Navy ducks suit over radioactive waste cleanup of San Francisco shipyard

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — The Navy secured a victory Monday in a case over the radiological cleanup of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard near San Francisco.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria acknowledged there were some outstanding questions about the Navy’s handling of the former shipyard’s cleanup; however, they were outside the scope of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice’s lawsuit, he said.

“Most concerningly, the Navy has not explained why it has made so little progress toward retesting the soil in the eight years since Tetra Tech’s fraud was revealed. And given the lack of reliable soil testing, it is hard to see how the Navy can be confident that the radiological contamination is not a risk to the people currently living and working near the site,” he said.

“But Greenaction has made clear that this is not within the scope of its challenge to the Hunters Point cleanup," the Barack Obama appointee added, granting summary judgment to the Navy and dismissing the case with prejudice.

Greenaction filed its lawsuit in 2024, claiming that the Navy’s cleanup efforts violated environmental law by relying on outdated soil testing data and underestimating the scope of potential risks to human health. It says that the Navy has relied on old soil testing data in its most recent mandated five-year review of the site — published a year late — to recommend protective remedies.

To make matters worse, many of the earlier soil tests from the site were completed by Tetra Tech, which the government later sued for falsifying data.

At a hearing over the party’s competing summary judgment motions, Greenaction argued that the Navy should take into account new remedial tests following the faulty Tetra Tech data and redo the tests. In contrast, the Navy claimed that it has followed all of the measures mandated by the EPA and that its cleanup process is above board.

“Greenaction seems to be arguing that instead of deferring the long-term protectiveness determinations, the Navy should have concluded that the remedies are not long-term protective. But it was not arbitrary for the Navy to defer the long-term protectiveness determinations due to lack of reliable soil testing,” Chhabria said in his five-page ruling.

Chhabria questioned why the Navy had no explanation for why it had not yet completed soil retesting eight years after the fraudulent testing was found, and seemed skeptical of the evidence to support the Navy’s conclusion that the current remedies are short-term protective.

However, he wrote, given Greenaction’s clarification that it was only challenging the Navy’s conclusions regarding long-term protectiveness, the argument fails.

The judge similarly ruled that it was not arbitrary for the Navy to assume remedies were safe despite elevated estimated cancer risks, given that there was a “reasonable explanation” why estimated risks would be above the true risks, or defer estimating cumulative radiological and chemical risks until it had more complete data.

Chhabria further rejected Greenaction’s arguments that the next five-year review should be filed in 2028, rather than 2029, as the government claims, given that the most recent review was released in 2024.

“In this case, it seems clear that imposing a tighter deadline on the Sixth Five-year Review would not help achieve any of the things that Greenaction wants — namely, more thorough and reliable assessments of the contamination and the effectiveness of the response actions,” he said.

A representative for the Department of Justice declined to comment.

Greenaction attorney Steve Castleman, of the Environmental Law Clinic at UC Berkeley, told Courthouse News that “we’re digesting the judge’s ruling and we will be discussing it with our clients.”

The soil testing at Hunters Point is on track to be completed by 2032, according to David Mitchell, a Department of Justice attorney. The Navy is the lead agency involved in the cleanup.

First established in southeastern San Francisco in 1939, the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard was home to the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory between 1946 and 1969, which led to the contamination of soil, groundwater, surface water and sediment in the San Francisco Bay. The location was slated for redevelopment in the 1990s.

When completed, the 400-acre site will have 10,000 new homes in one of the largest redevelopment projects in the city’s history.

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