The Atomic History of Hunters Point
The deplorable, terrible, unjustifiable truth.
• • • • • • • • December 2025 • • • • • • • •
Plutonium-239, a fissile product, was detected at concentrations twice the action level by downwind air monitor MSC02 in November 2024 east of a Radiation Staging Area (RSY), directly across from Parcel A-1 residences, parks, and food trucks. This finding is central to the history captured in The Greatest Story Never Told, which documents the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Historic Parcel C District.
“On July 28, 1849, the Hunter brothers arrived in South San Francisco aboard the Clipper ship Memnon. The family built a mansion and dairy farm along Griffith and Oakdale Avenue in modern-day Hunters Point…at the site of federally subsidized Oakdale public housing and one block north of the Crisp Road entry to what would - by 1955 - become the United States Radiological Defense Laboratory Complex.”
Newspapers called it “the grandest spectacle of the age” as Roosevelt’s Atlantic Fleet of sixteen gold-gilded battleships steamed through the Golden Gate.
Welcoming the Great White Fleet - San Francisco Sunday Call - April 26, 1908 - Library of Congress. “In 1920, a Congressional hearing on Pacific Coast Naval Bases was held in San Francisco City Hall. Representatives, including Mayor Rolph and City Engineer O’Shaughnessy, made the case for a permanent naval base at Hunters Point. The need to increase naval shipbuilding and repair facilities became even more pressing as the country entered World War II. The Navy brought the property in 1940, naming it the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.
“The first Pacific Coast dry dock was constructed in 1867 when New York real estate investors and brothers - Phillip Schuyler Hunters, Robert Eugene Hunter and John Hunter - gained the deed of title to a portion of a four-thousand-acre land grant awarded to Jose’ Cornelio Bernal during the California Gold Rush in 1849. By 1870, the Hunters Point dry docks were hailed as “The World’s Greatest Shipping Yard.”
The Heritage of Our Fathers …The Loudest Voice in the Room!
“Our power comes from the fact that we create wealth. Wealth is power…we have the ability to withhold that power! ,” Boots Riley - Filmmaker & Activist, Juneteenth 2020 ILWU Shutdown Port of Oakland.
OpenSFHistory.org Photo taken at the open western boundary of the base facing southeast towards the iconic Hunters Point Gantry Crane situated on the Gun Mole Pier. Circa 1948, the A-frame atop the mighty crane had not been erected. The hull of the WWII battleship was used as a target ship in 1946 during Operation Crossroads, the atomic weapons testing, and was docked along the northern border of the Gun Mole Pier from 1946 to 1951. The USS Independence, exposed to two 21 KT Fat Man Plutonium bombs and used as a repository for nuclear waste, was used as a naval training station.
The photo is of historic significance in that it captures the industrialized activities in regions of Federal Superfund Parcels D and C where building demolitions and air monitoring exceedances in plutonium - 239 and PM10 detected by a system of air monitoring stations operated by the Navy and sited around the perimeter of a Radiation Staging Yard (RSY) along the northern border of Drydock 4 - north of the Gantry Crane.
For 11 months, actionable exceedances captured by air and dust monitoring were not disclosed to city and state health departments, environmental regulators, the development agency, or affected populations on Parcel A-1 and among Parcel B Artists.
Hunters Point Report on Navy’s Plan on Radioactive Building Demolitions.
Photo verified by the Navy Inspector General's Office in March 2024. Piles of uncovered soils left over the March 8, 2024 weekend in a Radiation Staging Yard (RSY) on Blandy Street along the northern border of Dry Dock 4 at the intersection of Spear Avenue. Chain-metal fences separating a radiation-contaminated Federal Superfund site east of Spear Avenue lack dust curtains and Proposition 65 notifications. Food service trucks and government vehicles are parked along the western fence line at the boundary with residential Parcel A-1.
Navy fraud, concealment, data manipulation, negligence, and public endangerment are evident in the required public and regulatory notice of exceedances in the fission product Pu-239 and the coarse particulate PM 10 - detected in November 2024 and released in October 2025.
The fraud is perpetuated by the preposterous assertion made by Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Environmental Coordinator Michael Pound that he was not made aware of an actionable exceedance in an airborne product of nuclear fission detected in November 2024 through March 2025.
Additionally, in the November 17, 2025, PowerPoint presentation to the Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee(HPSCAC), Pound claimed that the Navy has not identified the source of the Pu-239 exceedance detected by the downwind air monitor MSC02 in November 2024.
The MSC02 air monitor and real-time dust station is downwind and east of the Radiation Staging Yard on Blandy Street at Spear Avenue along the northern border of Dry Dock 4.
A falsified Summary of Air Sampling Data, October-December 2024, was posted to the BRACPMO website, reposted to a 3rd-party website, and taken down at the time of public disclosure of the November 2024 Pu-239 detection.
Actionable exceedance in the coarse particulate PM 10 detected by the air monitor PC Upwind on November 07. 2024. PC Upwind is a Navy-operated air monitor and real-time dust station located at the northern border of Parcel A-1 and Parcel B, which can be used to track exceedances in populated regions.
“YOU DROPPED A BOMB ON ME…BABY!”
