Navy faces lawsuit over halt to $1.2 billion cleanup of San Francisco shipyard filled with radioactive waste

The U.S. Navy and Environmental Protection Agency failed to properly oversee the removal of radioactive waste from a massive shipyard in San Francisco, an environmental group is accused of in a federal lawsuit filed Friday.

Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice accuses the service industry and the agency of “egregious” violations of federal laws such as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act in connection with remediation efforts at the San Francisco shipyard, formerly known as Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.

In the 1950s, ships used for nuclear weapons testing were decontaminated while docked in San Francisco, contaminating part of the facility with radioactive waste.

Since then, the lawsuit alleges, the Navy has failed to meet federal deadlines to review progress on the $1.2 billion cleanup effort, and the EPA has failed to enforce a remedial action agreement between the State of California and the Navy .

The lawsuit accuses the Navy of failing to honor a 2018 agreement to retest previously contaminated areas if additional radioactivity issues were discovered, after two executives at Tetra Tech EC, the cleanup contractor, pleaded guilty that same year to falsifying records.

The Navy has since admitted that radioactive waste in the form of old shipboard markings and contaminated glass shards was found in numerous samples.

The Environmental Protection Agency and Navy do not comment on ongoing litigation.

The shipyard is located near a historically black neighborhood. It is part of the future site of a sprawling 693-acre redevelopment project, one of the most ambitious projects in a city plagued by a housing shortage in a generation, aimed at transforming the area and nearby Candlestick Point into a vibrant neighborhood with more than 10,000 housing units, pending decontamination efforts .

“The Navy should recognize that and move forward,” Steve Castleman of the Environmental Law Clinic at UC Berkeley Law, who represents the activist group, told KQED. “The agencies are in no hurry to move to 100% testing, and we don’t believe they’ll ever do 100% testing without a court order.”