In July 1945, the U.S.S. Indianapolis, loaded with parts for the first atomic bomb, set sail from San Francisco's Hunters Point Naval Shipyard for Tinian Island in the Pacific. A month later, the parts were delivered to Hiroshima via a B-29 bomber.

So begins a story of nuclear intrigue and government mismanagement too long to tell here. The short version: after the war, Hunters Point became the Navy's top-secret Radiological Defense Laboratory. The lab handled enough plutonium to kill 15 million people and it's doubtful anyone in downtown San Francisco (five miles to the north) knew that. The naval yard became even more dangerous when fourteen U.S. ships, survivors of nuclear test detonations in the Pacific, were towed to Hunters Point for study and decontamination.

Who knew decontamination could be so difficult!? Apparently, no one. Nuclear waste on such a large scale was something new. The Navy unloaded radioactive material any way it could: dumping it into the bay, burning it in the open, selling 'hot' ships as scrap, among other dubious means. Decontamination became a lot more difficult when the base was declared a Superfund cleanup site in the early 1990s and the Navy closed it.

September 9th, 2017

creative collaboration in the Mission

discovery in the San Francisco hills

September 9^th, 2017