The Fat Man in Hunters Point
Fat Man was a plutonium-based implosion-type nuclear bomb designed and produced by Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico from 1945 to 1949. Its core components are a 6.2 kg Pu-239 sphere at the center, surrounded by a layer of Uranium-238 for neutron shielding, and 32 shaped explosive blocks that, when detonated, create an inward shockwave that compresses the plutonium to trigger a nuclear fission reaction. The explosive yield of Fat Man was 21 kilotons - the equivalent explosive power of 2000 tons of TNT.
According to the aerial photo depicted on the cover of the Draft Final Hunters Point Shipyard Historical Radiological Assessment, multiple Operation Crossroads target ships exposed to two 21 KT Fat Man plutonium bombs during atomic weapons testing conducted in the Bikini Atoll in July of 1946, were returned to Hunters Point and docked along the piers and dry-docks of the base. While the exact number of Operation Crossroads target ships returned to Hunters Point is disputed, the historical record suggests that up to 100 Pu-239-exposed vessels were ultimately returned there.
The HRA, the Bible of HPNS radiological operations from 1939 to 2003, documents that the Navy burned 600,000 gallons of plutonium-contaminated fuel into the air above a community of 33,000 people. The bomb scarred radioactive hulk of the aircraft carrier USS Independence was docked alongside the Gun Mole Pier beneath the towering Hunters Point Gantry Crane, where it operated from 1946 - 1951 as a floating radiation laboratory and repository for nuclear waste.
The Parcel F Addendum to the Feasibility Study documents the detection of Pu-239 in the submarine area of Parcel B in concentrations up to 60 times higher than background. The submarine area is where Polaris and Trident nuclear submarines were docked and fueled with enriched Uranium-235. A colony of artists occupies buildings on unremediated sediments with the highest detected concentrations of all radionuclides tested: Pu-239/240, Cs-137, Co-60, Ra-226, Sr-90 and U-235.
“What’s in the air in Hunters Point?”
According to the Committee to Bridge the Gap’s 2018 scientific publication, The Great Majority of Hunters Point Sites Were Never Sampled for Radioactive Contamination:
“In addition to not measuring 90% of radionuclides of concern, 90% of the measurements made on soil samples didn’t measure two of the four radionuclides admitted by the Navy to be key at HPS: Strontium-90 and Plutonium-239. The soil samples were mainly measured for gamma emitters - Strontium-90 and Plutonium-239 are beta and alpha emitters.” — Danile Hirsch committeetobridgethegap.org
THE BOMB IN OUR BODIES • THE NUCLEAR CLUSTER @ HUNTERS POINT
In the summer of 2022, James Dahlgren Medical contracted with the Hunters Point Biomonitoring Foundation to develop a urinary assay sensitive enough to detect atomic bomb residues - specifically products of nuclear fission. The cost of testing 15 workers, current and childhood residents within the half-mile perimeter of the base, was $60k. Pu-238, Pu-239, and, in the majority of residents, Pu-244 were detected in concentrations greater than can be accounted for by exposure to thermonuclear fallout.
In 2012, the Department of Homeland Security conducted an aerial survey of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. A Bell helicopter rigged with NaI gamma radiation detectors hovered at a flight altitude of 300 feet above the base and detected gamma counts as high as 7,000 emanating from the Parcel E-2 landfill and Parcel E shoreline regions of the base.
Gamma counts emanating from regions of Parcel C, D and G were detected as high as 5,500 cps. These extreme gamma counts offer evidence of high-level nuclear waste containing Radium-226 devices, naturally occurring radioactive K-40, and atomic bomb residues, Cesium-137 from thermonuclear decay, and dozens of NRC licenses issued to the Navy and NRDL permitting research using the fission product.
HP BIOMONITORING’S SEVEN-POINT PLAN:
1. Immediate Moratorium on deep soil excavations and building demolitions at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Federal Superfund site pending fortifications and Proposition 65 notifications as required by law.
2. A Federal Injunction prohibiting the Navy from operating Radiation Staging Yards (RSY) adjacent to human receptors. A National Response Center complaint has been filed against the Navy for staging radioactive so
3. A Federal Injunction prohibiting the Navy from violating the Superfund Act by allowing elementary school children into radiologically impacted regions of the base as “window dressing” to promote the safety of the Parcel G Building Demolition Plan.
4. DOJ referral for BRAC Environmental Coordinator Michael J. Pound to investigate clear patterns of data and document manipulation, falsification, deletion, and concealment across base-wide operations, observed by scientists, journalists and legal experts.
5. Conducting an advanced AI analysis of the BRAC PMO Administrative website for suspicious patterns of base-wide data manipulations evident in air, soil, building, asphalt and landfill gas monitoring data and documents.
6. Immediate reinstatement of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Restoration Advisory Board, federally subsidized by the Base Realignment and Closure Act, offering full transparency and elected seating of community stakeholders, federal and state environmental regulators, health officials, and the Navy BRAC team co-chaired by an elected community representative.
7. Federally subsidized voluntary relocation options for residents living adjacent to Federal Superfund landfills, building demolition zones, and a Radiation Staging Area.
Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai is an environmental activist and Community Healer/UCSF Alumni living on the Westside.
December 2025
