On November 27, 2025, a revelation shook San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood: airborne plutonium had been detected at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, an 866-acre Superfund site notorious for its Cold War nuclear legacy. The news, first reported by outlets including IBTimes and The Guardian, triggered a firestorm of concern, not just over the radioactive threat itself, but over the Navy’s 11-month delay in informing city officials and the public.
The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, perched on the city’s southeastern waterfront, has long been a symbol of industrial might—and environmental neglect. During the 1950s, the Navy used the site as a decontamination hub for 79 ships exposed to nuclear blasts in the Pacific Ocean. According to The Guardian, radioactive waste was spread throughout the yard, and by 1989, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had classified the area as a Superfund site, one of the nation’s most polluted.
The recent controversy began in November 2024, when the Navy collected 200 air samples at Hunters Point. One sample, taken from Parcel C—an area bordering new condos and a public park—showed plutonium-239 at twice the federal action threshold. The findings, which could have immediate implications for the health of nearby residents, were sent for laboratory analysis. Yet, despite receiving the alarming results in March 2025, the Navy withheld the information until October 30, 2025, when the city released a bulletin alerting residents.
That delay has become the flashpoint in an ongoing saga of mistrust. At a community meeting on November 17, 2025, Navy environmental coordinator Michael Pound addressed the crowd with a rare admission: “I’ve spent a fair amount of time up here getting to know the community, getting to know your concerns, transparency and trust, and on this issue we did not do a good job.” His apology, reported by IBTimes and The Guardian, did little to quell the outrage. City health officials echoed the sentiment, stating, “Full transparency with our communities and the department of public health is critical, and we share your deep concerns regarding the 11-month delay in communication from the Navy.”
The Navy claimed that a re-check of the sample returned a non-detect for plutonium-239, but public health advocates and attorneys remain skeptical. “Can you trust them to report this honestly?” asked Steve Castleman, supervising attorney of Berkeley Law’s Environmental Law Clinic, as quoted by The Guardian. Castleman’s clinic is involved in ongoing litigation with both the Navy and the EPA, arguing that clean-up standards have not kept pace with strengthened regulations and that the government is failing to protect the community.
Hunters Point’s radioactive legacy is as much about what’s known as what remains shrouded in secrecy. According to reports submitted to the EPA by nuclear experts, about 2,000 grams of plutonium-239—a substance so lethal that inhaling one-millionth of an ounce can cause cancer with near 100% certainty—remain on site. The yard once housed a clandestine Navy research lab where animals were injected with strontium-90, and in 2023, the Navy and a contractor were accused of falsifying strontium-90 test results.
Residents and advocates have long suspected that the site’s hazards extend beyond what’s officially acknowledged. Multiple tests have detected radioactive compounds, including plutonium, in the blood and urine of Bayview-Hunters Point residents. Local activists are now pushing for comprehensive health screenings, emphasizing that the effects of low-level radiation exposure may not appear for generations. Community members report clusters of cancer and other health problems they believe are linked to unremediated contamination.
Jeff Ruch, senior counsel with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, summed up the frustration: “It’s been one thing after another after another. What else is in the closet? We don’t know and we’re not going to search the closet to find out.” Ruch’s group is also engaged in litigation over the site, and he has criticized the Navy for trying to avoid the billions of dollars a thorough cleanup would require. The Navy, he alleges, has not accounted for several thousand tons of radioactive grit buried somewhere on the property. “Where was it buried? The Navy doesn’t know and it doesn’t want to look.”
The EPA, for its part, insists that the “site has been fully characterized” and that “the vast majority of historic radiological material at the Hunters Point site has been removed or remediated.” But radioactive material continues to turn up, and the agency has faced criticism for what Ruch described as being a “98lb weakling” when it comes to enforcing cleanup standards. The EPA has now vowed to conduct independent air monitoring to verify the Navy’s claims and restore public confidence. “EPA will prioritize the review of the Pu-239 results to make a final determination on what risk there is to the public,” an agency spokesperson told The Guardian.
The stakes are high, not just for the current residents but for the city’s future. San Francisco is planning to redevelop Hunters Point with up to 10,000 new housing units and waterfront commercial districts. One parcel has already been turned over to developers, and some residents living there say lingering contamination is behind a cluster of cancer and other illnesses. The city and federal government have proposed capping the property with four inches of clean dirt, but Ruch and others argue that this is insufficient, as it risks exposing people to whatever lies beneath.
The Navy’s assurances that air and soil levels are safe have not convinced the community. The exposure levels at which plutonium can cause cancer are so low that they are difficult to measure, further fueling skepticism. The Navy has also stated that it did not carry out nuclear work on 90% of the site, so the EPA does not require radiation testing in those areas—despite radioactive material turning up across the yard. As one anecdote from the 1950s illustrates, crews initially tried cleaning ships returning from nuclear testing with brooms, before moving to sandblasting, with the contaminated grit reused around the yard. The Navy even sent ships with goats into the blast zone, and the radioactive material in or on the animals was likely spread throughout Hunters Point, either in contaminated feces or when the animals were incinerated.
As federal regulators increase oversight and activists push for more comprehensive health protections, the Bayview-Hunters Point community finds itself at the center of a decades-old struggle for environmental justice. With the memory of past cover-ups still fresh, the demand for transparency—and real action—has never been more urgent.
The legacy of Hunters Point is a stark reminder of how the costs of nuclear experimentation can echo across generations, leaving communities to grapple with the fallout long after the headlines fade.
