Fallout

The number of barrels in the Farallon waste site -- supposedly, 47,500 -- comes from an estimate done in 1974 by an Atomic Energy Commission researcher named Arnold Joseph, who never intended it to be a definitive count. In his report, Joseph cautioned that the number was based only on the limited information that he could find at the time.

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• Courtesy of TimePix

  

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

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And as these "facts" are repeated, the Navy and the Department of Energy cling to the inherently contradictory position that, while they don't know a great deal about what was dumped in the Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Site, what's there is not dangerous.

Documents obtained by SF Weekly appear to bring the federal government's position on the Farallon waste site into significant doubt. Government reports on the contents of the site do not take into account the aircraft carrier Independence, which was apparently packed with huge amounts of radioactive materials before it was sunk, very probably in the Farallones. The NRDL's own records strongly suggest that far larger amounts of plutonium, uranium, and other long-lived radioactive substances were dumped in the Farallones than the government has acknowledged. And two government officials say the Navy has acknowledged dumping thousands of barrels of high-level, long-lived, "special" nuclear waste at the site.

There are hundreds of boxes of records on the activities of the NRDL sitting in the National Archives and Records Administration in San Bruno and the Department of Energy's records repository in Las Vegas. Government files also contain information on the University of California laboratories that did nuclear research and shipped their waste to the NRDL at Hunters Point, which then dumped it in the Farallones.

Apparently, those records haven't been reviewed to assess what radioactive poisons made it to the bottom of the sea. Without such a review, followed by additional research in the Farallones, and some regime of monitoring of the undersea dump site, no government agency or academic researcher can say, definitively, whether the nuclear waste resting off the coast of San Francisco does or does not pose a danger to humans.

But this much is clear: The past -- and the future -- of the Hunters Point Shipyard, the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, and the Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Site are utterly, inextricably linked. The long-lived radioactive materials that were used at the NRDL during the early days of the nation's nuclear research program have not gone away. They will pose a potential danger for thousands or tens of thousands of years. Whether they are at the bottom of the sea near the Farallon Islands, at a decommissioned shipyard that the city of San Francisco wants to remake as its newest neighborhood, or at some other location, these exceedingly long-lived poisons are still with us.