Fallout

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.

• Paul Trapani

  

  Dr. Herman Karl headed a USGS study aimed at locating barrels of nuclear waste at the bottom of the sea.

• Paul Trapani

  

  Dr. Herman Karl headed a USGS study aimed at locating barrels of nuclear waste at the bottom of the sea.

Details:

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.