The ongoing testing on the old Hunters Point Naval shipyard has turned up a piece of radioactive glass and another radium deck marker.
They are the latest in a string of surprises that prompted residents Thursday to demand that the Navy perform a new round of comprehensive testing across the entire site to assure public safety.
“It’s about the size of a pea,” said Sean-Ryan McCray, a senior shipyard cleanup manager said at a community briefing about the Navy’s recent discovery. The glass measures about 3/16th of an inch in diameter.
McCray told residents that there is no immediate danger, but did confirm the glass shard, that was found in soil, was radioactive.
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While he did not provide specific measurements, he said the glass piece has been sent to a lab for analysis to determine the specific source of the contamination.
“The immediate reading from the devices show this was a very low dose of radiation from the object that is low and does not pose a risk,” he said.
Tiny or not, critics of the cleanup says the latest discovery has big implications for the site's cleanup effort.
“It’s another nail in their coffin,” said Steve Castleman, a supervising attorney with the UC Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic.
Castleman notified the Navy Thursday that he intends to sue over anomalies in the ongoing testing program at the shipyard.
“This notice is a shot across the bow of the Navy and the EPA to let them know we are not going to let them get away with doing a slipshod, shoddy, and unlawful clean up here at the Hunters Point shipyard.”
Castleman noted that back in 2015, the Navy assured the community that “no radiological contamination remains” on the Parcel B site, where the glass shard was found earlier this year.
At the time, the parcel had already been certified as cleaned by the then Navy contractor, Tetra Tech.
The contractor specified, to the Navy, that the only expected contaminates remaining on the site would be heavy metals and hydrocarbon residues.
In the years since, the firm has been dogged by whistleblower allegations of test falsification and fraud. While the firm still denies any wrongdoing, the Navy decided to order more tests to reassure the public.
Community organizers, behind the new legal action, said the Navy is not doing enough to assure the site is clean.
“We still have to fight and file lawsuits just for the Navy to do their job,” said community activist and organizer Kamilla Ealom, with Greenaction - one of the community groups behind the legal effort.
The glass discovery, confirmed by the Navy last month, isn't the only surprise revealed in the new testing effort.
Back in 2021, tests showed elevated levels of the cancer-causing radioactive isotope Strontium 90 on another nearby part of the shipyard, known as Parcel G. The Navy has since downplayed its own results as “skewed” and unreliable, even after a second round of testing confirmed some of the hotspots.
Cleanup crews earlier this year also dug up a radioactive Radium deck marker, used to illuminate ship decks for aircraft in World War II. That marker turned up on Parcel C, another part of the cite that Tetra Tech had certified as clean. Testing on nearby Parcel A had previously uncovered a deck marker as well.
Until now, the Navy’s plan has been to test about a third of the Tetra Tech locations to assure accuracy of the previous results. But activists say they believe the three recent discoveries should change that plan.
“We want them to retest a hundred percent” of the shipyard, Castleman said, adding that any one of the three recent revelations should be enough to force the Navy to honor a prior commitment to retest the entire site, if anomalies were found. Castleman believes the time to order more tests across the entire site is now before construction begins on the planned massive residential and commercial development there.
“They agreed that if they found any contamination they would retest 100% of it,” Castleman said. “They have found contamination in 25 different places, since they have made that promise, they have reneged on that promise.”
The Navy said Thursday that it would not comment until after it reviewed the notice. It has previously said the ongoing testing is at the “heart” of its work to ensure there’s no contamination on the shipyard that would pose a public health or environmental risk.
