Critical report on shipyard
Researchers find Navy using obsolete safety standards in cleanup, increasing cancer risk
Faked soil samples, falsified documents, two criminal convictions, three federal lawsuits — in recent months, the cleanup of the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard has been rocked by scandal. Most questions have focused on the role of a Navy contractor, Tetra Tech EC.
But fraud may be the least of the problems with the cleanup, according to a new report by academic researchers that reaches a startling conclusion: The Navy, which is supposed to be removing radioactive contamination from the shipyard, is relying on decades-old, obsolete safety standards in order to avoid cleaning up dangerous substances — a strategy that lowers the Navy’s costs, but increases the risk that people living or working on the site will get cancer.
What’s more, the researchers say, state and federal regulators either failed to catch the archaic standards or approved of them, despite the fact that federal law requires current standards to be used. In some cases, the strategies put forward by the Navy appear to have been authored by Tetra Tech, the same contractor now accused of widespread fraud, according to public documents reviewed by the researchers.
The report relies on the current safety standards, which are defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and are based on scientific studies about the cancer risk from radiation. Using these standards, the researchers estimate how many people would get cancer from exposure to shipyard soil and buildings that the Navy considers to be acceptably clean. According to the calculations in the report, if 380 people were exposed to this soil, one of them on average would get cancer from that exposure alone. For the buildings, the researchers say, the Navy allows a risk of 1 cancer in 37 people.
“That number just knocks my socks off,” said Dan Hirsch, retired director of the environmental and nuclear policy program at UC Santa Cruz and president of the nonprofit Committee to Bridge the Gap, which released the report Tuesday. “I’ve never seen somebody claiming that levels that high are acceptable.”
For comparison’s sake, the EPA aims to clean up toxic Superfund sites like the shipyard so that no more than one person in a million would get cancer from the site alone, and the risk is never supposed to exceed one cancer in 10,000.
The consequence, according to the research, is that the Navy’s targets are so lenient that even if the Navy follows its own cleanup standards perfectly, the shipyard may still be dangerous.
An EPA spokeswoman said the agency could not comment on the report because it had not had time to review it. A Tetra Tech spokesman said the report is best addressed by the Navy, “the property owner and entity that set the contract standards for Hunters Point Shipyard.” Tetra Tech has previously denied any wrongdoing in its cleanup work, saying the company performed to Navy specifications.
Derek Robinson, environmental cleanup coordinator for the Navy at the shipyard, disputed the report’s findings. “The Navy's first priority in its Base Realignment and Closure cleanup work at Hunters Point is human health and safety,” Robinson said. “We stand by our existing cleanup goals at Hunters Point.”
The new report, one of five on the shipyard cleanup that Hirsch’s group plans to release, relies largely on the Navy’s own public documents and files from the EPA, which oversees and sets standards for such cleanups. Hirsch collaborated with a group of former and present students to perform the research; the report is co-authored by Taylor Altenbern, Maria Caine, Haakon Williams and Devyn Gortner.
The Committee to Bridge the Gap is 48 years old and provides technical expertise to communities dealing with nuclear projects. Hirsch, a persistent critic of nuclear weapons proliferation, has written widely and testified before the U.S. Senate about environmental cleanups at federal facilities, and in recent years he has often critiqued the cleanup at Hunters Point.
The former shipyard is one of the most contaminated places in the country, a 500-acre Superfund site riddled with longlasting radioactive elements spread by the Navy during the Cold War, including plutonium, radium, strontium and cesium. Extremely small amounts of these substances can cause cancer if inhaled or ingested.
Since the early 2000s, the Navy has hired contractors to measure and remove radioactivity in soil and buildings, with the EPA and state regulators supposedly watching over its shoulder.
But the Committee to Bridge the Gap says the Navy’s use of obsolete standards has made it seem like it is cleaning up the shipyard when in fact it is leaving behind significant radioactivity, more than enough to pose a health threat to people who live or work there or will in the future.
The Navy has already transferred some parcels of shipyard land to the city for development; home builder Lennar has built 450 homes out of a planned 12,000. Some of the people living in those homes are now worried about contamination on the site. Federal, state and city agencies have repeatedly told them they are safe.
Hirsch, 68, spoke earlier this month to a group of shipyard homeowners who had invited him to give a presentation on his nonprofit’s research. A wiry, serious man in a dark jacket, he clicked through PowerPoint slides full of pie charts, bullet points and pictures of the shipyard in its heyday.
“The Tetra Tech scandal is just the tip of the iceberg,” Hirsch said. “I think that Tetra Tech is unlikely to have done this on their own. I think they were getting signals, explicit or implicit, from the Navy.”
In two other reports it released this month, Hirsch’s research team pointed out that during the Cold War, the Navy brought vast quantities of radioactive materials to the shipyard and then spread them around, burning 600,000 gallons of radioactive fuel oil and sandblasting the irradiated hulls of ships, producing clouds of radioactive dust that settled over the site.
The Navy, though, has focused the cleanup on just 10 percent of potentially contaminated areas, declaring the other 90 percent clean based on spotty historical records. The bulk of the shipyard has never been tested for radioactivity.
On Tuesday the Navy released a brief statement on its website refuting the committee’s first two reports, writing that the Navy “has full confidence” in its prior decisions about what to test and what not to test.
The new, third report from the committee documents the Navy’s flouting of federal standards, digging into the crucial role of what are called “cleanup goals.”
The EPA oversees all Superfund cleanups and sets the cleanup goals for a particular site — the quantities of toxins that must be removed before the site is declared safe. The goals are based on scientific studies about the cancer risks of various contaminants, and these goals change with time as scientists learn more. Usually they get much stricter.
“We’ve discovered over time that radiation is considerably more dangerous than previously thought,” Hirsch said.
As the owner of the shipyard, the Navy is responsible for removing the contamination, and it is supposed to follow the latest EPA cleanup goals.
Instead, the researchers say, the Navy has been depending on standards from earlier eras, long ago abandoned as unsafe. When the Navy has measured radioactivity in soil at the shipyard, it has been using standards from 1991. When the Navy has measured radioactivity in buildings, it goes back even further, relying on a report from a now-defunct commission written in 1974.
Hirsch and his researchers discovered the use of the outdated standards in February 2016, after he asked the researchers to analyze some cleanup documents for a class project. In recent public letters and comments, the EPA has told the Navy to adopt the current standards.
What’s at stake, Hirsch said, is the health of people who may one day live and work on the redeveloped shipyard.
According to the report, the Navy’s obsolete standards would allow significant amounts of radioactivity to remain at the shipyard for generations, boosting the chance that residents or workers could receive cancer-causing doses of radiation. The report visualizes these doses by comparing them to equivalent doses from repeated chest X-rays.
Scientific authorities say that each chest X-ray increases a person’s cancer risk by a small increment, which is why doctors try to limit patients’ exposure. But the report says the Navy’s safety limits at the shipyard would allow people to be exposed to a cumulative radiation dose equal to hundreds of chest X-rays every year.
This month, at the end of Hirsch’s presentation to shipyard residents, Greg Pennington, a plaintiff in a civil lawsuit against Lennar and Tetra Tech, asked Hirsch if he would want to live at the shipyard, knowing what he knew.
“I can’t answer the question,” Hirsch said. “I want to be very candid, which I don’t think the agencies have been. The agencies have told you it’s all safe. I’m not going to tell you it’s all dangerous.”
The real “horror,” he said, is that after decades of work, no one knows what is actually in the ground.
“You want to know whether it’s safe to be here. And you have a right to know that, and the agencies should never have let it get to the point where you can’t know that.”