The United States Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory (NRDL) was an early military lab created to study the effects of radiation and nuclear weapons.
The aircraft carrier USS Independence, which had been heavily damaged and contaminated with nuclear fallout by Operation Crossroads explosions in July 1946, was brought to the NRDL for study.
[7][8] The NRDL and the military radiation training school at nearby Naval Station Treasure Island loaded the nuclear waste left from experiments into steel barrels and sent weekly barges to dump them offshore near the Gulf of the Farallons, which is a US National Wildlife Refuge and a major commercial fishery.
[1][10] The US Navy completed a Historical Radiological Assessment of the Hunter's Point Shipyard in 2004, including the known NRDL facilities on the property, years after the SF Weekly article cited declassified documents showing that many sites and buildings used by NRDL were not included in the Navy's list of sites with potential for radiological contamination.
[7] While Lennar has built and sold hundreds of new condominium units on the site of the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard,[12] regulators, activists, and cleanup workers have claimed that the site is still heavily contaminated and that the company contracted to handle the cleanup and testing, Tetra Tech, has repeatedly violated established cleanup protocols,[13] deliberately falsified radiation test results at the site to falsely show that there is little remaining radiation,[14][15] and fired employees who attempted to force workers to perform radiation tests as required.