If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you may be surprised to learn that "more than 47,800 drums and other containers of low-level radioactive waste were dumped onto the ocean floor west of San Francisco between 1946 and 1970." (Source: The U.S. Geological Survey, a bureau of the Department of the Interior.)
Just 25 to 30 miles offshore from the Golden Gate bridge -- in a marine wildlife sanctuary, no less -- the ocean floor is littered with rusting 55-gallon barrels of radioactive waste. The U.S. Navy shipped this toxic cargo from the Radiological Defense Laboratory at the Hunters Point shipyard in San Francisco and dropped it in the sea near the Farallon Islands -- creating the first and largest offshore nuclear waste dump in the United States. Navy gunners were instructed to shoot holes in the barrels that didn't sink right away.
Here's an interactive map of the waste dump site, provided by the Center for Land Use Interpretation:
Nearly 50,000 drums of nuclear waste sounds bad enough, but the ocean floor around the Farallon Islands is host to even more toxic garbage: Namely, the radioactive wreck of a ten-thousand-ton aircraft carrier, used as a nuke target during the 1946 Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests.
Eager to learn what might happen to a warship when an atomic bomb explodes nearby, the U.S. Navy placed the USS Independence within one-half mile of ground zero during the "Able" atomic bomb test of July 1, 1946. This was the first of two atomic bomb tests conducted on the Bikini Atoll as part of Operation Crossroads:
Highly radioactive but still afloat after the blast, the bombed-out hulk was then towed to San Francisco's Hunters Point shipyard for decontamination experiments.
After five years of fruitless sandblasting, the Navy lost interest in the useless wreck. In 1951, the Independence was towed out of the bay and sunk near the Farallon Islands as just another (albeit quite large) chunk of radioactive waste.
The California State Lands Commission shipwreck database pinpoints the exact location of the radioactive shipwreck of the USS Independence as: Latitude 37deg 28'24'N, Longitude 123deg 07'36'W. This interactive map shows the position of those coordinates:
Lisa Davis, a reporter for the SF Weekly, broke this story with an excellent investigative piece in 2001. The San Francisco Chronicle picked up the thread in 2005. Curiously, no other news organizations appear to be interested in covering this story -- an omission that is especially startling in light of the fact that nearby Marin County has an unexplained high incidence of breast cancer rates.
7 comments:
wow, why did they choose the islands? are there other such sites off the coast?
In 1979, I happened to be in the library at Scripps Institute of Oceanography involved in a research project. While there, I ran across a report detailing the dumping of 1,200 barrels of nuclear waste at the Farralons. Similarly to your report above, the barrels were incased in concrete. However, the report diverged from the story above in the following respects. This report concerned the dumping of Plutonium waste from the Hanford, Washington site and which was anything but low-level. It expressed grave concerns about the environmental impact of leakages on the Pacific bioshpere with theoretical scenarios over a period of twenty years, the length of time the report predicted would lead to degradation of the concrete containers. The extreme toxicity of the waste as well the quanitity of it would eventually lead to a major ecological collapse, the report concluded. The information contained therein was in explicit detail with charts of radioactivity levels, salt water dispersion rates, directional sub sea current data indicating likely spread patterns and again, concluded that the eventual effect of the toxicity levels would be the interuption of plankton life cycles over a large geographic scale compromising the ongoing integrity of the entire Pacific biosphere. It ended with the commentary that from an engineering perspective, little or nothing could be done to prevent that collapse which, they concluded, was inevitable.
I'm originally grew up in Fairfax, Marin county, and not only heard but saw the large amount of Breast Cancer victims within the bay area. Could this be the cause?!?
I'm sorry but to tie this to any Marin county cancers is one heck of an irresponsible leap. If such clusters were found in Sonoma, San Fran, Alameda and San Mateo Counties then maybe.
If your premise was correct then there should be corresponding clusters in Farallones researchers, fishermen who frequented the area before it was closed off, and persons living right on the coast.
I'm more interested in the fact that a radioactive ship was being sandblasted at Hunters Point for 5 years. What happened to the sand and other waste and what is/was the health status of those workers.
Apparently the "greatest" generation were really just "great" at screwing their descendents.....
James Stevens, it's been 40 years since the report. How are the plankton doing? Are there any signs that the local biosphere is heading for trouble?
The connection to Marin county makes no sense. There are millions of people living much closer to this site who have no problem.
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