard for the last time in 1951. It was definitely filled with radioactive waste -- some of it of the high-level variety -- when it went down. Although the Navy will not confirm the ship's whereabouts, the Independence is widely believed to rest in or near the Farallon undersea nuclear dump.

The 10,000-ton aircraft carrier was among the Navy's largest vessels when it was built in 1942, and had seen a great deal of action in World War II. Originally a cruiser, the Independence was converted into an aircraft carrier after it was hit by a Japanese torpedo at Tarawa. "The Mighty I," as the ship was nicknamed, participated in the October 1943 battle at Wake Island.

The ship's radioactive history began in 1946, when it was a target ship parked in the lagoon surrounded by Bikini Atoll during the United States' largest atom bomb test. The Independence was only 560 yards from the blast, so close that it caught fire, and its upper decks were mangled into a mess of misshapen metal.

Following the test, the highly contaminated Independence was one of 14 ships brought to the San Francisco Naval Shipyard at Hunters Point for experimental decontamination in exercises that gave birth to the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory. After several months of trying to cleanse the giant vessel with everything from vegetables to detergent to kerosene, government scientists decided that sandblasting followed by a citric acid rinse was the way to get rid of radioactive contaminants.

Eventually, the NRDL brass determined that the Independence was so "dirty" it was beyond hope of being safe to sail again. At that point, parked in the bay at Hunters Point, the Independence became a guinea pig. The prevailing wisdom, as revealed in NRDL records, seemed to be that since the Navy was planning to sink the contaminated ship anyway, it was the perfect place for radiation experiments.

On one occasion, scientists sprayed mixed fission products across a portion of the ship. Eventually, the NRDL decided to turn some sections of the aircraft carrier into a radiation lab. The ship-as-lab is described in a November 1948 memo from the NRDL to the Army's chief of engineers:

Engineering Applications Division is in process of converting some of the interior compartments of the ship into an improvised hot-laboratory where high levels of activity can be used on fairly large-scale practical samples as a means of testing "quick and dirty" methods of decontamination.

... The big advantage of such an improvised hot-laboratory is that spills or other accidental contamination do not matter, since if the whole laboratory becomes contaminated it can either be moved to a new compartment or gross decontamination methods can be used on the laboratory without the necessity of careful disposal.

All the while, the ship was used for another purpose: Radioactive waste produced by both the NRDL and the University of California's nuclear laboratories was stowed on the Independence until shortly before its sinking in January 1951. Correspondence from the time indicates that the radioactive waste packed onto the ship went down with it. A Dec. 23, 1949, memo from C.J. Brown, assistant chief of the Navy's Bureau for Research and Medical Military Specialties, describes the situation this way:

During the past year, Independence has been used as a test laboratory for radiological decontamination studies. Large quantities of fresh fission product mixtures were introduced on board during these studies and subsequently were drained into empty tanks aboard the ship for stowage. Other contaminated materials that have been used in connection with the research program of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory also have been put on board the Independence.

Brown went on to explain that if the Navy wanted to salvage the Independence for scrap, it would have to remove and dispose of the contaminants on board, a process that would exceed the ship's scrap value. So Navy officials decided to sink the ship in a weapons test.

The exact circumstances surrounding the Independence's sinking have never been made public. At the time, Navy officials told reporters that the ship had been sunk in a weapons test some 200 miles off the coast. But the captain of a merchant ship claimed to have witnessed the Independence go down only 40 miles outside the Golden Gate, which would put it near the Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Site. The Navy did not comment on the merchant captain's observations. But during a recent project aimed at mapping nuclear waste barrels dumped near the Farallones, government scientists found nothing where the Navy has said it sank the Independence, and a large shipwreck that fits the Independence's description close to the nuclear waste site.

Navy officials still refuse to comment on the location of the Independence, citing policies, aimed at preventing salvage or looting, that prohibit confirming the exact location of any sunken Navy ship. Regardless of where it is, the Independence, which remains the property of the U.S. Navy, has apparently not been monitored in regard to radioactive contamination.

Depending on what, precisely, they turn out to be, the "mixed fission" products on the USS Independence could represent as much radiation as all the barrels in the Farallon dump site, according to W. Jackson Davis, head of the International Environmental Policy program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and an international environmental consultant. (SF Weekly contracted with a team of analysts working under Davis' direction to review environmental documents pertaining to the Hunters Point Shipyard. Their findings were included in Part One of this series.)

"You'd sure like to know what "mixed fission' products mean," Davis says. "Whether you could immediately tell by monitoring the surrounding area, I'm not sure. It could mean that the waste is still entombed within that ship."

That the waste might be mostly contained by the Independence is not necessarily a positive notion. Shipwrecks attract the very creatures that tend to absorb radiation into the food chain of sea life. Invertebrates such as clams and mussels are particularly attracted to the hard surface area provided by sunken ships.

The safety of nuclear waste dumped in the Gulf of the Farallones began to be questioned nearly as soon as dumping stopped in 1970. But the concern has been expressed publicly only in fits and spurts.

In 1974, the EPA conducted an investigation of the site but could locate only about 150 of the 47,500 containers the government has acknowledged dumping there. Most had imploded or were otherwise damaged. Three years later, government scientists retrieved one barrel, which showed only low levels of radiation. But a survey of the sediment surrounding containers at the sea bottom showed radiation 25 times higher than "background," or what is normally attributed to the fallout from atmospheric testing. More disturbing were underwater photographs taken at the site that showed sable fish feeding within inches of a leaking barrel of radioactive waste.

The barrels captured the attention of then-U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, a San Francisco Democrat, who held the first congressional hearing on the Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Site in 1976. At the time, EPA officials told Congress that the situation was potentially dangerous and would require more study. Then the Farallones faded from the spotlight.

Four years later, a group of environmentalists enlisted the support of Quentin Kopp, then a San Francisco supervisor, who rallied supervisors from several Northern California counties and formed the Ad Hoc Coastal Counties Supervisors Committee on Nuclear Waste. The group, which included Barbara Boxer, a Marin supervisor at the time, immediately engaged in battle with federal agencies, including the EPA, over information the supervisors deemed "incomplete, conflicting, and inaccurate."

Kopp introduced a resolution by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors calling for the release of EPA reports on the Farallon waste site. Robert Dyer, head of the EPA's Office of Radiation Programs, told reporters that he was a "one-man show" who had had neither the time nor the resources during the previous three years to complete reports on the Farallon waste site.